Chapter Fourteen: Home Port

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra awoke to the buzz of his senses gradually roaring to life. He couldn't explain how it had come to pass, but all of his senses were far, far more sensitive than any normal human's. It was frankly overwhelming - it had overwhelmed him, until Fenrik bolted mufflers over his face and forced pills upon him to mute his sense of touch and pain to normal levels. Taste and smell had only ever been muted somewhat - fortunately, the taste in your mouth was almost exactly neutral most of the time, and the taste of eating most foods was no more overwhelming than, say, a very, very spicy curry back on Earth. As for smell, he'd learned to breathe through his mouth at the first whiff of trouble. Granted, he would then taste the foul odor pretty substantially, but it was a lot less overwhelming than smelling it.

The smell he awoke to before tamping down on his senses was the smell of Rill's hair. She was warm, curled up against him and breathing softly. Her hair smelled of ash, oil, sweat, and something sweet… that was the short version. His nose could pick out at least a dozen different subtle notes, different volatile molecules wafting around her glossy crimson mane. He liked the feeling of her against him - pleasantly warm, though he knew an intense fire flared within her soul. Soft and warm and gently breathing.

Anise and Franyi shuffled about the room, the shades drawn and only one reading crystal kindled. They whispered, trying not to wake them. And Ezra didn't want to wake Rill, so he just watched them for a moment…

"Don't forget to bring your seed selection for herbalism," Franyi whispered.

"Shoot… I didn't select them yet… I… you wouldn't believe the day I had yesterday…"

"No problem, here… show me your case…"

The two girls bent over what looked like a small toolbox but was, apparently, filled with an array of seeds. Franyi went through them, counting seeds out, whispering the name of each to Anise. Knowing Anise, she already knew all of the seeds, but she didn't interrupt Franyi. And, each time that Franyi leaned forward to whisper, Anise would take in a breath, as if to smell her presence, and sometimes Franyi would run her fingers through Anise's hair to move it aside, and the girl's ears went a bit pink and she rocked on the balls of her feet. It was obvious that Anise was crushing hard on her roommate… so obvious that he wondered how he hadn't noticed it before. And, if Franyi somehow hadn't noticed it, she was doing just about everything she could to accidentally coax the crush along.

"If we don't hurry, we're going to miss breakfast," Franyi said. "What should we do about…"

"We're awake," Rill yawned.

Ezra had hardly noticed how her breathing had changed, how her body's posture was the same but somehow more attentive. He waited for her to part from him, leaving a cool, unwanted absence in her wake as she pulled away and swung her feet off the bed. Ezra rose to a sit, brought his hair under control, and scooted next to Rill, his right foot thumping to the floor next to her smaller, smoother left foot. Her hand snaked out and automatically found his, and Ezra had to wonder whether she knew how she made him feel and, if she did know, how she felt about it.

"Um… how do we, you know… leave?"

Franyi frowned. "Well… once you're out of our room, you're not really our problem. Who's to say you didn't come out of some other girl's room?"

Anise giggled. "Franyi!"

"Hmm…" Franyi paced to their little closet and returned with what looked to be about seven meters of coiled rope. She laced some white ribbon around one end of the rope, taped a small indigo crystal to the ribbon, and did some sort of magical manipulation. "This rope will return back to this coiled state in fifteen or twenty minutes. You should be out of the room by then if you don't want to get yourselves or us in trouble. All right?"

"Fair enough," Ezra said. It was the old climbing-out-the-window gambit, a trick that traversed time and planes of existence.

"Shoot! We have to go… good luck, guys!" Anise said. She grabbed her bookbag and dashed from the room, with Franyi right behind and slamming the door after them.

"We should have asked about money," Rill said, and she was right.

+++++Ezra+++++

He felt bad about stealing Anise and Franyi's things but, to be fair, he didn't steal that much, and he did leave an IOU. He hastily scrawled out what they were taking on Anise's notepad: thirty-three par in assorted change from the desk drawer (no brownbacks, unfortunately), a few unused leatherbound journals, an unopened Ambrik & Company jewelcutter's set, and one of Franyi's navy blue casual dresses, which fit Rill's lithe frame pretty well - she was bigger than Franyi in the hips, but that didn't matter so much with dresses. They didn't want to take anything that had sentimental value - just a few things they could sell until they were on their feet. And the IOU promised they'd pay it back with interest without specifying how much interest.

