He pushed open the door to the living area of the Starlight Carriage and stepped inside.
Arthur was at the center of the room, seated on a stool with a mug in both hands, dressed in the blue compression gear he wore under his armor when he was not expecting to need the armor. He looked out through the wide carriage window into the purple expanse of the void, where debris drifted in slow irregular arcs. He looked relaxed in the way people look relaxed when they are actually just exhausted.
Valen was on the floor. Cross-legged. Surrounded by small stacks of coins that he was sorting and counting with the focused attention of a man conducting an audit.
Lucid looked at the coins.
'Those are mine.'
"Hey," he said.
Arthur glanced back over his shoulder. "Do not bother. He took mine too." He reached into his coat pocket and produced nothing. "He will not give it back."
"You scoundrel." Lucid stepped forward. "You have no business touching—"
Valen looked up from the floor without pausing the count. "You two managed to spend five hundred silver coins on this expedition alone. That is genuinely impressive." He set one stack aside and started on the next. "A normal trip to Port Vexis on the railway costs a couple of gold coins at most. You spent seven gold coins. Seven." He looked up. "What did you buy?"
Lucid considered whether to answer that. He decided against it.
"That useless relic," Valen said, filling in the silence himself. He laughed. A short, satisfied sound.
He had not bought it. Good. That reduced the number of things Lucid needed to address.
He crossed the room and snatched the pouch from the floor in front of Valen.
"Such aggression," Valen remarked, not moving.
Lucid tossed Arthur's pouch across to him and turned back. "Rule six, or whatever number we are on. Do not touch other people's belongings."
"Belongings," Valen repeated, drawing the word out and squinting. "You say that as if I took something. I was auditing. There is a distinction."
"You are a thief."
"I am a loan shark. Entirely different profession. Regulated, even, in certain jurisdictions."
Lucid looked at him for a moment. He genuinely did not have the mental space to continue that thread.
"Whatever. What is on the menu today?"
Arthur turned on the stool and gave him a look. It was the look of someone preparing to deliver information they did not want to deliver.
"What?" Lucid asked.
"We are out of supplies."
Lucid stared at him. Through the mist covering his features, the expression underneath carried something close to dread.
"You are kidding."
Arthur shook his head.
No wonder the man looked like he had been awake for too long. Lucid thought about it quickly. His own situation was survivable in the short term. As long as the Chain of Heart kept moving fate essence through him, he could function without food for a while. Probably. Unless something destabilized the chain, which was a separate concern he decided not to follow all the way to its conclusion.
His companions were the actual problem. They were human, or close enough to it, and they would not manage indefinitely.
"Then what do we do?"
Arthur stood from the stool. He reached out and steadied himself briefly against a nearby lamp as he rose.
A growl came from Arthur's direction. Valen looked at him. Lucid looked at him.
"During a holy month," Valen said, with the solemn gravity of someone reporting a scandal to local authorities, "a knight, no less. Shameful."
Arthur only looked at him. "I am not a knight yet."
Lucid pressed a hand against his forehead like he was holding something in place. He looked around the carriage.
"Where is Ayame?"
Valen tilted his head. "I tried to get hers. But the girl is completely broke. No pouch, no currency, nothing. I did not realize she had such a genuinely carefree approach to finances." He paused, genuinely seeming to consider this. "I respect it, actually. Spiritually, at least."
Lucid moved to the kitchen. She was not there.
Arthur followed him partway. "She is in her room. Though I will say I have never actually seen her in her own room. She is always in the lounge."
Lucid moved to the door that led toward the private quarters.
Arthur reached out. "Wait. Are you going to just—"
Lucid took the handle, opened the door, and stepped through, closing it behind him without slowing.
The room was exactly as the blueprints had described when he had first studied the carriage layout during the less honest portion of his tenure at the academy. He had spent time with those schematics, had read the structural details of each compartment with the attention of someone planning something he was not supposed to be planning. This room was the foundational version of what the blueprints promised. Walls. A bed. A window. A single lamp that had not been moved since it was installed.
No decoration. Nothing added. Nothing personalized. The lamp was the only object in the room that was not architectural.
Ayame was on the bed, cross-legged, eyes forward, completely still.
She appeared to be in a meditative state. Lucid's Chain of Heart reacted before he made any conscious decision to engage it. He felt her. Something radiating from her at a low, consistent frequency. Fate essence. Red fate essence. He followed the perception further, toward her thread of fate.
It was red.
He pulled back from the perception. The effort of using the chain without Alice to stabilize the process drove a spike of pain directly behind his eyes. He gripped the side of his head. A thin trail of blood had started from one nostril. He wiped it away with the back of his wrist and narrowed his eyes until the worst of the pain passed.
He moved to the bed and sat on the edge of it without ceremony.
Ayame did not open her eyes immediately. Her breathing was slow and did not change when he entered or when he sat. The room smelled of nothing in particular, which in a carriage that normally carried the combined presence of four people was notable on its own.
After a moment she spoke, without opening her eyes. "You are bleeding."
"Bit."
"From your nose."
"I noticed."
She opened her eyes and looked at him. The directness in them was the same as always, no gradation to it, no adjustment period. She assessed what she saw and held the assessment.
"Alice is not present," she said. It was not a question.
"No."
She looked at the wall opposite the window for a moment, then back at him. "Is that why you are bleeding."
"Probably part of it."
She said nothing further on the subject. She did not ask where Alice was or when she would return. She did not offer anything that would require him to have answers he did not currently possess.
"We are out of food," he said.
She received this without any visible change in her expression. "I am aware."
"Any thoughts?"
"You could hunt," she said.
"In the void."
"There are things in the void."
He looked at the window. The purple expanse outside carried floating debris and, further out, shapes that moved in ways debris did not. She was not wrong.
"I am not hunting in the void," he said.
"Then we wait until the next station."
He sat with that for a moment. It was functionally the only other option. The carriage would reach the next stop eventually, and there would be supplies available there. The issue was the interval between now and then, and what Arthur's stomach would do during that interval based on the sound it had produced in the living area.
"Valen says you have no money," Lucid said.
"Valen took inventory of people's belongings without asking," she replied. "That is his problem, not mine."
"Fair."
She shifted slightly on the bed, adjusting the angle of her legs. The movement was minor and settled quickly. She looked at the lamp on the far wall.
"You came in here yourself," she said. "You did not send Arthur."
"Arthur tried to stop me."
"I know. I heard the door." A pause. "Why did you come in yourself?"
Lucid did not have a tidy answer for that. He thought about Alice not being there, about the room feeling quiet in a way he had not anticipated, about the red fate thread he had briefly perceived before the pain had cut the perception short.
"Wanted to check on something," he said.
She looked at him. Whatever she found in his expression through the mist covering it, she held it for a moment and then returned her attention to the window.
"You saw it," she said.
"The thread."
"Yes."
He did not ask what it meant.
She did not offer to explain it.
Ayame suddenly looked away towards the window.
"I like it." She said blunt.
Lucid shifted, not quite understanding what it meant.
"The way you do not ask for my consent..."
She looked at him, softly.
"It is efficient."