Archive of Our Own

The islands floated in the sea like motes of dust in a beam of light. Seen from a great distance, they resembled the glittering debris that flaked off the work of a master. Upon closer observation, one could see the tenuous fabric of its planetary structure, suspended among many gravity cores and protected from raw space and the Subspace Crystalline Barrier’s warpstorm by an impenetrably thick sheet of pure diamantine—Pier Point was an improbable miracle of hyperspace architecture, confounding in its extraordinary stability. Cradled in the liquid run-off that poured from the Wall, overglowed by Their body, that mass of traceless amber in the distance working eternally, washing Pier Point itself golden with commerce and unassailable victory.

Sometimes, they met in bars. 

“Relax,” Aventurine advised Topaz, crossing his legs at the ankles and lifting the sour-citrus vape to his mouth. “The Galilean stock crash is brief. Buy while you can and leave the rest to the Federated Planets to sort out.”

“That’s what you told me last time,” Topaz said. She had to lean forward and raise her voice to speak, and in doing so took the opportunity to steal his vape too. She took a drag and blew warm orange nic into his face. It unfurled over her pretty features like a lover’s fingers. “And then I lost three billion credits.”

“And you made back four times as much,” Aventurine soothed. “Hey, look, I think Sugilite’s here. Hey, Sugilite! Over here~”

Sugilite turned at the sound of his name and strolled over. “Why am I not surprised to see two of the biggest slackers in the Department drinking on a Thursday night?”

“It’s called celebrating,” Topaz said. “And I don’t see you at work.”

“My next project launches in two weeks. Diamond told me to take time off until then.”

“And you always listen to Daddy Diamond,” Aventurine inserted. “Hey, since you’re here, why don’t you buy us a drink?”

“What’s in it for me?”

Aventurine smirked. “Buy me one and find out.”

A stop-motion comic interlude; Sugilite attempting to acquire the bartender’s attention. What a pity that the service staff on Fleet Street were too accustomed to rubbing shoulders with the IPC’s elite to be impressed by a Stoneheart. He snapped his fingers (invisibly), cleared his throat (inaudibly) and waved (imperceptibly). Then, embarrassed, he turned his gaze on the two of them. Challenging them to say a word.

Topaz and Aventurine stayed virtuously silent.

“New watch, I see,” Sugilite said, after a moment.

“Bought it on Penacony,” Aventurine agreeably extended his right arm to let Sugilite see the watch up close. Cool fingers closed around his wrist. “Custom work—there’s only one other like it.”

“A frivolous trinket, easy to replicate,” Sugilite dismissed, dropping Aventurine’s limb like a used candy wrapper. 

Unaffected, Aventurine leaned his weight on the countertop and called, “Danny! Ya got a moment for us?” 

Danny skated over. “Sup,” he grinned. 

“My friend here wants to buy us drinks,” Aventurine said, indicating Sugilite. 

“What can I get ya?”

Sugilite gave Aventurine a profoundly dirty look, and said, “Two glasses of champagne and…”

“Maybe a Foolish Boy,” Aventurine said. “I could go for a Foolish Boy. Or Girl.”

“Of course you’d drink that,” Sugilite frowned. “I thought we were celebrating?”

“Don’t like champagne much,” Aventurine said, to be petty. “A Foolish, Danny, thanks.”

“I want a side,” Topaz said. “Oyster Clusters.”

“Oyster Clusters? Here?” Sugilite sounded offended.

“They’re not as good as yours, obviously,” Aventurine soothed. “Still pretty good, though.” He winked at Danny. “Anything else?”

Sugilite’s hands twitched as though he wanted to murder Aventurine right here, right now, in front of everyone. It was too easy to rile him up, and sweet like a spoonful of sugar—Aventurine had always preferred his desserts sour, with a kernel of honey in the center. Something he could pretend he’d discovered. “Rose water in the champagne for me.”

“Kay,” Danny said. “That’s a Daisy, here. Just a mo’,” and skated away.

Topaz said, “Let’s shift to a table.”

They shifted to a table. The only empty one at this time was near the middle, nestled in the noise and chatter. A dozen vape flavors wove intricate shapes in the glittering air. Aventurine wove through them, feeling loose-limbed, easily scattered—a wisp of smoke himself. He could savor this feeling too, over the part of his brain that told him it was only an illusion brought on by hunger and painkillers. 

Topaz sat across from them. Aventurine let his hand rest on the dark polished wood, imagining that he could sink right into the shadows on its other side. Sugilite rearranged the table placements. Their orders arrived.

