"What the hell are you?"
Lay’s eyebrows rose. The lazy half-smile faltered for the first time all night - not into hurt, exactly, but into something close to being offended. The expression of a person who had been called a name they considered way beneath them. She tilted her head slowly, her dark hair shifting across her shoulder, and looked at Kori with the offended patience of a woman who had been asked to explain herself by someone who had clearly not earned the right.
"Ow!? That’s rude."
"It’s a question."
"It’s a very rude question."
"You agreed to answer them."
"I agreed to questions. I didn’t agree to having my entire existence interrogated like I’m some kind of -" she waved one hand vaguely, "- thing."
She unscrewed the cap of the canteen.
The slushie inside had settled into its final state: a fine, layered mixture of ruby red tea-ice and pale snow, the colours separated into soft striations along the brass interior. Lay tilted the canteen toward her face, took a long sip, and her expression changed.
It was the most genuine reaction Kori had seen from her since the encounter began. Lay’s eyes closed. Her shoulders dropped a lot. The corner of her mouth pulled upward into a slow, satisfied curve, and a small sound escaped her throat - half hum, half pleased sigh, entirely involuntary. She held the canteen near her mouth for a moment after the sip, the brass close to her lips, savouring whatever the cold and the hibiscus had done together inside the metal.
"...Oh," Lay said. Her voice had softened. "That’s really good."
Kori patiently watched her drink. "Why don’t you use Eon?"
Lay opened her eyes. Took another sip. Swirled the slushie slightly inside the canteen with a small rotation of her wrist.
"Can’t."
"Can’t or won’t?"
"Same thing, eventually."
"That isn’t an answer."
"It is. You just don’t like it."
Lay drew another mouthful from the canteen and held it on her tongue, considering, before swallowing. She wiped her lower lip with the back of her thumb. The motion was almost lazy, almost feline – as if she had decided that whatever Kori was going to do with her next, the slushie was worth the wait.
"What’s your full name?"
"Lay."
"That’s a nickname."
"It’s the name everyone uses, and the only one you should know."
"Where were you born?"
"Around."
"Around where."
"Around... Close enough."
Kori adjusted her grip on her knife. The frost between them had not retreated; if anything, it had thickened during the brief interlude, the cold spreading further across the rooftop as Kori’s irritation continued to grow at the level of her unconscious. Her left hand, hanging at her side, had condensed a thin layer of frost across the back of her own wrist, without her noticing. Her shoulder was still bleeding. The cuts on her hip and shin were beginning to ache as the adrenaline thinned out.
"What were you doing tonight?"
Lay raised the canteen toward the sky.
"Welp... Enjoying the view?"
She gestured upward with the brass. Through the cloud-glow above, the closed shape of the petals was barely visible - the curved alloy plates fully sealed now, their edges glowing softly with the pale lights that traced the dome’s perimeter across the upper atmosphere. The sky beyond them was completely obscured. Whatever lights or auroras the third-day phenomenon had been preparing to deliver were now invisible behind the city’s defensive shell, hidden from the entire population below.
"If you guys hadn’t closed the sky off," Lay said, "it would’ve been pretty. Third day, right? The colors come tonight. I came up because the lower districts don’t have rooftops tall enough to see the whole thing from underneath, and now I’m sitting here with a slushie and no view because you all panicked. So." She shrugged with the slushie in her hand. "Enjoying what’s left."
"You scaled a four-storey jump to look at clouds."
"I scaled a four-storey jump to look at clouds, yes."
"And the Wardens?"
"The Wardens panicked, not me. I haven’t hurt any of them. I’m in the city tonight because the sky was supposed to be open, and now it’s closed - that’s on you, not me." She paused. "Did you know the auroras are visible from the western plains for almost two hours after the whole thing ends? But I wanted the angle from up here. I like the way the cloud layer holds the light. It’s the difference between watching a candle through a window and standing in the room with it. You know?"
Kori didn’t know. Her irritation had reached a threshold somewhere between Lay’s third sip of the slushie and the candle metaphor.
