I come to a complete stop as the sun morphs from a red circle to full daybreak all at once, shielding my eyes against the brilliance. My homesick heart responds instinctively to the sight. A long tail of color-bleached hair kicks up behind me as my aura ripples outwards.
When I check my JOY on its belt tether, an electric-blue holoscreen tells me how long of a return trip I’m looking forward to. Another hour at the least. I’m already twelve miles deep into the fields. I take another glance at the nearing mountains.
In the end, it’s the clock that decides for me.
I wheel back around in a slow jog, finally letting ki flourish into my muscles as it’s been waiting to do since I started. Then I look up, set my eyes on the clouds, and a clap of thunder rips across the fields as I flash skyward in an arrow of light.
Waking before sunrise is a survival mechanism of my paranoid brain, not an active choice. If it were an active choice, I’d have woken groggy at noon and rolled back over for another hour’s nap. Maybe even slept the whole day away. Gods know I need the rest. But the things that haunt me when I sleep aren’t so easy to run from as ones back in the house.
An old, familiar instinct guides me back down to earth as I fly over the final straightaway to home. The same straightaway Thane and I would always save a little more energy for when we raced. It’s a perfect mile from the corner to my driveway. I stay airborne a little longer so I can take a closer look at the state of my home from above, gradually tapering down my aura so I descend in gliding flight. Far below, the garden is so overgrown I can’t even see the dojo or the meditation pool through unkempt groves of bamboo. The house’s roof looks even worse from the sky than it does inside. The rice fields that used to just surround the estate are now spilling over the crumbling walls, completely grown out of control.
If I ever come back again, I’ve got some hellish yard work waiting for me.
I mind the potholes as I slash back down to the dilapidated road, jogging the final steps to my driveway. Drawn out by the fading storm, the animals that were hiding yesterday begin perking up one by one as they hear me walking down into the garden, orienting towards me like sunflowers at dawn. I practice my kinetic sense by focusing on each of them individually. So few remain compared to my memories of this place… but there’s already more than yesterday. Like some semblance of normalcy is returning now that I’m back.
I take it slow through the garden, catching my breath while I work my way around the side of the house. A rogue blackbird darts down from the canopy to pace me from perch to perch, fluffing its feathers out to dry in the current of my aura. When I hold my arm out for it to jump onto, I can tell it’s thinking long and hard about it. Judging me with inquisitive eyes. But it must decide that I’m a little too scary, because it flutters off after a moment of consideration.
The open window to Dad’s bedroom is hiding beside a lily bush that’s just past the front porch. I easily vault up and in with the help of a microinfusion of ki to my legs. Pale, golden light illuminates the damaged room like a moving torch as I skip over the debris to grab my prosthetic arm. I reattach it in the washroom; wincing as the circuits jack back into my body. My nerves are still sore, but now that I’ve purged the melted biocircuitry, the seizures should stop. As long as I keep taking it off when I sleep, the infestation shouldn’t grow enough to turn malignant again.
The finger joints are a little achy, a little creaky, not as smooth as they’d be with Cal’s maintenance. Once I’m done curling and uncurling them to test the dexterity, I go back out and fetch my skinsuit. I hung it out to dry after a rain wash last night, and a quick sniff confirms that it’s clean enough. I’m walking back past Dad’s bed when I stop to look over his personal things on the bedside table.
Most of it’s small stuff; innocuous trinkets that belong to the house, not him. He didn’t keep many of his personal belongings here. Didn’t have many, to be fair. His most treasured things were the people he kept around him. A wooden necklace of a chesspiece was a memento to Mr. Ajax; one of his old friends who taught me my fundamentals through training videos he recorded for Aunt Jolie. I make a small, snorting smile when I spin the caf cup around to read the etching on the other side. World’s Best Dad, engraved in the shaky handwriting of yours truly by my own ki. I put the mug back down and pick up the earring beside it, turning it over. The pin that goes through the ear is made of some bronzy alloy, but the decorative part itself only activates once I pick it up.
Yeah. Activates.
A holographic, ion-blue design wavers out from the pin like a projection from a JOY. It’s uniquely intricate- circular and triangular shapes that flip and flop with real gravity physics as I spin it around- and it’s a tried and true holograph. Micro-sized holotech. I swipe a finger through it twice just to be sure.
“Some kind of JOY thing?” I murmur.
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Might be an Innovators gadget. Might be something Jolie made for Dad as a gift- it definitely looks like it’s that level of expensive. Or maybe it was from a fan. Whatever it is, I can’t remember ever seeing Dad wear it. There’s gotta be more to why he kept it beside his bed.
The athletic wear I borrowed from Jolie’s closet doesn’t have pockets, so I slide the earring into my waistband and take it with me as I pick up my skinsuit and vault back out the window. Reorienting myself with the rising sun, I hop along the garden’s moss-covered footpath with fresh energy- Cal would kill me if she saw me now, the fact that I just don’t get tired when my ki is working drove her insane when we were in the Vents- and make my way through the groves towards the back of the estate. Birdsong and buzzing cicadas fill the air with living sound. A hidden brook gurgles somewhere nearby. Sunbeams and wind breeze through stands of bamboo. Moisture glistens and drips off the leaves. Every plant in its most vibrant shade of green.