The smell of river oysters turned his stomach. He smiled, shook himself out of his stupor, and drew out a deck of cards, shuffling to occupy his hands. Eventually that turned into a game of poker, because they were talking at the same time about Sugilite’s new project—Rek Anor, a system of planets in the Torius Rim, had been hit by a dangerous mix of plagues and famines. Since Rek Anor exported billions of tonnes of fruit and grain every month, the ripple effects of their famines started to percolate throughout the supply chains that fed the galaxy. Sugilite was the ideal candidate for the operation, but Aventurine wasn’t going to tell him that. 

“I have this funny story about Rek Anor,” he said, instead. Dealt a hand. Topaz drew highs. “You know, I happened to meet an Anoran diplomat on Iymanika—he was stranded on the airstrip, this was two years ago—and he told me quite a bit about how things work over there. It turns out—” He flipped his cards to prove his victory and then picked up a napkin to sketch his point. “Their internal political system is arranged according to a system of incestuous inheritance and theatrical maneuvers. Pretty opaque, for someone on the outside, but they live and die by their status games.”

“Barbarians,” Sugilite snapped. He’d lost badly.

“Hey,” Topaz said suddenly. “Isn’t that Ratio?”

An impromptu quiet carried her words clearly. Aventurine twisted around. Sugilite laughed under his breath. Ratio was at the bar. He turned at the sound of his name.

“That’s Ratio,” Topaz said. She waved. “Anyway, continue with your story.”

Aventurine couldn’t remember where he’d gotten to in its telling. It didn’t matter; Ratio was making his way over, an arm around the shoulder of some woman—Aventurine had never seen him with anyone before, not like this. His hand was light on the strap of her dress, polite; on anyone else, it wouldn’t have seemed desperate or possessive. It would’ve seemed normal.

On anyone else.

“You have a date,” Aventurine said, as they came closer. The conversation around them had picked up again; it covered his words. He had to repeat himself. “A date.”

“Yes,” Ratio said. His voice was clear enough to be intelligible; maybe he just knew how to project. All that teaching. “This is my girlfriend, Sanjana. Sanjana, that is Topaz, and this is Aventurine and Sugilite. They work for the Strategic Investment Department.”

“You could say that,” Sugilite said, clearly stunned at the bland introduction. 

“Nice to meet you,” Aventurine said. “Do you guys want to play poker with us?”

This went unheard. Ratio said, apropos of nothing, “Smells nice in here.”

“We’ll find our own table,” Sanjana cut in. “This one’s a bit crowded. And really? Smells like sour oranges to me.”

“And honey. I quite like it,” Ratio said, at the same time that Aventurine said, “We can leave.”

“We just got here,” Topaz protested. “There isn’t another empty table in the whole place. Sit, Aventurine.”

He sat. Like a dog, he sat.

“I would propose,” Ratio said, “That we wait here until another table becomes available.” There was something awry in him, a subtlety Aventurine wasn’t sure anyone noticed—a weary edge to his syllables, a cool lustre in his eyes. They’d worked together for so long, Aventurine found himself in the habit of looking. Or perhaps it was only the figment of a jealous imagination, that wanted to retain a fragmented intimacy.

“That’s reasonable,” Sanjana allowed. 

Ratio bullied some poor sod out of a seat and dragged it over for Sanjana. Then he bullied Aventurine into moving so he could sit next to his girlfriend. Aventurine relocated to Topaz’s side. 

She speared an oyster on a fork and held it to his mouth. He opened it automatically, then closed it. “Can’t eat seafood.”

“Oh, I forgot,” she patted his knee. “I’ll get you something else. Ratio, are you ordering?”

“Yes, we were contemplating the oysters. Are they good?”

“Great, actually. Can you get fries?

“I don’t think we want fries,” Sanjana said.

“They’re not for you,” Topaz said.

“I will get fries,” Ratio said. “For whom am I getting these fries?”

“Me,” Aventurine said.

There was a brief, stultifying pause. Then Ratio got up and left.

Topaz loudly restrained a sharp comment. Aventurine switched gears to placation. “So, Sanjana, what do you do?”

“I’m a researcher. I specialize in Aeonic Studies.”

“Publish anything recently?”

“Only a paper about an archaeological survey of a Hunt-attuned civilization in the Infernalian circuit,” Sanjana said. Ratio returned. “Hello, Veritas.”

He squeezed her shoulder. Seemed awkward, unable to meet their eyes. “The Infernalian circuit?” Aventurine said idly. “Doesn’t one of Long’s Scions live there?”

“To call that ‘living’ would be a gross misappropriation of the term. Have you read Eu Mari’s paper on biological predestination and disruption in the progeny of Long?”

Aventurine blinked.

“It’s highly unlikely that Aventurine has even heard of it,” Ratio said.