Her right knife came forward - fast, a strike that closed the two-metre distance between them in less than half a second and swung with the edge of the blade a centimetre away from Lay’s throat, just enough to be really threatening. The luminite core flared bright blue. Lay’s neck was pale in the cold light, the small motions of her swallowing visible just above the line of the steel.
The knife stopped right in front of her throat. Hovering. The chained attached to it suspended in the air.
The slushie kept moving. Lay was still drinking it, unphased.
"Stop." Kori frowned.
"Mm?"
"Answers. Real ones. Now."
Lay tilted her head a few millimetres. The blade tracked with her.
"You want to know what I am. I don’t know how to answer that in a way you’ll like. Maybe I’m just a person." She took another sip. "Maybe everyone you’ve ever measured was abnormal and I’m the baseline."
"You don’t have an Eon signature."
"Mm."
"That isn’t possible."
"And yet... Here I am, with a blade to my throat."
Kori pressed the blade forward by a millimetre. Just enough that the edge touched skin without cutting it. The cold air condensed on the surface of the steel in a thin line of frost where the blade met Lay’s throat.
Lay’s hand snapped forward, suddenly. Kori did not see it happen. She felt the shift in the air before she saw the gesture - Lay’s right hand left the canteen, traveled the distance between her side and Kori’s chain in the time it took for Kori’s pupils to dilate, closed around the chain at the base of Kori’s knife with the grip of a woman who had decided the interrogation was over.
She wrapped the chain around her hand. Once. Twice. Then she pulled hard.
Kori was yanked forward, her own knife becoming a trap. She fell forward - her chest pressed against Lay’s shoulder. Her head came to rest in the curve of Lay’s neck, her cheek against the woman’s collarbone, her own knife now turned in Lay’s grip with the flat of the blade resting against the back of Kori’s neck. The edge was angled inward. Any motion Kori made would draw the steel across her own skin.
Lay’s other arm wrapped around Kori’s back.
The hold was firm without being aggressive. Lay’s left hand settled between Kori’s shoulder blades, the fingers spread wide, the palm flat against the fabric of Kori’s clothes. From the outside, the position would have looked like an embrace - a woman pulling another woman close, the cloak settling around both of them, the brass canteen now settled on the ground, next to Lay’s right thigh.
It was the closest Kori had ever been to her.
The cold of the rooftop had not reached Lay’s body. The skin beneath her bandages was warm, almost unnaturally warm. The hibiscus tea on her breath was sweet. Her hair, where it brushed against Kori’s temple, smelled like cedar smoke and something else Kori could not identify.
Lay’s lips moved near Kori’s ear.
"You’re asking questions," she said quietly. "But if you don’t like my answers, that’s your problem."
Kori couldn’t move. The blade was angled across the back of her neck. Lay’s arm was tight at her back. The lock was so cleanly applied that any resistance Kori offered would tighten the trap further. Her body, recognising the pin, simply held still.
Suddenly, from the east, a whistle - a high, sharp note - distant at first, then closer, then close enough that Kori felt the air begin to move in front of it. Something large was approaching the rooftop at a speed that displaced the atmosphere in a long, building pressure wave. The sound rose in pitch as it neared. The frost at the edges of the rooftop trembled.
Lay’s head turned.
The motion was small. Her chin tilted upward and to her left, just enough that her line of sight cleared the top of Kori’s head and reached the eastern sky. Her lips brushed Kori’s ear in the motion - soft, warmer than the rest of her, the touch lasting less than a second before her head settled into its new angle.
She studied the approaching object for half a second
The whistle resolved into a shape - something broad and sharp at the edges, tumbling end over end through the cold air. Pale brown alloy. Faintly luminescent edges. The thing was perhaps one and a half meter across.
Kori recognized it – it was Osamu’s shield.
Lay watched it come. Her smile returned beneath the cool light of Kori’s knife, lazier than before, her reacion when an interesting evening had just become more interesting.
"Ah," she said. Her sigh was small and almost regretful. "Your friend is here."