Wednesday, March 29, 2022 Aqrabuamelu training facility; Flushing, Queens, New York, United States

The MK556 felt heavy in Ella’s hands. She crept around the corner and suddenly spotted the remaining opponents.

She hand-signaled back to Bahu and Etana, two enemies, and signaled to their locations. This was it. She put Bahu and Etana on the smaller enemy who was in partial cover and took the larger one for herself.

Ella hoisted herself onto the half-wall and shimmied into position. She carefully lined up her shot through her reflex scope, the red dot on the dark silhouette and waited, finger on the trigger. The enemy was in a good position, lots of cover and decent sight-lines, but this had been all about getting the drop, and her team had taken the other two enemies quietly right after their check-in.

Etana whispered a gentle “Now” over the comm and Ella pulled the trigger, hitting center mass twice in quick succession and dropping her target. She quickly swung over to the second target, but saw it was down.

The lights flickered for a moment and then turned on. Zaidu made the announcement, “Another round for Team Vermin. Disgusting.” His hissing voice almost felt resigned to her win. His spitting on the ground was audible over the speaker.

Ella watched Arcsa stand-up, paint spread over his chest and side where she had hit him twice, and heard Tauthe cursing about getting shot by Bahu and Etana in the head.

“100 six-point burpees for the winners!” He paused savoring it for a moment, “and 200 for the losers. NOW!”

They put their paintball guns down and started. Ella was first done like usual, but Arcsa was actually ahead of her in count as he did his next hundred. They all stood there panting after, awaiting Zaidu’s release of his command for the day which only came with another hissed “Disgusting.” And him spitting again to the side.

Afterwards they went to the showers. Ella had become inured to the communal showers as had the others, but it felt different with Arcsa there. A new invader in their post workout rituals. Adra and Davcina both had trouble taking the paint off of their necks where they had had their throats “cut”.

Tauthe, still irritable at the loss, came up and grabbed Ella’s night vision goggles, jamming them on her head and flipping them on.

“Are these somehow better than our vision? How did you keep spotting us so easily?”

In disgust she tore them off and threw them on the bed and went to her bunk to sulk.

In their game of night hunting, Ella had perhaps done too well. “Beginner’s luck,” Ella said to the still sulking Tauthe as she went over to the kitchenette for two cups of tea. She sat down next to Tauthe and handed her a cup.

“You guys did well to split into two groups, but it killed your one advantage, you had one more person than us. And… I think because you have better night vision than those goggles, you rely on it. You weren’t quiet enough.”

“Almost right,” Adra came over, “we should have kept sight of each other in the split. You are right about the noise though.”

Tauthe grunted, but she did drink the tea. So Ella considered that a win.

Ella sat and muddled over two things which she kept switching back and forth on. One was the physics text in front of her. Her magic was going to lie within her understanding of science. Her perceptions and thought processes shaped how she formed her magic. So that started to focus her studies quite a bit more, she was refining a list of items to understand that she would leverage into mastering her magic.

The long list of topics was still too long, and she needed to cut it down; however, her intuition told her that underlying fundamentals would be more powerful but harder to master. And quick and easy wins like, well, light, would render her more capable sooner.

Her list kept getting longer, but she would organize it into categories and then make choices to focus on. And make her independent study about it. Two birds, one stone.

And then the other topic. The regalia.

Here, there were three threads going.

First, the bracelet. Out of reach for now. The Manticore apparently could survive just about everything. It could be cut in half and survive. Bahu and Arcsa thought it could maybe survive a nuclear blast.

Second, the unknown one in South America. Here the key was Donna and the asymmetry there, Ella knew she was a spy and Donna did not know she knew. So how to leverage that best.

Third, when Ella had been attacked in that alley by Bahu and a team, the rest of that team, mostly called Newborn, meaning created in the days of Kur of after, were sent to hunt the regalia. Arcsa had them split up in Asia and Africa hunting for it. So far they had found one more hidden world, empty and featureless, not even corpses. The Newborn team had said their cameras did not work in that kingdom.

Ella had asked how they would find it, and Arcsa said they had just a slight affinity to them from Ekerri’s magic. If they got close enough they would know.

So it made South America the one to chase. But how…

The same day Ixus Capital, Midtown, Manhattan, New York, United States

Goldberg was such a pig. Charlie hated working with him. He was currently yelling at her over her recommendations. And he was wrong.

“Look, you may have your whole Taylor Swift vibe going on here, and that may have let you float through life on easy street, but…”

Wah, wah, wah.

