Max and Cici were waiting by the door for me. Cici was holding her bundle of antlers.
“Let’s go ahead and drop this off,” she said. I nodded, but internally I was agitated. We had important things to talk about. Why were we running errands now?
We walked out of the door and into the sunlight, and I had to shield my eyes at the sudden change in brightness. Cici led us left down the street. Max and I followed behind her, side by side. Simply-dressed folk wandered about, doing who knows what.
“Cici, why is it still so bright out?” I asked. “It’s been like a full day.”
“Isn’t it rude to ask the host questions?” said Max.
“We’re outside,” I retorted. “She’s not our host anymore.”
“That’s not how that works,” said Cici, “and the amount of impersonal questions you ask is still rude. But I’ll oblige you since you’re not from here. It’s bright out because it’s still the fortday.”
She pointed to Earth in the sky. I was struck by the same strange feeling I had when I had first seen it up there, but it didn’t floor me this time.
“From what I know, you Gaians wait for the sun to go down before you sleep. That doesn’t happen very fast here.”
From what she knew?
“It takes fourteen of Gaia’s cycles for the sun to go down, and fourteen for it to rise back up again,” Cici continued. “We sleep using Gaia’s cycles because they’re shorter.”
I stared at Earth for a moment. It had a shadow across it, like how the Moon looked from Earth.
Max put his fingers up to frame the Earth and looked at it through one eye. “So one cycle is when the Earth goes from dark to light to dark again,” asserted Max.
“Yep,” said Cici.
We came to an interesection where three roads met at a gurgling fountain. Not many people walked about here. The buildings along one street looked a little more homey, trading bright paints for soft stain. The buildings along the other were a bit taller and outright plain. Their wood was unadorned. The plaza gave me a wierd vibe similar to Cici’s house. It made sense, logically—the tall and plain buildings were warehouses or factories, the smaller prettier ones were businesses and shops—but it still all felt wrong. The empty streets didn’t help either.
Cici turned down the street with plain buildings. She glanced back at Max and I.
“So,” she began, “tell me about yourselves. What are your families like? You look to be about apprenticeship age, who are y’all apprenticed to?”
My face scrunched up. “Don’t you wanna know how we got here?”
Cici waved her free hand dismissively. “It doesn’t make sense to ask that yet. I barely know y’all,”
She turned to me to make eye contact. “Max is the only one of y’all that even told me their name,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “Point taken. Name’s Amber. I recently took over the shop, so I don’t think I’m an apprentice anymore. I’m a gunsmith by trade.” I paused. Did she know what a gun was? “I make crossbows that use explosions to throw tiny arrows.”
“What’s a crossbow?” she asked.
Welp. Wrong assumption. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I make weapons that shoot small projectiles very fast.”
I could see her nod in front of me. “Sounds like the slings the weavers make. I think we’ll get along well after all. Now, who are you apprenticed to, Max?”
“Amethyst and I aren’t really apprenticed to anyone either,” he replied. “We’re students. We study magic.”
“And Amethyst is the friend we left in bed?” asked Cici.
“Yep,” replied Max.
“So, what do you mean by magic?” asked Cici. “Here, magic is just a part of stories we tell for fun. You have a form of magic on Gaia?”
Max gave Cici a confused squint even though she couldn’t see his face. “Didn’t we just use magic to get over the wall? What do you call that then?”
“Oh,” said Cici. “You mean aether.”
“Well, yeah then,” said Max. “We study aether.”
“What majors are you guys?” I asked Max.
“Let the host ask questions,” Max said. I glared at him.
Cici let out a small laugh. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s more about the host choosing the topic.” She fiddled with the bundle on her shoulder. “Feels kinda wierd to be saying this stuff out loud to other people my age,” she added.
Max’s eyes roamed as he took in the utilitarian buildings around us. “I’m majoring in magichanical engineering. Amethyst is a electromagical engineering major.”
I gave a mirthless chuckle. “Wow. They’ve got to work on their names,” I said.
Max shrugged. “The magical fields are in their infancies. Everything is still a bit siloed, so until the theoretical magical scientists figure out a consistent naming scheme, we’re stuck with the idiosyncracies.”
“I have no idea what any of that meant, but it sounds cool,” said Cici.
“Yeah, that’s what most people say,” said Max. “Amethyst keeps complaining that our public education system is lagging even worse with magic than they do with computers.”
“Speaking of Amethyst, why was she working on Occidae with you if she’s majoring in the electrical stuff?” I asked.