Once down and crunching across the damp grass and dry leaves of the St. Quillia's campus, they didn't have much to worry about. Either one of them could have been one of the dozens of couriers and servants who crisscrossed the campus on any given day. Nobody could say, 'watch out for a human boy with goggles bolted to his face' anymore. Ezra ran his fingers along his temples. He didn't even have the scars from the bolt-holes and metal plates anymore. They'd all healed overnight… for some reason, he and Rill appeared to have a healing ability beyond what normal humans or infernic-humans had. It probably wouldn't prevent death, but it had pulled Rill back from the brink of it yesterday.

"Is your thrall-plug scar still there?"

Rill untucked and pulled her blouse up in full view of everybody - she still didn't quite understand the social mores of modesty. Somebody nearby gasped - at least a few people had spotted her casual exhibitionism. She pulled her blouse back down and let Ezra hurry her away from the St. Quillia's campus. But she certainly didn't have a scar anymore… he'd got a good look.

"I wonder which one of them likes jewel-cutting," Rill said. She turned the embossed metal case over in her hands.

"I suspect it's neither, since nobody's used the thing," Ezra said. "Hopefully, we can make a few brownbacks off of it."

The obvious question was: where should they go to lay low? From the etudium, it was a straight shot south to the Palace District, which was mostly monuments, museums, the palace (obviously), and a handful of fantastically wealthy people. They could go to East Shore, obviously, but everywhere from there up to Chartham was dangerous, with either Fenrik or Gladion looking for them and out for blood. That left the West Shore, the Parliament District, and Portside. Of these three, only Portside, the northernmost district bordering on the seacoast, was likely to have cheap housing and places to pawn off questionably-acquired goods. So they hiked to the West Shore and paid their four par to take a streetcar up to the port.

+++++Ezra+++++

"What about now?" Ezra asked.

"I'm afraid not," Rill said.

He sighed. The jewelcutter's set had netted them ten brownbacks, which was a lot more than Ezra had been expecting, and he and Rill celebrated (in part) by buying dark sunglasses to hide their eyes. Kao-alta pretty much had to wear sunglasses in the sunlight or they were functionally blind, but the fashion had spread well-beyond their enclaves, and you could see people of all races with sunglasses strolling about the Port Galleria in the midmorning sunshine. With the darkest tints available, the fire in Rill's eyes was nearly invisible, and she'd just look like a regular human wearing sunglasses to anybody looking for her. Ezra's eyes, though, were still visible through even 'noontime blacks', as the darkest shade was called. His eyes were far less obvious, but the light still shone through, so he'd have to be mindful of keeping them tamped down a bit. A young man with solar light piercing out from his eyes was even more noticeable than one with welding goggles bolted on… but at least he could keep his eyes tamped down with a modicum of effort.

They weren't in the affluent Parliament District, but the cheapest places in Portside were nonetheless a lot pricier than anything in the Chartham Canals. They paid four brownbacks for a week at the Quartermistress's Table, a boarding house that catered to sailors with families and a bit of money. Four was a bit steep but, for that, they got a room with a dresser, a proper bed with a clean mattress, and a full bathroom right off from the common room they shared with two other units. The place still smelled like stewed fish, though… Ezra wondered whether that was a universal of St. Arbalest boarding houses or just the ones near the ocean. Neither would have surprised him.

"You into port for long?" Mr. Venno asked them. He was the husband of Mrs. Venno, their landlady. He did something construction-related in the shipyards but putzed around the homestead when he wasn't working or drinking with his friends, which was pretty often. He'd been a sailor in a past life but had been a landlubber for ten years now… he'd told Ezra and Rill all this in a jumbled, single-breathed monolog instead of pointing out the amenities of the place like Mrs. Venno had asked.

"I'm not a sailor," Ezra said. "I just work around here we needed a place to stay."

"Hope you like fish," Mr. Venno said. He lit up some sweetbac, a mixture of tobacco and apuiha, and stretched back on the couch… apparently, he saw no issue with occupying the common rooms of his wife's tenants.

