"This is as far as I go," Jet said, looking cheerlessly at the walls of the Academy. "I've already notified them. Someone will come fetch you in a while."
There was something dark in the depths of her eyes. The air felt suddenly colder.
Hermes looked at her.
"What's the third piece of advice?"
Master Jet glanced at Sunny, then sighed.
"Remember: no one can survive in the Dream Realm alone. That's not an opinion, that's a fact. Try to get along with your peers, even if they don't treat you well. It might save your life."
Then she smiled, something more genuine than her professional warmth, and reached out to pat them both on the shoulder.
Something entered his Soul Sea.
Hermes felt it before he understood it, a new presence settling into orbit around his emerald sun, small and distinct and entirely foreign to anything he had put there himself. He had just enough time to register that something had been given to him before—
He opened his mouth.
"Thank you, Master Jet. Though there's nothing I can give you in return for your kindness—" he adopted an expression of solemn generosity "—I can only offer my body as payment. From here on I am free to you. Feel free to relieve your frustrations on me."
Jet delivered a soft chop to the top of his head.
"Auoo—" The sound that came out of his mouth was deeply embarrassing. He resolved never to make it again and suspected he would fail.
"You're not really that smart, are you?" she said, feeling helpless while watching a fire they had specifically tried to prevent.
Then, louder, for the benefit of no one in particular: "It's a loan. You return it to me when you can. Understood?"
Oh, Hermes thought, approximately three seconds too late. She was being discreet.
I was not being discreet.
"Understood," Hermes said, rubbing his head. Then, because he apparently had not learned anything: "Though the offer stands."
"You know," Jet said, in a tone that was somehow both threatening and tired, "I could use a punching bag to relieve my stress."
"You're more than welcome," Hermes said smugly. "I insist."
Jet looked at him for a long moment going through many difficult people she had the opportunity to know in her life and was quietly adding him to a specific category.
She turned to Sunny.
"I'm sorry, I don't have a spare memory for you. You do have one already, right?"
Sunny thought about it for exactly long enough to make his flaw entirely unnecessary.
"Yes," he said, with the flat resignation of someone who had wanted very much to lie and had been denied the opportunity by the fundamental architecture of his own soul.
He was envious of this lucky bastard in a way that defied easy articulation.
Jet nodded, satisfied.
"You've both done well to survive until now. Make sure to keep yourselves alive in the future."
She got back into the PTV.
And then, just like that, she was gone.
The two of them stood in front of the colossal gates and said nothing for a moment.
Hermes looked at where the PTV had been.
He thought about the woman who had sat watch for three days over two strangers and given away a memory she didn't have to give and delivered a chop to his head with exactly the right amount of force.
I'll return it, he thought. Properly.
Oh.
He reviewed the last thirty seconds of his behaviour.
Did I just set off a red flag?
Something cool touched his nose.
Snow.
He looked up. Small white flakes drifting down from a grey sky, unhurried, settling on his hair and shoulders with the indifferent beauty of weather that had no opinion about the people standing in it.
How beautiful.
He lowered his gaze and caught someone in his peripheral vision.
A girl.
Tall. Slender. Clear grey eyes with the particular quality of someone looking at the world from a slight remove, as though the glass between her and everything else was just thick enough to notice. Silver-white hair cut short and neatly parted to the side. A police-issued tracksuit, same as his and Sunny's. No personal belongings. On her head, a pair of old-fashioned headphones, and from them the faint suggestion of music that belonged entirely to her.
She was simply standing there. Waiting. Calm in the way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with a person who had made their own interior world sufficient.
There was a certain vibe to her. As though she was apart from the world, not excluded from it, just not entirely in it either. Confident. Self-sufficient. And underneath both of those things, quietly, a little lonely.
Ah, Hermes thought.
The autistic blowtorch. The real main protagonist of Shadow Slave.
Nephis of the Changing Star, standing in a police-issued tracksuit in the snow with her headphones on, looking exactly as described and somehow still more than he had expected.
He looked at her and felt, unexpectedly, something like recognition.
She's not so different from me, he thought. In the social aspect at least.
That gave him pause.
Does that mean I'm autistic?
He considered it genuinely. He did have learning disabilities, his sixth form had flagged them, careful and tactful about it, pointing at patterns they had noticed. But a proper diagnosis required money he didn't have and wasn't willing to spend on what amounted to a label for things he had already learned to live around. Daylight robbery. He'd rather just be vaguely broken for free.
Well, he thought. Whatever. At least she has headphones.
The gates began to open.
The enormous reinforced metal descended with the slow deliberate gravity of something that had been engineered to be impossible to rush, creating a long bridge that settled into place with a finality that suggested it had done this many times and would do it many more.
Nephis, seemingly indifferent to the spectacle of it, walked forward and stepped onto the bridge without breaking stride.
Here we go, Hermes thought, and followed.