Max cocked his head. “How do you mean?”
“There’s nothing electrical on Occidae, unless I’ve missed something,” I said.
“You haven’t” said Max. “It’s just a prototype. We haven’t even found a way to stabilize the projectiles yet.”
I gave him a flat look. “You couldn’t have mentioned that before we marched straight into demonic territory? The thing has a scope on it, I assumed it had some sort of rifling.”
Max scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, now that I think of that, we probably should have told you. But it didn’t really matter since we were in the woods, so your line of sight couldn’t have been that far. Anyways, Amethyst is on the project cause she has the general skillset, and we would have needed her for systems like fire control later in the project.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Elaborate.”
“Maybe later,” said Max. “We’ve kind of gotten off topic. Cici, who are you apprenticed to?”
Anger rose in my chest, but I pushed it down. Whatever. We’d get to the important stuff after everyone was done being polite.
“I’m… not really apprenticed to anyone anymore,” said Cici listlessly. “I hunt demons. That’s my thing,” she said, holding up the bundle of antlers.
“What do they use those for?” I asked.
“Aether resevoirs,” she said.
Max looked like he was about to ask a question, but Cici suddenly stopped in front of a door. This one actually had a number—404.
“We’re here,” said Cici. She opened the door and we followed in after her.
Inside was little more than a passageway with a door leading off one side and stairs leading upward. Cici swung right and went through the door.
Inside was a small room, clean but cluttered. Unfamiliar metal tools lined a pegboard on the wall and were strewn across a workbench that ran the length of the room. A rather tall, thin man sat atop a stool at the workbench, tinkering with some small metal and wood device. It took me a moment to recognize what it was—a watch of some kind. It was a little big for a pocket watch, but not big enough to be a clock you’d hang on the wall or sit on a shelf. Several small dials sat in its squat, square body.
The man and Cici looked at each other a moment, but didn’t exchange a word. Cici removed a single antler and placed it on the workbench near the man. He looked at it, then went back to what he was doing. Cici turned on her heel and walked out the door, beginning to climb the steps in the hallway.
“What was that all about?” I muttered to Max. He pursed his lips and shrugged slightly.
We ascended the steps and stopped in another hallway, this also with only a single door. Cici stepped inside, and the strange tactit exchange repeated itself with a new person, this one a short old woman. We ascended the entire building, the strange process repeating itself on each floor. Cici stopped on the final and seventh floor. She didn’t even open this door—she just laid the last two antlers on the floor outside the door.
I made a face at Max as we descended back down, but he just shrugged again. Cici didn’t look back at us at the door, instead walking straight outside and taking a right as if nobody were following her. Max and I had to jog a few steps to catch back up with her. This time we walked beside her, since we were just going the same direction we had come.
“The frick was all that?” I asked.
“When you find out, let me know,” she said flatly. She looked back and smiled as if nothing had happened. “Now, were were we?”
“You asked us about our families,” said Max. “I’m the middle of five. I have two older brothers and two younger sisters.” He counted on his fingers. “The oldest is twenty-five, then twenty-three, then me—I’m nineteen—then fifteen, then twelve.”
“Y’all must be quite the handful for your parents,” said Cici.
“To some extent,” said Max. “Mostly my sisters. They’re trouble-makers right now, going through puberty and all.” He smirked. “Now that my brothers are out of the house and I’m in college, there’s nobody to keep ‘em in line.”
Cici laughed softly. Max indulged the obnixous habit he had picked up recently by blushing slightly.
“What about you, Amber?” she asked, turning to me.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” I said bluntly.
This was stupid anyway. How many big, important things were we dancing around because we were too busy making small talk?
“Fair,” said Max. He turned to Cici. “How about you?”
“I’m an only child,” she said. She held her arm and looked at the sky. “My parents passed four years ago. I’ve been on my own ever since.”
Oh. She was like me. I fiddled with the strap on Occidae.
After a long silence I spoke. “Me too. I mean, I lost my parents too. My mom dissapeared when I was young, and my father died… today. I don’t have any siblings either.”
Cici held eye contact with me, her eyes reflecting the pain in mine. “I’m sorry. I understand how you feel,” she said.
Did she actually?
I looked away, my eyes resting on the fountain as we made our way through the plaza.
“What were your parents like?” I asked absently. It wasn’t really what I wanted to ask.
“Brave,” said Cici softly. “Relentless. And the best weavers in the world.”