They didn't mind Mr. Venno. Not when they had an actually-decent room to themselves. The bed was a bit smaller than Anise's back at St. Quillia's, but that suited Ezra just fine - all the better excuse to be close to Rill. She flopped onto the mattress with a little oof as the air whooshed out from her impact, and rolled around the mattress for a moment, reveling in its softness, the fabric of Franyi's navy blue dress migrating up her smooth legs as she kicked…

"Do you think we'll both fit?" Ezra asked.

She reached out to him. "Let's find out!"

Ezra wasn't about to argue with that. He rolled onto the mattress, his eyes gazing into hers. His irises were, he realized, putting out an awful lot of light. A normal woman would have found it uncomfortable if not outright painful to look at. But Rill stared right back.

"It doesn't bother you?" he asked.

"I am an ifrit," she stated. "Fire is light, fire is warmth… it cannot harm me."

He ran a hand down her arm, slim and taut with little downy hairs, and along the sturdy fabric of her dress, tugging at one of the white buttons at the front. That was the fashion with women's blouses in St. Arbalest - dark or solid colors with piping and big buttons that contrasted with the garment's main color. Ezra couldn't say he cared for the style, but he liked the way it looked on Rill. He undid a button and she made no move to stop him. Her eyes remained on him, her breath coming in faster.

Another button, and then another. If Ezra looked down, he'd be able to see most of her breasts, but he kept his gaze upon her eyes, how the fire flashed in them, how she looked at him so intensely. It wasn't hard to imagine her as a goddess, utterly confident in herself and her power. She shrugged out of the loose blouse. And, finally, he glanced down and traced a finger along the taut skin of her sternum, right where her scar had persisted for less than two weeks… he'd known Rill for less than two weeks. Ten days since he'd carried her out of Fenrik's, pursued by Gladion's men.

"I'm sorry this happened to you," he said.

"I'm not," Rill said, seemingly in earnest. Her hand cupped at his jaw, at the wispy, barely-there fuzz of his young man's beard - he'd probably never be able to grow a proper one. "The life of a goddess is boring. Nothing changes - the earth doesn't change. People don't change. I would sleep for a dozen years in the hope that things would be different when I awoke, and it was always the same. My greatest joy was righteous fury, in unleashing destruction upon those who'd displeased and dishonored me… well and good. But I've lived more in a week than I did in the hundred years before, where time flitted so fast that I barely noticed the seasons. Never in my life did I imagine autumn to be golden and beautiful… somehow, even more beautiful than a fire." She laughed. "Absurd, but true! If I lit the St. Quillia's wood ablaze, those beautiful flames would be a farce, nothing compared to leaves in the wind. Perhaps I am just a bad ifrit…"

"You're not…" Ezra leaned in, and suddenly they were kissing.

Rill's lips were hot against his. Her hands were at his shirt, slowly pulling it up, her fingers sliding along his chest. Then she straddled him, coppery, crimson hair draping around him like fiery silk, and she nibbled at his lip, biting a bit too hard before pulling back. Ezra took a deep breath and looked up at her, watched her straddling his lap, her blouse pooled about her waist, her eyes fiery and yearning for him. She was a goddess, of that he was sure. She was his goddess, though he wouldn't presume to say what he was to her… and… was she getting cold feet? Well… cold feet for a fiery ifrit? Rill bit her lip, her questing fingers suddenly hesitating.

"I'm not sure what to do."

Ezra sat up, his hands sliding to her hips, to the fabric of her top and her blouse pooled about her slim waist. "We just… I don't know… we go by instinct. He leaned forward and kissed the smooth spot between her breasts, the spot above where her soul crystal might yet sit, slowly absorbing into her body's humors. When he looked up, she was smiling, her head lolling back, her fingers meshed behind Ezra's neck as she hung on. His hand moved down, shifting the fabric of her skirt aside, running up a smooth thigh.

"Oh…" Rill said. "Oh, Ezra!" Her hand went to his chest, her fingernails scritching against his skin. Something sizzled…

"Ow! Jesus!" Ezra bucked and Rill tumbled off of him with a little yelp.

"Sorry! Sorry… I got carried away! Um… what's Jesus?"

Ezra prodded the red, hand-shaped burn on his chest. It wasn't too bad. "Some god from back on Earth… lots of people believed in him, I guess."

"Sorry. I guess that was ifrit instinct, not human… does it hurt?"