I breathe out and slow down, actually letting the peace hit me.
There’s a bittersweetness to finally coming home when I’m doing it without Cal. Even now I can’t stop myself from thinking about her. She’s always perched astride my thoughts. That blackbird hopping, hopping along beside my wandering mind.
Thane wasn’t wrong. More running isn’t going to change my situation, and it’s not going to help Cal. But I don’t have many other options. It’s not like I can just get strong enough on my own to go toe-to-toe with a Champion and take on the entire Section to free my girlfriend of a single night. Nor do I have many options for allies. I’m not an idiot- even with the complicated mess of things unspoken between us, Thane isn’t exactly ally material. At best, he’s an enemy of an enemy.
As I walk through a mossy glade with a carpet of emerald grass, I pull the earring back out for a distraction, forcing myself to think about something other than Cal.
The holoprojected design turns on as soon as the pin touches my skin, and it doesn’t seem to care what kind of skin. It turns on when I put it against my leg, but not my right arm. Doesn’t seem to be any way to shut it off either. I turn the earring over again, watching the morning sunrays scatter through the holograph. Thumbing over the pin. Holding it up to my earlobe.
Dad kept it for a reason. I wonder… no.
Right? No way.
But what if…?
And that, dear reader, is how I ended up performing a backstreet ear piercing on myself using a ki blast.
A very small, very precise blast fired from a single fingertip, to be fair. And my aim was good. Directly into the center of my left earlobe. Fireball pain focused to pinpoint precision, instantly cauterized, yet it’s still sharp and sudden enough that I yelp out loud and start slapping at my leg. I look like a loon, jumping around in the garden howling and swatting at nothing. The pin hurts like hell when I try to slide it in at first. I grit my teeth and jam it all the way in, tears springing into my eyes. The burn eases once it’s through, though not by much.
My ear is definitely swelling. I can feel how angry it is just by touching around the fresh piercing. But my insanity is rewarded when I go to tap the pin in a little firmer and a stream of electric-blue light suddenly cascades from somewhere on the left side of my head. From the earring itself. I stand ramrod still as a miniaturized holoprojection- maybe half the height of a JOY’s screen- warbles to life in the air in front of me, just within arms’ reach.
“Holy shit,” I murmur.
Wide-eyed, I reach forward and brush my fingers through the holoprojection. Snowflake particles from an aging projector drip off the edges of the screen as it solidifies into a boot menu just like a JOY. But where a JOY always displays its name and version, the earring shows a different word entirely: STAR.
The projection shuts off when I tap the earring a second time, and reactivates again when I tap it a third time. I stare at the login screen and swallow hard before reaching out to tap the screen. Left index finger, right in the middle.
The word STAR fades away and a deluge of information appears in front of me. Very quickly, I start to realize that whatever I just put in my ear is way beyond my paygrade.
My feet navigate through the garden for me as I get sucked into looking at the earring’s landing screen. It’s eerily similar to the social profile on a JOY- albeit a stripped down version; almost like a virtual ID card. The name Mars Mons glows in electric-blue font beside a ridiculously photogenic picture of Dad flashing a showstopper grin at the camera, and there’s a number next to his name that labels him as a Grade 25. All his other biographical details are right. The social profile even includes his two classes- Martial Artist and Ki Fighter- with algorithmic quantifications of his apparent combat proficiency, though I’ve got no clue what the ratings translate to in real terms.
I start delicately poking and prodding at the earring’s functions like the holoprojection is going to fall to dust in my hands if I touch it too hard. Navigating around the menus is like navigating a different part of the same city you already live in. Most of the familiar landmarks, but they’re rearranged in different ways than your home neighborhood.
A lot of it’s nonsense. Or, not nonsense, but not information I can use or quickly understand. Most of the functions just flash a [NO SIGNAL] error when I try to select them, like the ‘Net interface.
I only really start to make progress when I open up Dad’s messaging history. The timeline of the earring starts to fall into place, and it’s also how I know it’s not synced to his actual JOY profile. Dad’s oldest conversations on the earring start around twenty years ago, a year or so before the time he adopted me- and right around the time he was sent to Olympus by the previous Champion; Rex Fang. I scroll up and up to get to the newest messages, swallowing down the lump that forms in my throat. My heart tugs at me to stop and read every single one, but my mind knows that I can’t let myself touch that heartbreak. Not when I know exactly what worse pains it’ll reawaken.
I keep swiping. Dad exchanged hundreds of messages with a name I actually recognize- Emilia Mori, a minor-league Gunslinger from his same generation. There’s so many I can’t even begin to parse their contents. And there’s plenty of texts to Aunt Jolie and other figures of the older pro leagues scattered throughout, as well as a select few by a name that makes my eyes narrow: Carra Kyriaku.
Better known as Akis Prazen, one of the Section’s most infamous mercenaries.
Not-so-better known as Thane and Cal’s father.
On and on I swipe. The messages start petering out about a decade ago; nothing that overtly looks like it might help me. I’m about to close out of the menu and go back to investigating more of the earring when my scrolling comes to an abrupt stop at the very end of Dad’s most recent texts.
Right at the top of the stack, unread and pulsing with electric-blue color, is a message from Aunt Jolie.
And it was sent one week ago.
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