“It’s pointless to try and explain, then,” Sanjana said. “Veritas, I was thinking about the conversation we were having at the wharf. Upon consideration, I will modify my point slightly. Do not think I am ceding ground, I am merely synthesizing new data.” She moved her hands as she talked, tracing the shape of her thoughts in the air. 

A familiar watch flashed on her wrist. Aventurine held his breath, frivolous trinket echoing in a buzz of blood. His own wrist, resting on the back of Topaz’s chair, felt like a stranger’s.

“But of course.” Ratio sounded fond. “Please, continue.”

Sanjana grabbed the tissue paper Aventurine had been using and turned it around, starting on a fresh side. “The alliances that form between the factions that follow various Aeons are not interesting to me. Human behavior is hardly relevant in the scheme of things, and you cannot argue with me on this point—mortals don’t live for long enough to affect the course of the universe in any meaningful fashion. Human enterprises are a different story. I’ll loop back to that in a second. What I want to focus on is the relationships between Aeons, or rather the lack of one when by all means certain Aeons should collaborate. Now, while I grant that Silas Rackham’s treatise on the limitations of the Primum Mobile held some value, his argument has many flaws—”

“Rackham’s major drawback is his inability to admit the conditions that lead to the creation of an Aeon in the first place. Dismissing origins as irrelevant might work for some, but knowing the factors—”

“If origins were as important as you claim then the Harmony would have taken a very different path—”

Aventurine’s head hurt. He went to the bar and got a fresh drink, a plain glass of water, and slipped a sachet of medicine into it. He gulped it down and when he came back, Topaz and Sugilite were checking stocks on Sugilite’s tablet. Ratio’s argument with Sanjana was in full swing. They seemed to be having fun.

Sanjana was pretty, he supposed. Somewhat dumpy, with plump cheeks and an unflattering haircut. Ratio was turned towards her, arguing animatedly. In love, maybe. Aventurine had never seen him in love, to be able to tell. 

He’d never seen Ratio like this either. So alive. In the smothering fog of the bar, he was out of place, a gleaming strale in a fistful of credits. Incommensurate and unconvertible. He belonged on rocky beaches below sleet-grey skies, under olive trees with the afternoon sun gliding through the leaves to lap at the cut of his jaw. But here his features were too sharp and heavy, his playful irritation an insufficient veneer over a brewing storm that promised to be ugly. Aventurine didn’t want to look at him.

Perhaps, he thought, Ratio liked Sanjana so much because she wasn’t afraid. She had opened the door, walked through; she did not tease herself with imagined landscapes. Her eyes were clear and fearless.

“Eat your fries,” Sugilite said. He sounded gentle. 

It was only a trick of Aventurine’s rattled mind, which would have felt wire wool as soft after the ravages of the reef. Wasn’t even his argument.

He ate his fries. 

~

Afterwards, on the paved and palm-shaded riverfront, Aventurine would light a cigarette and laugh about it. In the middle there were many sleepless nights. But it started when Jade sent him to the opera—no, it started when the days all lengthened into late evening shadows, and an elastic darkness stuck under his fingernails no matter how many times he washed his hands. It started when he was thrown out of his favorite gambling hall for cleaning out the house. 

Penacony haunted him. He did every drug he could lay his hands on to erase it and still it came back, like a crack in the wall that defied every coat of paint. Cocaine was a classic, but he circled through four types of acid, and an assortment of pills, sizzling and sharp, and quite a lot of mushrooms imported from every corner of the universe. Back to cocaine, and finally to one of his worst habits:

“I,” he announced, flouncing into Jade’s office, “I am going to quit. I am going to become a Galaxy Ranger. I wish to hunt outlaws and bring justice to the universe.”

“They are outlaws, my darling,” Jade said, leaning forward with vague interest in his latest antic, chin resting on her hand. She had lived several decades of her life on Pier Point, and therefore looked youthful, her face unlined, her eyes unburdened. But when she talked, she spoke with the hovering threat of that experience, which she wouldn’t bring to bear until she had to. “Your Cornerstone may be broken, but you are still a Stoneheart. Do something with your life.”

He draped himself woefully over her extraordinarily comfortable couch (“What’s it stuffed with?” “Kitten fur.”) and shook his head slightly to fan his hair over a velvety cushion. “Can’t you fix me?”

“Has the thought ever entered your impoverished mind that I am working? Busy with the vast multitude of things in my life which do not involve you?”

But it’s me, Aventurine almost said. I’m your boy. She had always indulged him, given him a long leash, to hang himself or sniff out treasure or often both; her poisonous sweetness, which would never spare him an ounce of agony as it would for Topaz, nevertheless deserved his sincere gratefulness because it was how she had taught him to guard his want and stay hungry at the feast. She all but owned him. Of course he came to her with his problems, great and small. 