It hurt a bit, but Ezra shook his head. "It just surprised me… it'll heal before too long."

"Can we try again later?"

Ezra nodded. "Unless… you want to try again now?"

Rill wanted to very much.

+++++Ezra+++++

For a little while, at least, life wasn't so bad. The accommodations at the Quartermistress's Table were cozy but acceptable, the food was fish-dominated but edible, and if Ezra wanted, he and Rill could stay inside all day and do whatever they wanted (and, it so happened, they discovered plenty to do in their room) and nobody was likely to bother them, unless it was to request that they keep the volume down. As a rule of thumb, they tried to be respectful about the noise.

Of course, the room and common area were pretty modestly-sized, so even Rill, who was, as a simple function of years, used to living inside a volcano with most of her fiery, igneous mass extending through kilometers of molten mantle, got a little stir-crazy. Plus, they'd just paid up for their second week, but they would need to bring in some more money to make it to a third week. There was no such thing as telecommuting in St. Arbalest, and so leaving the boarding house to pick up some brownbacks soon became a necessity.

It wasn't clear what, exactly, they might do to earn that money. As Rill practiced her fire-manipulation abilities, she got increasingly good at it and quickly found herself steamrolling through 3rd elevation power levels… but she could never demonstrate those skills outside the home or she'd be instantly made for an infernic. And, as a relative newcomer to Medias, Ezra didn't have much in the way of skills, either…

"I could always do the…" Rill mimed the saunter of a street-walker. She certainly had the looks to bring in the bacon if she wanted to use her body. "What's it called again? Sex labor?"

"Sex work. Prostitution," Ezra said. "You're not doing that…"

"I can do as I wish," Rill stated.

"You can…" Ezra said - and, he had to remind himself, he imagined himself to be very sex- and sex-worker-positive. "And if you do decide to become a prostitute, I'll still be your friend… but we can't share a bed anymore."

Rill pouted. "You're being incorrigible."

That was one of her new favorite words whenever she thought somebody was being illogical. Of course, people rarely changed their minds when you outright called them incorrigible, but Ezra wasn't being incorrigible. But how did you explain to a goddess the realities of STIs or the fact that you just weren't ready for an open relationship?

"Non-infernics are filthy," he said eventually.

"Anise is a human," Rill retorted.

"And a fine one, too. But I don't share my bed with her, do I?"

"You don't," Rill agreed… "though we did sleep in her bed that once. Should we be worried…" she puzzled it over - making intuitive connections was something she was getting good at. She could usually even parse human idioms at this point. "It's not about the bed," she concluded. "It's about what you do in it. Prostitutes do the sex game, but it's wrong to do the sex game with non-infernics… because they're filthy?"

"I… may have misstated…" Ezra said, worried that he was about to send sweet-but-arrogant Rill along the road to infernic supremacism. Thus, what he truly feared came to pass: an hour-long lecture on sexual mores, relationship dynamics, and emotions like jealousy and envy.

Rill nodded thoughtfully. "It seems like being a prostitute isn't a good fit for me, given our…" she tried to remember the word that Ezra had wielded… "normative sexuo-cultural values and current socioeconomic status."

Ezra was glad he'd taken that seminar in college - and, before long, Rill would probably be able to teach it. She soaked up information almost as readily as he did and was, if anything, more inquisitive. Whether that was a function of her body's brain (or lack thereof) or her own qualities as an infernic was unclear - Ezra suspected it was both.

In retrospect, the solution was pretty obvious: among the various abilities the two of them possessed, the only one they could use toward their financial advantage was their ability to take in prodigious amounts of information. To that end, Rill was able to dye her hair (a travesty, but a necessary one) and secure a job as a dictation secretary for one of the port bosses for three brownbacks a day… and, when it became known that she was unwilling to engage in prostitution-adjacent activities, they were still willing to pay her two brownbacks a day. And Ezra was able to pick up a job as a numbers-man at the port authority, an incredibly boring and tedious job, but at least it paid. The job interview had been as follows:

A dour borrenkin in a black suit smoking a black pipe paced among the six applicants for the job. There were only five seats and, being the shabbiest-dressed and the only one without a father, uncle, or great aunt of decent means to recommend him, Ezra got to sit on the floor. Mr. Gavra-Foss, the borrenkin Junior Vice-Assistant to the Vice-President, handed out a sheet to each of them - face-down for starters - and handed each of them a fountain pen filled with red ink. He frowned at each of them - uncertainly, unhappily, unhopefully - and said:

"Ours is a game of speed and a game of numbers. In this job, you'll have to go through four hundred pages of shipping manifests daily and mark them for missed import and export fees, under- and over-payments… we don't really care about the overpayments… and luxury and sin taxes across three to five levels of graduated taxation, depending upon how much luxury and how much sin. Three hundred fifty pages won't cut it. Make five hundred and you'll get a ten percent bonus… make six hundred and it'll be twenty-five percent. There are six of you and two openings, so you do the math - two-thirds of you will go scraping back to your families with bad news. This is the reality of numbers. Now I'll have you really do the math - on each of your sheets are two arithmetic errors. Your job is to find them and circle them before anybody else does. You may begin… Now!"

Ezra dutifully flipped the sheet over. It contained a mess of hastily-scrawled calculations from some possibly-real, possibly-hypothetical harbormaster. There were probably three hundred calculations of various fractions and multiplicative values jotted across the big, tawny page. Ezra took a good moment to familiarize himself with the writing, which probably took him a grand total of five seconds, at which point he circled the errors and raised his hand.

"Mister Gavra-Foss… I've found three errors."

Apparently, they'd been using that test sheet for two years and nobody before had caught the rounding error on 226.4 x 11.5% = 26.03. That was enough to impress dour Mr. Gavra-Foss and enough to land the job, though he got the exact same job that the nebbish kao-alta next to him got, and that man had taken a full minute to find the two more-obvious errors. At least Ezra was now earning three brownbacks a day, and nobody ever asked him to do anything prostitution-adjacent or cut his pay by a third when he refused.

"That doesn't seem fair," Rill said. "They didn't even ask you to do the sex game?"

"No, and I didn't volunteer," Ezra said.

+++++Ezra+++++

Their new jobs were at the very lowest stratum of white collar, but they were white collar nonetheless - in St. Arbalest, that meant five day workweeks with occasional overtime. And, since Ezra always got his twenty-five percent bonus, that meant they were bringing in just south of thirty brownbacks per week - a veritable king's ransom as far as the two of them were concerned. They paid their rent, saved half of the rest, and spent the rest however they liked - with their first ten spare brownbacks, Ezra commissioned dark contact lenses to cover up his pale gray eyes so he could go about in public without being pegged for an infernic. With their next ten, they got Rill a fiery red dress (even though her hair was dyed black) and a dapper heather-gray suit for himself, equally appropriate in the office or strolling along the Port Galleria.

Ezra knew it couldn't be permanent though, just how impermanent, he perhaps badly underestimated. He thought they might live like that for a while, save up some money, and buy a country house in one of the outlying towns and live without anybody bothering them ever again. It saddened him that he'd never see Anise again - she was his only friend who he actually liked. Mr. Venno, the landlady's husband, was fine to share a drink with, provided you didn't mind hearing about fishing, seamanship, or the logistics of running a drydock. Audrym Eisoh at work was amiable enough, but he either had a man-crush or a crush-crush on Ezra and wasn't a good enough accountant to admire reciprocally. And Mr. Gavra-Foss at work had made some overtures toward friendship but, even if he wasn't too dour to take seriously, it was pretty clear the man was just trying to get his underlings to attend services at some religious temple. No thanks.

"Lets go out to the sea," Rill said.

She liked to walk along the portside boardwalk at sunset - she said it was because the sun on the water was beautiful, and Ezra suspected that was because it reminded her of the vast fields of glowing magma she'd casually ejected in her past life. Liquid death as far as the eye could see. Fortunately, she didn't seem to have a pyromaniac streak anymore. She just liked to watch the fiery sunset over the ocean.

They walked hand-in-hand along the seawall promenade, past other couples, past a gaggle of dorthek children daring one another to take gliding leaps into the breeze, past wharf-workers drinking and smoking and waiting for the evening haul to come in. The breeze was cool off the ocean, but Ezra had his dapper suit jacket and it would be a cold day, indeed, before the weather bothered fiery Rill. They passed the port authority building where Ezra worked… there were a trio of borrenkin men milling about the front of the place. Ezra recognized one of them.

