Chương 42: Sometimes you deserve a party

The twelve areas are numbered rather than named by design. For most of human history, names carried weight - of nationality, of ethnicity, of belonging and exclusion. As travel became easier and the lines between peoples blurred, the old names became less a source of pride and more a source of friction. The solution was simple: remove the names. A number carries no history, no claim, no slight. Whether this was wisdom or cowardice depends on who you ask, and where they are from.

- From the memoirs of Glen Headall, 18th Head of the First Brain's Faction"- and then he just walked away," Kara said.

"After that, Narak caught up with me and I headed back." Vixen had her chin on both fists. Glasses was leaning against the headboard, listening the way he read a report, with his full attention. Waggy was asleep in a curl on the bed beside him, making the small sound between growl and purr that Kara had decided was his version of snoring. There was a pause. Kara's narration had slowed just before the end - a pause that had no business being there, too long to be natural, too short to be deliberate.

He had replayed the festival in his head several times already, moving through each moment in sequence, and when he got to the part with the gorilla and the smoke and the figure disappearing through it, the pause arrived without his permission. Because he knew what it was. He had remembered mid-sentence, the way recognition sometimes works, assembling piece by piece until it was unmistakeable. The hand gesture.

Open palm, thumb up, forefinger and middle finger joined, small gap to the ring finger, smaller gap to the little finger. He had not seen it in three years. He had been four the first time someone showed it to him, sitting on a kitchen floor with his knees pulled up, being told what it meant by his mom and a seven-year-old with patient eyes and limited working knowledge of his language. I am here. I see you. You are not alone.

"You slowed down," Glasses observed.

"Did I?"

"Right at the end. Before the smoke cleared." Kara considered his roommate. Glasses was leaning against the headboard with exactly the expression he used when he was working through something and waiting for the answer to offer itself.

"A lot happened in a short period," Kara said.

"Mm-hmm." Vixen was watching him, bright and considering, visibly sitting on a follow-up question and weighing whether it would be welcome. That in itself was notable, Vixen generally asked the question first and considered welcome as a retrospective concern.

"Anyway," Kara said.

"Tonight. Are we going?" Vixen's expression shifted through two stages before landing on indignant.

"What do you mean are we going, it's the festival ball, of course we're going." A beat.

"Wait, what time is it?"

"Seven."

"Seven!" She was already moving, the question of the pause apparently reclassified as a problem for later.

"I have to - there's a thing in my hair still from the chase, I need to fix that, and I haven't even decided what I'm wearing yet-" She was off the bed, across the floor, at the door.

"I'll ping you when I'm ready. Don't be late." The door closed.

"She is going to be late," Glasses stated.

"She is absolutely going to be late." Kara watched the door for a moment.

"What's new."

"Coming from you, that's rich."

"I'm never late."

"You were late to the SDC final."

"I was on time. I simply did not wear the correct clothes." Glasses made a sound that declined to take a position on this distinction.

"Do we actually have to go?" Kara looked at him. The question was genuine. Glasses had the expression of someone who would rather spend time with his box than go to a social gathering. Kara understood that feeling.

"I want to," Kara said. Which was true, if incomplete.

"It's a part of university life. I don't want to miss it and then potentially regret it later." Glasses received this with the sigh of a man accepting an outcome he had foreseen.

"You don't have anything to wear."

"How did you know that?"

"Not that hard to guess." Kara looked at his wardrobe. It contained training clothes, his uniform, the invisibility suit, and approximately three options for days when he wanted to look like a person who had made a choice rather than grabbed the nearest available option. None of them were ball-appropriate.

"My mother," Glasses said, already crossing to his own wardrobe, a contingency plan visibly clicking into gear, "is not like me and my father. About social occasions." He produced a garment bag from a corner that Kara had never paid attention to.

"She made me bring two sets. Said I would need them at some point." Inside were two ensembles - dark blue, and a deep charcoal. Both looked like they were chosen by someone who knew how to make a person look put together without making the work show. He handed the dark blue to Kara. It was slightly large at the shoulder, which read as borrowed on purpose, and was better than anything else available to him right now.

"You look fine," Glasses said.

"Stop examining it."

"Your mother has excellent taste."

"That she does." He said it like a man who found anything to do with family approval deeply inconvenient.

"She'll be very pleased to know it was used." They sat. The party did not start for another hour, and Vixen's arrival time was a matter of optimism rather than schedule. Waggy stirred on the bed, made the growl-purr sound, and went back to sleep. Kara looked at him and thought about his brother.