It didn’t work like that. She loved him, but she wouldn’t mourn him. If he died, she’d skin him and stuff him and move on to a different golden goose.

“Give me something to do,” he said at last. “Anything. I’m only bored.”

“And I have been reduced to entertaining you,” Jade said. He was so attuned to every note and undertone in her voice that the faintest hint of affection could soothe him. There was precious little now. “Go to the opera. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Everything in Jade’s office carried the air of tradition; the beautiful mahogany desk, the cabinets that lined the wall behind her, oil paintings hung next to the carved crystal mirror. It pressed down on Aventurine like a coffin. 

He’d come from sand and tents. Despite knowing that this office was ensconced in glass and concrete like the rest of the IPC’s corporate infrastructure, wood and stone made Aventurine ache inside. He knew all the stories of Jade’s long life; she’d dragged this desk on her first day. It had been here for fifty years before him, and would outlive him by another fifty. He could not imagine something so unflagging. 

“Is that all?” he asked, rising from the dead and dusting himself off. “Your will be done.”

She didn’t look up. 

He slipped away and went home, downed a dose of his medicines and stripped in front of the mirror. For a moment he looked at himself, this repulsively beautiful body. Thin and delicate despite a hint of muscle, with pale gold skin that had once flushed easily. It was difficult to think of it as his own. It felt like something rented, a good car he could dream of owning but never earn enough to really buy. It handled smoothly. The only part of it he felt any connection to was the network of thin spidery cracks on his chest, where his heart should have been. They radiated a pulsing crystalline glow, and if he focused, he could feel the hard pain of his broken Cornerstone digging into flesh.

Mechanically, he found a skin patch, took off the sticker, and applied it to himself. He smoothed it down and checked his phone for tickets as it dried and took on a natural color and tone. Then he dressed again, styled his hair, changed his earring, and stepped out. 

The operahouse overlooked the sea. Flying rainbow fish caught the city's lights and threw them in glittering handfuls over the black water, briefly illuminating the passage of ships. In the winter they all died of the cold; every spring they were imported anew. Aventurine, not nearly so fragile, still shivered as he walked into the mingling air of the opera. 

His mark: the pianist, brown-haired and quick-fingered. Aventurine had never been one too invested in the arts and still found himself beguiled. After the show he shook off the stupor and went backstage, flashing his ID and professing a desire to compliment the player in person. From there it was only a matter of playing his cards right, leaning forward, smoothing a lapel here and slipping hints there. 

And for that, he got what he wanted. In a hotel bedroom, pressed against the blinds until they printed musical staffs onto his skin. He wound his fingers in thick, soft hair and moaned in all the right places as Benjamin parted his cunt to make way for a cock.

There was a curious sense of repatriation in it all; this man, Benjamin, could play an instrument beautifully, but Aventurine could play him. Line up these beautiful lies in a score he’d settle some other day.

When the sweat cooled, Aventurine took the opportunity to examine Benjamin properly. He had a blunt face, soft-jawed, pleasantly babyish. Bitable. But he didn’t like pain, neither giving nor receiving. And his hands made up for their skilled playing with a charming lack of grace on another’s body—Aventurine’s cunt felt sore, used without satisfaction. It didn’t matter. He’d tasted, too, the lack of cigarettes in Benjamin’s mouth, and had understood that he had to tread neatly, agreeably, to get anywhere with this one.

“Will you play for me?” he asked, to conceal the hungry itch in the back of his throat.

“Perhaps later,” Benjamin said. “It’s late, and I want to sleep.” He hesitated briefly, then said, “Will you spend the night?”

The moon-made shadows cast against the floating islands were bright and hard; one of them cut right through their window, lighting half the room and only half. Aventurine slid to the dark side and picked up his watch from the floor. It was nearing twelve. He placed it on the table and curled up under the sheet Benjamin offered him. But he couldn’t sleep; all night his mind drifted, an island lost between tides of pain and boredom.

So it went. 

That weekend, Aventurine hugged a pillow and watched Benjamin scribble music on lined sheets of paper. “You make me want to write,” he said, and “Listen to this,” and Aventurine listened. This was how Benjamin saw him, perhaps: a refraction of his own passions. Aventurine found little of note within himself to contradict that notion. He was happy to play the blank canvas, to spread his legs, to moan without feeling. He gave up cigarettes because Benjamin hated the taste that lingered on Aventurine’s skin. Withdrawal made his hands shake and his vision blur, but it was fascinating in its own way; the things he let go of, the things he tried to retain. 

He scrolled through photos of Sanjana and Ratio trekking on a white mountain and ached for when he’d see Benjamin that day. Only when they touched again did he realize that reality had already paled. 