"Shit… it's Gladion's men," he said. He tugged Rill's hand and they turned around.

"They can't just bother us like that," she insisted. She offered a token resistance but, of course, she knew as well as he did that they weren't free citizens of St. Arbelast. Gladion's thugs most certainly could bother them, and the only thing they could do to save their bacon was admit to being escaped infernics. Ezra didn't have much hope that the authorities would offer one scintilla of mercy to them…

For the next five minutes, Ezra tried to enjoy the evening, but it was difficult when Gladion's thugs were quite possibly after him. Without much success, he tried to convince himself it was probably just chance - Gladion's men were mostly borrenkin, and so were about half of the leadership at the port authority, so maybe they traveled in similar social circles. He and Rill strolled the seawall down toward the quay, cold sea breeze whipping at Ezra's hair, and he felt Rill's hand go uncomfortably hot. He spotted them just after she did: a human and a kao-alta attired as mid-level bureaucrats, right down to the dark suspenders and powder-blue linen shirts with the rolled-up sleeves. Fenrik's hired guns.

Rill's hand grew even hotter. "I'm going to…"

"Don't," Ezra said, giving her fiery hand a reassuring squeeze. And, just as they turned and made for the safety of the Quartermistress's Table, the kao-alta turned toward them…

Ezra didn't think they'd been spotted, but it had been close. Way too close. They hurried onto the Port Mains, the major road running through the Port District, and headed for home. The boarding house was only two blocks away. Ezra looked back over his shoulder and saw no one. He worried whether breaking into a jog would draw more attention to them than they wanted.

"I think we lost them," Rill said. Her hand had returned to its normal warmth. Ezra hoped she was right…

They ascended the stairs to the Table and were about to step inside when they heard a soft silvery voice within: "Well, if they aren't here, I guess I'll just wait," she said. That was almost certainly Berhu, Plenakton's infernic/kao-alta lieutenant.

"A brownback buys you an hour," Mrs. Venno said.

"Fine."

It was hard to say whether he and Rill were having an extremely lucky or an extremely unlucky day. All three groups after the two of them had discovered their general whereabouts on the exact same evening, but they'd managed to spot all three groups before being spotted, themselves. Ezra backed away from the door and closed it as slowly as he could, only to have an errant gust of sea breeze bump the door into the frame with a little klunk.

"What was that?" Berhu said.

Rill broke into a run, yanking Ezra's arm hard enough that it hurt. But she wasn't wrong - it was a very appropriate time to become scarce. However, Rill had chosen the exact wrong direction - she turned onto the road toward the Port Galleria and nearly collided into Gladion's men skulking up the street.

"Hey!" one of the borrenkin goons boomed.

"There they are!" another voice shouted - and a human and a kao-alta raced down the road from the opposite direction, alchemical pistols drawn but not yet firing.

Ezra leapt away from one borrenkin's lumbering grab, and Rill burnt another with a pluming gout of fire, making the man howl and drop to the ground, his leaves charred and smoking. That left two borrenkin, a human, and a kao-alta… and, yes, Berhu wasn't far behind - and her urmal associate lagged behind another block or so back. Ezra kicked the burned borrenkin goon and leapt over him, racing after Rill.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he was surprised but not too disappointed to see Fenrik's thugs facing off against Gladion's goons. It looked to be a pretty fair fight, too - two hulking and bark-covered borrenkin squaring off against two smaller but substantially more skillful opponents. And Berhu vaulted over all four of the brawling men with a magical push, nearly missing her landing when she clipped a wrought-iron street lamp. Rill was fast, a born sprinter, and Ezra was even faster, soon catching up with her and then slowing down just enough to avoid overtaking her.

"The ferry!" Rill said.

That was a good idea. The evening ferry was chaining off its ramp for departure - already technically closed, but they wouldn't turn down a pair of fares if they vaulted over the chain and sprinted aboard. So that's exactly what they did, leaping over the chains hand-in-hand, and leaping again to cross the nearly three meters onto the slowly-departing ferry, hitting the deck just before the boarding attendant swung the gate shut.

"Just made it!" Ezra flashed a bashful smile.

The attendant rolled her eyes. "Three par apiece, please."

He was only too happy to pay.