Charlie had only tuned in to hear the favorable comparison to Taylor. Back to Charlie Brown mode.

Apparently he had been slobbering over Ella when he had interviewed her. But Ella was a smokeshow, and Charlie apparently didn’t have the two things that would draw Goldberg’s attention the same way. He would have been good-looking if he wasn’t so dumb and such an asshole.

And before she lost her temper, de Fonseca Benveniste jumped in and told Goldberg to shut up and that Charlie was right. And try saying that name five times fast thought Charlie. But he was a lot smarter than Goldberg was as was Charlie. And Goldberg deep inside knew it.

Their argument devolved into something in Hebrew which sounded an awful lot like curse words. Now Charlie was humming "Lover" which reminded her of Adra which made her still blush a bit.

Ella would not have let this fight go on, she would have reached out and made peace. But Charlie? “Thanks DFB! But he won’t understand anyway. Let’s take it to the boss.”

Charlie had never seen anyone sputter before. As they walked out of Goldberg’s office, she blew him a kiss.

“He will make you pay for that. And call me David. DFB, really?”

“Whatever you say Dave.”

His eye roll was balm for Charlottes abusive little soul.

“Did you really build that model from scratch?”

“Yeah. This stuff is a cakewalk. Still a bit rough on the implied volatility surface part, but I’ll nail that down soon enough.”

“Xu won’t like it.”

“Xu can suck it. He isn’t infallible, and even if I’ll admit his intuition is good. But these numbers don’t lie.”

“Which numbers?” said a cultured voice behind them.

David turned around quickly and already had started to apologize. But Charlie was having none of it.

“These numbers,” she said, holding out the laptop. “You should be buying right now. You aren’t.”

He perused the numbers a bit, then grabbed her laptop and started typing away, changing assumptions and rewriting her formulas — what the hell?

But when he handed it back to her, “The jump diffusion parts looked good, but your local volatility calculations were off here and here.” Xu pointed at the screen at the relevant parts.

Charlie clicked her teeth. She would have caught it in a day or two.

And then Xu continued, a twinkle in his eyes, “So you, as the kids say, can suck it. Miss Harris, in my office.”

Shit.

Charlie sat down in Xu’s ridiculous oversized office, feeling like she was in detention.

He closed the door and then sat down at his desk, his hands steepled in front of him.

“Miss Harris, you have been here how long?”

“Ummm. Two months, I think?”

“And in that time, you have been telling Mr. Goldberg how he is ‘an idiot who shouldn’t have been let out of kindergarten math’, and I know you have been staying up to help Mrs. Kawashima. She has been working here two years.”

“Well yes.”

“And why is that?”

“Goldberg is an idiot who shouldn’t have been let out of kindergarten math,” Charlie might be digging her own grave here, but it was true. “He is a hack and is only here because of his connections.”

“And Mrs. Kawashima.”

“She is smart but doesn’t have the math she actually needs. Another six months, and she will be there.”

“She is also not assertive enough to get the help when she needs it,” Xu said amiably enough.

“She’ll get there. Let me continue and don’t let her know you know. Her last job was a pretty abusive place. Especially for a young girl from Fukuoka, wherever that is.”

“And you? What should I do with you?”

“Promote me?” Charlie certainly never lacked for confidence.

He smiled.

“Here you go.” He slid a folded letter that had been sitting on his desk over.

Charlie leaned over and picked it up. She eyed it nervously. No guts, no glory, she thought and tore through the seal.

Her eyes widened, “Do I get to tell Goldberg?”

“In a moment.” He stood up and walked to the window facing out over Central Park.

“Miss Harris, I like you quite a bit. You are like me, a dragon among sheep.”

Charlie almost fell out of her chair at that statement. And then she realized she had been caught out, Xu’s eyes were on her on the reflection in the window.

Okay, I guess I used the ’no guts, no glory’ line too soon thought Charlie. ‘Fortune favors the bold’, maybe? Charlie psyched herself up to be as Charlie as she could be, not knowing that Ella had sat in this same chair channeling Charlie’s spirit not that long ago.

“I am hardly a dragon like you,” she said sweetly, knowing her Savannah accent was outing her nervousness. “More a… a hatchling.”

Xu spun around so quickly she almost fell out of her chair again.

“A hatchling. I like that. Well Miss Hatchling, would you like a drink? Some Lay Mou perhaps?”

“Ella said it tasted like ass.”

“It does. It really does. Would you like some?”

“Sure.” Charlie was going to enjoy having Goldberg’s office.