But he saw no reason to crib about pretending otherwise. He might as well have whined about breathing.

Even the dates were nothing special. Aventurine took Benjamin to places the Stonehearts wouldn’t go. Tonight it was caviar and wine in a floating restaurant with a view over the whole of Pier Point. It had a certain reputation; artists and tourists liked it more than the Corporation’s gentry. But still reservations went months in advance, though Aventurine just showed up and asked. 

When the aircab set them back down on the landing pad, Aventurine slid his hands casually into his pockets against the artificial winter chill and said, “Let's walk back home.”

“Saving money?” Benjamin joked. Aventurine smiled like it was funny. Benjamin was dressed for the cold, with his leather greatcoat and sealskin gloves. Aventurine wore green silk because it made his hair look like gold. The elevator ride down was quiet.

And then they were on Allheart Avenue, a mile of shopfronts in both directions. Aventurine took a deep breath and hooked his arm into Benjamin's elbow. They never held hands; the ring on Benjamin's finger burned Aventurine’s skin. “You should get me something,” he whispered. “It's almost New Year’s.”

“What do you want?”

“You should pick,” Aventurine said, pinning the words with a dazzling smile. “I just want a gift.”

They peered through the windows. “How about that?” Aventurine asked innocently, pointing at a crimson peacoat. 

Benjamin spotted the price and winced. “Too loud for you,” he said.

Two doors down, bespoke shoes inlaid with black coral. “Elegant,” Benjamin said approvingly. “But they wouldn't suit you.” They also cost ninety thousand credits. Aventurine didn't point that out. 

A feathered scarf, a gorgeous vase painted with leaping rainbow fish, mother-of-pearl cufflinks, embroidered gloves—all dismissed for being either too gaudy or too unlike Aventurine. Benjamin was getting frantic. He pulled Aventurine past every shop, and Aventurine let him, laughing like he didn't know what Benjamin was thinking. 

“Stop,” he said finally. “Let me breathe.”

Benjamin stopped. He looked a little angry. “Isn't there anything worth buying?” he said savagely.

“Oh,” Aventurine said. “This one's a pawn shop.” He looked up at the sign, lit in purple. Bonajade Exchange. “Why don't you see what they have? I'll wait out here.”

Benjamin stared at the door, hypnotized. Hungry. Jade knew how to pick her spots; right at the end of Allheart, after a thousand shops where nothing sold for under fifty thousand credits. He vanished through the door and Aventurine checked the time, then walked back to the shop with the cufflinks and the shoes, ordering them to his office.

It began to snow as he returned. Aventurine shivered and hurried under the awning, rocking on his feet as though he could stave off the cold by moving. It was no good. The flakes settled on his shoulders and on the back of his neck, sharp little needles.

When Benjamin came out, he looked haunted. Jade was with him. Aventurine took his hand and squeezed it, sweeping an elegant little bow towards her, a diffident “Madam,” polite and distant.

“And what about you, pretty thing?” Jade inquired, flicking his earring. “What would you like in exchange for those pretty eyes?”

Aventurine smiled. “When I want something very badly, I’ll be sure to come to you.” He tugged Benjamin away. 

“Do you know her?” Benjamin asked.

“Why would you think that?”

“You work for the IPC,” Benjamin said. “I asked around and they said you’re a Stoneheart. She’s one too. You must have worked together.”

“Colleagues, nothing more,” Aventurine said, picking his words with care. “Did she…not give you what you wanted?”

“Oh, she did,” Benjamin said. His voice was heavy. “She did.”

That night, before they had sex, Benjamin took the platinum band off his ring finger and set it down in the bright circular wash of light under the table lamp. Aventurine lifted Benjamin’s hand and pressed his lips to the pale mark left behind.

Outside, the slushy snow beat against the walls and windows, begging to be let in. Inside, Aventurine said, “Let me pretend. I can be what you lost.”

“Her name was Isabele,” Benjamin said. Their voices were hushed, barely audible, but the name hung brightly in the air. 

Was it worth it? Aventurine wanted to know. But it wasn't his place to ask. He’d been pawned too. “Then call me Isabele.” 

His gut clenched, hot and strange, when Benjamin moaned that name. He fucked Aventurine like he could dig through the facade and find the real thing where Aventurine had hid it. He fucked Aventurine like he knew he’d never find it again. 

And later, after Benjamin was asleep, Aventurine picked through his wallet and found a photo, a pink-haired woman with deep brown eyes. He folded the photo in half, picked up the ring, and walked through the frigid night mist to the Bonajade Exchange. He let himself in with his own key and left both the photo and the ring on her counter. Then he went back to Benjamin’s apartment, and closed his eyes until the sky lightened outside. 