He had heard it mentioned, a comment in passing during Kazushi's remarks about the morning's incident, something about ongoing investigation into connected groups - that the figure in the smoke had been linked to the Freeks. The Freeks were not a respectable organisation by anyone's public account. What the Task Force said about them in official statements was far from charitable. What the news said was worse.

In the popular imagination they were people who had decided the rules did not apply to them and had made everyone else's life harder as a result. Gomot could not be with the Freeks. That sentence did not parse. And yet. The gesture was not ambiguous. He had known it since he was four years old, taught to him on a kitchen floor by a seven-year-old, assisted by his mother, who had needed them both to have a way to say something that words at the time could not carry.

Three years of distance and a festival crowd and it remained exactly as unmistakeable as it had always been. He had tried, briefly, to imagine it as coincidence - a stranger, a similar hand position, a trick of the light. This had lasted approximately four seconds before he accepted he was lying to himself. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Gomot was a hard worker, who was not shy about training.

Not only in the ocean, Kara remembered his brother going off for weeks at a time into forest environments, cold environments, any environment that would put pressure on him. Noone had never asked Gomot to do any of that. Gomot had simply done it, methodically, year after year, a boy who had looked at the world and decided exactly what he needed to become to survive it. He did not belong anywhere near the Freeks. But he had been there. He had made the sign.

He had broken whatever cover he was operating under to stop a gorilla from removing Kara's ankle. None of this arranged itself into a shape that made sense yet. His interface chimed. Vixen: On my way. Five minutes. He told Glasses. Glasses looked at him with the expression of a man whose analysis had been confirmed.

"Fifteen minutes," Glasses said.

"Minimum." They put on their shoes. It was twenty-eight minutes. She arrived in a deep green dress with her hair piled up and a mask that had been updated to complement the outfit - how, in the time available, was a question Kara decided was not worth pursuing. She looked at them standing at the edge of the residential area with an expression that briefly communicated surprise at finding them looking party-ready before reclassifying it as coincidence.

"See," she said.

"Five minutes."

"Five minutes was twenty-two minutes ago," Glasses said.

"That's within the social margin."

"What margin."

"The social margin. Nobody arrives exactly on time. That's not how people work." Kara fell into step beside them as they crossed toward the stadium grounds. The sound reached them before the space opened up - a low steady pulse of music beneath a layer of noise that sounded mostly human and mostly enthusiastic.

The grounds had been comprehensively repurposed: lights strung between posts, a platform at one end with a DJ whose interface appeared to be doing several things simultaneously, and a crowd in various states of engagement with the evening. A cluster near the far end had the relaxed, slightly too broad quality of people who had found the drinks station some time ago and made it their home. The smell of something that was definitely not standard-issue reached them.

"Indoor first," Kara and Glasses said, at the same time. Vixen looked at them both.

"Indoor it is. For now." The indoor stadium had the same space the SDC trials had used - smaller oval, quieter acoustics, a crowd that had arrived because they wanted music and conversation rather than just music. It was also where the food was. The counters along the far wall had been laid out by someone who understood that parties ran on two things, and the second was catering. They were halfway across the floor when someone stopped Kara. He did not know them. He was fairly sure he had never seen them.

They congratulated him on the event's success, said something about the demonstration, said something about the gorilla incident in an admiring tone, and departed before he could identify what class they were from or how they knew his face. He made it four more steps. Different person. Similar template. Something about the octopus and had its arm really regrown on stage. Three more steps. This one wanted to know whether Kazushi had spoken to him directly and what he was like up close. He looked for Glasses.

Glasses was already at the food counter, plate in hand, making steady progress through the warm section. He had clearly seen this coming and made a clean exit while the window was open. Kara looked at him. Glasses looked back with an expression that was slightly sympathetic, and wished him all the best. Kara had no response to this that wouldn't take longer than the next person stopping him. Beamer arrived from somewhere to his left.

Beamer had the confidence of a man several drinks into the evening, arrived at the hour when everything he thought deserved saying out loud. The incident with the whip, apparently, was exactly the material he needed.

"Heard you picked up Kazushi's whip," Beamer said.

"A legendary weapon. Thought you could just handle it, huh?"

"I was handed it."

"You grazed the Progenitor Area Principal."

"I was handed a legendary weapon a few minutes after it had been used in a demonstration."

"Not everyone gets to touch something like that just because they landed a committee spot by luck and had a gorilla trip over its own feet-" The sentence ended there. Something found his foot - a small, precise rearrangement of weight and surface that took a quarter of a second and left no trace. His arms came out. The floor came up. Beamer went down with the sound of a bag dropped from table height, and the people in the immediate vicinity looked down at him, startled, though not one of them looked surprised.