She swung her arm up, cradling the Earth in her thumb and index finger.
“They wanted to visit Gaia. People called them crazy, but they were gonna do it anyway. They made everything themselves. The reinforced craft, the suits, the sling. Grandpa helped us design a way to trap air for the trip. We spent a full year hunting enough material to make a resevoir big enough to hurl us off the planet.”
She dropped her arm, sighing. “And I was going with them.”
“What happened?” asked Max. His eyes were about the size of dinner plates by this point.
Cici shook her head. “People here always say Selenaia has ways of balancing himself,” she started. “They’re right, in a way.” Her expression remained flat, but her voice dropped a notch. “But he uses broken scales.”
She gestured in a direction with an arm. “Selenaia’s sick sense of balance is wandering out in that field outside the walls.”
She was being a bit cryptic, but whatever. I could read between the lines. “How are you here, then?” I asked.
“When you find out, let me know,” she said.
Nobody said anything for a while. Our shoes clacked on the cobbleshones, echoing through the basically empty streets. The one or two passerby were too far away for us to even hear their steps.
“What were your parents like?” asked Cici.
I paused to collect my thoughts, sifting through words one by one as I pieced together an answer. “My mother was very smart, from what I’m told. I never really knew her. Dad is… was… a more pratical man. He taught me everything I know about machining and gunsmithing. And about everything else.”
I swung Occidae from my back and caressed the wooden box. Memories trickled softly into my mind, but not down my face. “He taught me how to make coffee. How to shoot a gun. How to whittle wood and ride a bike and drive a truck and hunt deer.”
I traced the lines on the box with a finger. “He taught me how to live,” I finished. I put Occidae back on my back.
Max stared at me dejectedly, as if he were about to cry. I looked at him detachedly. Of course he could feel something, and it wasn’t even his father. What was wrong with me?
My thoughts were cut short as we arrived at Cici’s house and went inside. The interior was somehow less strange now that I was stepping in a second time. It was as if leaving and coming back made it more familiar.
Max and I stood looking at Cici as she stood in a doorway we hadn’t stepped through yet. She looked back at us, confused, before her features resolved in realization. “Oh. Sorry. Uh, now’s the time when we eat and then go to bed.”
“Gimme a minute,” said Max. He dissapeared up the stairs, then dragged a groggy Amethyst back down with him. “You’re—jerk” she muttered, interrupted by a yawn. Loose hairs jutted out in every direction. She hadn’t even taken out her braid.
“Food time,” Max said simply.
We followed Cici into a room with a table, chairs, and cabinets. She reached into a cabinet and pulled out a loaf of bread. She tore off equal pieces and handed them to us, then sat down with her own.
The room was filled with the sound of our munching. The bread wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t exactly stale either. It tasted remarkably like homemade bread back home. I sighed in relief. No matter what crazy or disguisting or stupid food people were going to offer me here, I would always have bread to fall back on.
I smiled in satisfaction as the succulent interplanetary constant filled my stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything in so many hours, and I’d been ignoring my hunger. Things felt more right than they had in what felt like forever.
“You seem to be enjoying yourself there,” said Max, smirking at me.
I nodded. “Bread is in fact my favorite food,” I said.
“Well, you’re in luck,” said Cici. “We have got plenty of bread here.”
“Good. Bread. Thank,” mumbled Amethyst through a full mouth. Her frazzled appearance, stupid shirt, and frantic gobbling made her look downright ridiculous. She was straight goobing at this point.
“You look like a derpy anime girl,” said Max. She smiled, swallowing. “Mmm. Moe.”
I would probably roll my eyes if I understood a word of what they were saying. Homeschool did not afford me many opportunities to pick up slang.
There was a window in the room that afforded a view of the street outside. It had filled up with townsfolk, presumably all headed home. I stared outside, finishing up my bit of bread.
Cici interrupted my people-watching. “I should probably warn you, we don’t sleep like you do,” she said. “It’s not all at once. We’re awake for a bit in between the two sleeps.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Wake me us up when you wake up. The sooner we get accustomed, the better.”
Amethyst looked at me with a hurt expression. I threw her a stern look.
“You’ve already slept too much. You’re not going to be nocturnal.”
She buried her head in her arms. “OK.”
Her cutesy shtick was getting on my nerves, but I did my best to keep a straight face. I could be cranky with her once I had the wherewithall to correct her effectively. It was time for bed. Amethyst’s attitude could wait till tommorrow.