It was all too perfect. All too sweet.

Their first fight came after a week, and Aventurine didn’t know what they were both yelling about, suddenly—he didn’t care either. He just knew that he’d started it by something he’d done or said, some flippant remark or a callous observation. He held to his chosen side stubbornly, but somewhere between the third fight and the fourth, Aventurine realized that he truly didn’t care at all.

Benjamin was still shouting. Aventurine cut a line of fine white powder on the mantel and snorted it swiftly. Then, anticipating the rush, he threw himself into an armchair and said, “Whatever. You’re right, I’m wrong. Can we go for dinner now?”

“That’s it?” Benjamin said furiously. “You want to just—go out and pretend we’re good?”

“Yes,” Aventurine said, tilting his head back against the rush of mania. “I’m hungry.”

So they went and pretended. Halfway through the meal, Aventurine had to excuse himself for a few minutes. He flirted with a guard for the terrace key—it was bland up there, just the risen smoke of the city, moldy pipes and rotten old furniture. Aventurine sat on an ancient sofa and dug his fingers into its exposed, spongy insides. His hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t light up, but his head was bright and brazen.

He couldn’t stop thinking, for some reason, about his stock portfolio. He’d read an interesting bit of news about a probable crash in the Waldorf chip industry—something about an innovation in Luongtan manufacturing technology coming out of Luongto. He called his financial manager and argued with her until she agreed to reinvest all the chip stocks into Luongto and then just sat there, dazed, almost drunk. Somewhere he heard a bird singing but that was impossible; there were few birds on Pier Point. None that lived outside cages.

At some point, he managed to light a cigarette, though he burnt his finger in the attempt. It helped, in a way. Alcohol, he suspected, would’ve been the answer. He still had time, didn’t he?

When he came back, Benjamin was staring at him. 

“What is it?” Aventurine asked. “Something on my face?” He examined himself in a champagne glass. “Are you done eating? I was only gone for five minutes.”

“You know I hate it when you smoke,” Benjamin responded. “And you’ve been gone twenty.”

“No,” Aventurine scoffed. Moved on: he had known Benjamin hated it—his heart rattled in his throat for a second, and then moved on from that too with a perfunctory, “Sorry.” He waved down a waiter and ordered a glass of mint soda. 

“It sticks to your clothes,” Benjamin said.

“Do you want me to go and change?” 

“What? No. You don’t have new clothes with you right now, anyway.”

“There’s a Leah Sloane outlet two floors down,” Aventurine said. “They’re quick.”

His mint soda arrived. Aventurine contemplated it for a second, then picked out the green sprigs with his nails. Then he chugged the glass down, wincing inside at the awful spicy taste. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Give me a second. Keep eating.”

His head was spinning slightly. He made his way to the bathroom, exited through the staff entrance, and smoked another cigarette in the back corridor. Then he circled the floor and took the elevator down to dart into the Sloane outlet. “I want another suit, just like this one,” he told the attendant. “Right now.”

He didn’t need to flash an ID. He’d been on billboards and broadcasts before; everyone knew him. 

“Of course, sir,” the attendant said. “Would you be willing to give us your jacket as a reference for the tailor? Your other measurements are on record, but this cut is unique. I’ll have someone bring you a drink.”

“Whiskey, neat,” Aventurine said. “I’ll wait in the lobby. Do it in ten and I’ll double your commission.”

The attendant smiled swiftly. “Right you are, sir.”

Aventurine handed over his jacket and made his way to the lobby couch. When someone came with his drink, he knocked that back without thinking. It was getting difficult to breathe. He checked his phone, once or twice, but there was nothing of note to distract him.

He’d only just closed his eyes when Ratio texted him. Aventurine blinked sharply at the shapes that couldn’t become words, and called Ratio back. “Hello,” he said, mechanically bright. “How was your research trip?”

“Good,” Ratio said. “I gathered material for a new paper. Where are you?”

“Where am I?” Aventurine looked around at the hotel lobby, the receptionist’s circular desk at one end, the marble floor soaking in the warm light to gild everyone that walked through. He was suddenly conscious that the shirt was a little sweaty, the pants creased; how had he failed to notice that? Was he so far gone? Would they throw him out— “The Aeraton. Why?” He got up as he spoke, and made his way into an empty bathroom. Leaned against the door, without locking it, keeping it closed with his own weight.

“I got you something. Came to your apartment to give it to you.”

“You got me something?” Aventurine felt ill. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know,” Ratio said. “It’s nothing urgent.”

“I didn’t ask you to get me anything.”

“Gambler.”

“You gave away the gift I got you.” 