Nobody appeared to have seen anything. The only possible explanation was the drinks. No foul play of any kind had occurred or could reasonably be inferred. Kara stepped around him and went to get food. He found a corner that was not quite empty but close enough - a spot beside one of the stadium's structural pillars where the light didn't reach directly and the noise from the floor arrived as background rather than foreground.

He had a plate of things that were warm and had cheese in them, and a drink that was fruity and probably not entirely without content, and for a few minutes he was simply present with that. His mind went, as it had been going all evening, to Gomot.

"He deserved that." He turned. Moghli was beside him - not quite leaning against the pillar, just settled near it, comfortable, in no hurry to move. He had a drink in his hand and the loose attention of a man who had been reading the room for some time.

"I have no idea what you mean," Kara said.

"Of course not." Moghli's eyes were on the crowd.

"There's always one in every batch. They tend to get worse before they get better, or they don't get better at all." He looked at Kara meaningfully.

"You handled yourself well today. All of it." Kara looked down at his food.

"You noticed too." It landed somewhere between a statement and a question. Moghli was quiet for a moment, deciding how much to confirm.

"I think," Moghli said carefully, "that the Freeks are a less straightforward organisation than the official reports describe." He did not say anything else. The silence that followed was the one that said I am looking at the same thing you are looking at, and I am not going to make you say it aloud in a crowded room. Kara exhaled slowly. Something in his chest that had been wound tight all evening let go a fraction. Not resolution. Just the relief of learning someone else was reading the same map.

"The dungeon cohort goes down in a few weeks," Moghli said, after a while.

"Oh right, so that means -""I'll be in it." He said this without ceremony.

"Which means I'm officially off the committee from next week. You and Phinx will manage the rest of the semester. You'll do fine." Kara nodded.

"Both things," Moghli said. He glanced at him, briefly, warm and direct, a man unpractised at sentiment who meant every word he had chosen.

"Both."

"Both," Kara promised. Across the room, Glasses and Vixen were making their way over, plates in hand, Vixen scanning the crowd, alert and interested, clearly treating the indoor space as a first course. Moghli straightened.

"I'll leave you to it."

"Thank you," Kara said. It came out quieter than he intended. Moghli received it with a small nod that said - heard, filed, we are not making this awkward - and then he was moving off through the crowd, his business here finished.

"Was that Moghli?" Vixen arrived with a plate stacked in a way that suggested strong opinions about variety.

"You were talking to Moghli privately at a party?"

"Briefly."

"Do you know how many seniors would part with an organ to be in that position?"

"I imagine most people prefer to keep their organs."

"Figuratively." She shook her head, but she was smiling. Then she looked at him with the expression that meant she had already decided something.

"Right. We're going outside." Kara's objection was forming when she held up one hand.

"Something is in your head. I'm not going to ask what. But you've been holding your shoulders like this -" she demonstrated something compressed and contained - "for three hours, and that is not what tonight is for. One hour. Then you can go back to your brooding." He looked at Glasses. Glasses gave him the expression that said she was not technically wrong. He went outside. What followed was, in terms of Kara's ability to recall it in sequence, somewhat fragmentary.

What he recalled was the DJ shifting to something with a longer, slower pulse. Vixen apparently knowing a meaningful fraction of the people in the outdoor space, moving between them like a woman entirely at home in a crowd. Glasses, somehow, managing to be at the centre of things while remaining entirely outside of the dancing - present, occasionally talking, occasionally watching, apparently content, having worked out the correct relationship to have with a party and holding it without visible effort.

At one point Kara had looked over and could not work out how he was doing it. He remembered a moment near the edge of the light where the bioluminescent corals were visible, the glow of the lake just beyond, and he had stood there for a moment and thought - this is nice. He did not know how he got back to the room. He had a strong working theory involving Glasses.

What he remembered clearly was Waggy finding him the moment the door opened - the clumsy enthusiastic scramble across the bed, the front paws landing square on his chest, weight being no object where affection was concerned, the small sound arriving at very close range against the side of his face. He sat down on the floor. This was the easiest option.

Waggy arranged himself into his lap like something claiming a seat it had reserved weeks ago, made the sound again, and licked his chin once without asking and without needing to. Kara sat in the dark and felt, for a moment, very simply and completely alright. He was most of the way to sleep when the calendar notification arrived at the edge of his interface. Classes resumed at eight in the morning. It was currently close to three. He looked at it.

He looked at Waggy, who was already asleep and producing soft sounds of total indifference to this information. He went to sleep.