Kest was lying on her stomach on a lounge chair, with her nose in her HUD and her boots kicked up on the seatback. She was so absorbed in whatever she was reading, she didn’t notice when I dropped into the chair next to her.
I scarfed the giant blueberry in about three bites. It tasted like a pineapple crossed with pine sap, the perfect combination for this heat.
When Kest’s lacy eyes roved to the edge of her HUD screen closest to me, she must’ve caught sight of my boot, because she did a double take.
“Hake!” Her face lit up, which made me forget about everything that had ever bothered me in my whole life. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Working on a new build?” I set the blueberry thing’s pit on the side table between our chairs and wiped the juice onto my pants.
She glanced over at the shaded living room. Seeing it was empty, she turned back to me and lowered her voice.
“Do you remember in the dream, when I was researching mechanical Spirit seas?” She swung her legs over the side of the chair and leaned forward, rotating her metal arm unnaturally so I could see her HUD screen. It was covered in thumbnail sketches of schematics for something I couldn’t identify. “Artificers have been speculating on it forever as a silly thought exercise, but what if I could do it? What if I could rebuild Rali’s Spirit sea with Metal Spirit and tech?”
“That would be awesome.”
“In the dream, I had something, some key piece of information that no one else had learned yet.” She frowned. “Or maybe it was a new twist on the design... Whatever it was, I was close to a breakthrough. I almost had it figured out.”
Sushi appeared in a glimmer of purple and white scales.
“Sown Dreams,” the little fish said like she was correcting Kest. “Not reality.”
“But they’re a start,” Kest said. “All the great inventors have been documented saying they got flashes of inspiration like that. Some of them have had whole builds come to them in their dreams.”
Sushi sniffed at the pit of the giant blueberry fruit, then started gnawing on it. Obviously she wasn’t that interested in the rest of this conversation.
“There’s whole fruit inside if you’re hungry,” I told her.
She let go enough to say, “Sushi wants bugs, not fruit.”
Then she dragged the pit off the table to the fountain and dropped it into the water with a plunk. It floated. Sushi scooted back, peering over the edge of the tile.
Kest giggled, and I grinned when I realized what Sushi was doing. For a while, we sat around watching the little fish lie in wait for something to go after her bait. Once Sushi gasped and lunged at something, but it was just a piece of leaf. She spat it out and went back to waiting.
After a while, I kicked my boots off and got comfortable. Or almost comfortable. The elixir bottle in my pocket was digging into my hip. I pulled it out and turned it over, reading the directions on the back. All it said was
Drink.
Survive.
Prevail.
“Proving Forge? Did you negotiate that as part of your salary?” Kest was staring at the bottle like it was the latest version of a brand-name sneaker or phone and nobody but presidents and rappers could get their hands on one yet. “It must’ve cost a fortune. That’s probably nothing to the leader of one of the Big Five, but still, to just hand it over to a new member like it’s nothing...”
“It’s supposed to toughen up my squishy human body.” I thumped my chest. “Make strong like Komodo Emperor! Defeat higher-level cultivators!”
Mentally, I noted that I hadn’t said kill higher-level cultivators. Unlike Rali, Kest wouldn’t get mad if I told her what was going on, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to make the joke.
Kest cupped her chin with her real hand. “I didn’t take the racial differences into account with our Ki-hardening practice.” She meant where she’d stabbed me a bunch of times with her pointy chain weight to get my skin to toughen up. “Maybe that’s partially to blame for why you still get hurt so easily.”
“Maybe.” And maybe Takeshi just wanted an invincible weapon on his side. I turned the elixir bottle over like I was studying the label closer. “Is it true that the Dragons were formed as a vigilante group?”
“Probably.” Kest tapped her HUD screen to wake it up. “Most gangs start as a way to protect your neighborhood or friends and family from outside forces. The Big Five all have roots as far back as Outward Expansion during the Colonization Era, which would make sense given the lawlessness of the outer planets at the time.”
“So they were probably all vigilante groups.”
“Here it is.” She read, “‘The Eight-Legged Dragons formed during the late Colonization Era on the mining planet of Giniro, reportedly in response to the Confederated Planetary Authority’s refusal to protect the inhabitants from the then unregulated practices of mining companies. When the massacre of noncombatant settlers by the Technological Edge Mining Corporation—later to become the Technols—went unanswered by the CPA because of its far-flung location, eight settlements banded together to bring their killers to justice. At the time these settlements were known as the Eight Legs of the Dragon, but eventually gave rise to the name Eight-Legged Dragons.’”
“It would make sense, then, that Emperor Takeshi’s affinity is Justice Spirit,” I said. “That’s an Ordinal type, right?”
“It would make perfect sense if that was actually what the Dragons still stood for,” Kest said. “It makes less when you think that they’re known for controlling most of the underground fighting, gambling, and protection rackets in the galaxy.”
My brain felt like it was hemorrhaging from all these uncertainties. I rubbed my eyes to push back on some of that pressure.
“I guess a lot can change in a couple hundred years,” I said. “But I think Takeshi’s