Ratio didn't reply. Aventurine cut the call. For a moment he just stood there, hand on the rim ofthe marble sink, a thousand little worries tumbling through his mind. It was quiet here. Warmer. No one could see him. For a moment, he covered his face with one hand and wished for yet another cigarette.

The suit. He went back to Sloane and tapped his card, and switched his clothes in the changing room. The details were a little off, but it was pretty good for ten minutes’ work.

He returned to the restaurant. Benjamin was still picking at the second course. “Where did you go?”

“Work call,” Aventurine said. “Let’s eat.”

“I’ve already—” Benjamin said, clearly annoyed. “Whatever., you’re paying. I’m hungry again.”

They ate. After the meal Aventurine picked those last green leaves and chewed on them. Benjamin liked the taste of mint, after all. And then they went back to Benjamin’s room and had sex, and they fought after having sex, and Aventurine slept on the couch.

In the end, he liked the fighting more than anything else. The sex was too vanilla, the music turned grating. But the fights were, at least, funny.

They argued about whether Benjamin should move out of the Aeraton and into a fully-furnished apartment; they argued about Aventurine’s drug habit; they argued about what to order for breakfast and Benjamin got so irritated he threw a pencil at Aventurine; they argued about clothes and habits, music and old movies, Aventurine’s lack of culture and Benjamin’s inability to explain. It was always bubbling over. Aventurine had only to stir the pot for it all to spill.

Like a child who had discovered the secret to infinite candy, he couldn't seem to help himself.

The Musée Avoncella ran musical exhibits in the summer months. One of Benjamin's original compositions (written about Aventurine, naturally) was selected for a light show. He was pleased; what he'd sacrificed for fame and fortune was proving to be worth it after all.

Aventurine, who had pulled strings and bribed the committee, only congratulated Benjamin and willingly accompanied him to help with setting up. For a while, he was too distracted to pick a fight. The evening crowd (tourists and local influencers and the late-workers stepping out for dinner and a break) filtered onto the riverfront, congregating under the exhibits to take photos. 

“Are you happy?” Aventurine asked Benjamin. They were standing near the working crew for the show, under a willow cultivar. No palms here; they were too common for the Museum.

“I have everything I want,” Benjamin answered. Then he frowned. “Did the curator over there just wave at you?” He nodded at them, being polite in his way, but the error was already made; they were making their way over.

“So this was the show you were talking about, Director,” Ananya said. “Not bad, not bad. Have you met my sister—?”

“You were talking about—” Benjamin inserted.

“We’ve met,” Aventurine held out his hand. “Sanjana, if I’m not mistaken? How was your research trip?”

“Sufficient,” Sanjana replied. “How did you know about my trip?”

Aventurine didn’t know where to place his eyes. Ratio said, “We posted photos, if you recall.”

“Oh, yes.” She finally deigned to shake Aventurine’s hand and did so, briefly and gingerly. Then she dabbed sanitizer on her palms. 

“You were talking about my show?”

“I just happened to mention it,” Aventurine said sharply. “It’s not whatever you’re thinking.”

Everyone was looking at them. Over the river, silver and green lights fused and separated in artful patterns. Their brightness stung Aventurine’s eyes.

“You’re the musician, right?”

“The composer, yes,” Benjamin said stiffly. 

Aventurine steeled himself to say, “Madam Ananya, this is my boyfriend, Benjamin Greaves. Ben, this is Ananya, she’s a curator at the Musée Avoncella.”

“I’m also Eve’s friend,” Ananya winked. “Which is how we met.”

“You know, your work speaks for itself,” Aventurine responded. Please take the hint.

“Eve?”

Aventurine blanched. Ananya, cruelly ignorant of his nervousness, barreled onwards: “You may know her as Director Jade? Aventurine’s mentor?”

“I didn’t know that,” Benjamin said. His voice was tight and cold. 

“Oh, really,” Ananya said, sounding confused. “I thought Aventurine would have mentioned her.”

Aventurine made the mistake of looking at Ratio. He was wearing a black suit tonight, thin silk gloves. His eyes were luminous and impossibly, cruelly frigid. “I think,” Aventurine said, then faltered, “I think it slipped my mind.”

“Slipped your mind,” Benjamin repeated.

“Why don’t you guys exchange cards,” Aventurine said weakly.

Ananya finally picked up on the awkwardness and rallied: “Capital idea! I have to make my rounds, anyway, here’s my card—give me a call anytime! I’ll leave you guys to catch up, alright. Bye!”

She fled, tugging her sister along. Aventurine scuffed his shoes against the ground. “I know what you’re thinking,” he started.

Benjamin slapped him. It was so unexpected and so hard that Aventurine stumbled a step, would’ve fallen into the water if Ratio didn’t grab his wrist and tug him forward. 

“I don’t want anything to do with you ever again,” Benjamin hissed.

Aventurine wrested his wrist from Ratio’s grip and said, “Wait.”

Benjamin had already walked away, shouldering aside the crowd. Aventurine sighed. Self-consciousness crept in a little too late; he noticed the weight of an intensely discerning gaze on him. 

“Are you happy?” Ratio said, dry and detached.

Aventurine laughed self-deprecatingly. “Happy? Whoever said anything about that?”

“Don’t play the fool,” Ratio said. “He hit you.”

“Look closer, dear doctor. Diagnose the root of the disorder.”

Ratio remained unmoved. “Don’t call me that. Even if you provoked him, he bears responsibility for what he does.”

“You admit that I provoked him.” He turned to face Ratio properly, letting him see Aventurine’s sincerity. The red on his cheek. “I was asking for it. Practically begging.”

“Should I restate the obvious? Has it happened before?”

“You seem concerned,” Aventurine said. “Or will you tell me not to say that too? I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that I was still your patient. I recall you were quite happy to discharge me from your care, in fact.”

It was sordidly satisfying to enrage Ratio. Anger brought out the best in his stunningly handsome face. “I never took you for the fool—”

“Lying is my thing, professor—”

“Only initially,” Ratio amended, irritated. “Certainly not the kind of fool who’d stay with someone so obviously bad for you.”

“Bad for me?” This time, when Aventurine laughed, it was with genuine humor. He couldn’t help it; he was charmed. “Ratio, you misunderstand. I can be myself around him.”

“Yourself,” Ratio echoed. “Well, not anymore.”

Aventurine shrugged. “It had to happen sometime. Nothing good ever lasts.” He slid a hand into his pocket, a reflex he hadn’t yet shaken, and came up empty. “Do you have a cigarette, doctor?”

Ratio exhaled and pulled out two cigarettes and a lighter. “Wasn’t it citrus vapes last time? Don’t overdo it.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been clean for a month. I prefer the scent of oranges, but I’d rather smoke the old-fashioned way.” He lit the first one and said, “So, how have things been with her?”

“Good,” Ratio said. “The research trip was fruitful.” He hesitated and stole the other cigarette, holding it to Aventurine’s to light and lifting it to his lips. “We made…many breakthroughs.”

Aventurine waited, as Ratio took a drag and held it in for a moment; the tip glowed like light through a keyhole. Then he exhaled, warm bitter smoke spiralling into the air. “Sanjana earned the gaze of Nous themselves. She returned to pack, and will be departing to Planet Screwllum for a conference of the Genius Society.”

His tone was perfectly neutral, every gesture seamless and natural. Aventurine couldn’t direct his gaze elsewhere. “Wasn’t the research shared?”

“I only did the boring parts,” Ratio said. “It was her insight that…” He stopped, and said nothing for a moment. If he had a bust within reach, Aventurine imagined he would’ve hidden in it. But his stony expression sufficed. Meanwhile, the cigarette smoldered on quietly. “I imagine she will break up with me soon.”

“Is the sex that bad?” Aventurine blurted out.

Ratio’s lips quirked reluctantly. “That is none of your business.” He removed his gloves and stuffed them into his pocket. “If she doesn’t, then I might break up with her myself.”

“Did you run out of things to talk about so soon?”

“There’s a lot to say,” Ratio replied. “But she’s going to travel for her research, and I’m a teacher.” A cool breeze tousled his hair. The reason had the sound of a script, already rehearsed. “I have to stay here.”

“You came with me to Penacony,” Aventurine pointed out.

Ratio nearly did smile at that. “It was summer break.”

Aventurine laughed. The light in the river was surreal, every ripple magnified by the music that played from the distant speakers. He imagined their slants as doors, pushed open by the breeze. “You know,” he said conversationally. “This song was written about me.”

Ratio paused to listen, thumb resting lightly against the filter. Then he shook his head. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

~

He went to Sevola for another Stoneheart, a shadowy stakeholder who refused to reveal her voice. He suspected who it was but kept his discreet observation to himself, even though Jade prodded at him for the information. He knew better than to lay out his hand so early. The political situation there was fragile; Aventurine had to tread carefully, balancing all the factions against each other, playing them off, picking his victors.

In the capital he met Revashe, golden-eyed and with a fondness for raking her nails over his body, unconcerned by his habits and uninterested in aftermaths. She thought she was using him and he knew he was using her, but the frank instrumentality was refreshing in a fashion.

Sevola was made of dark, heavy stone. On the surface, great snowstorms buffeted the air. People built below the ground, burrowing into the planetary heat. What sunshine came through oblique slants via an elaborate system of mirrors and magnifiers hardly lit the cities. Aventurine could not admit to anyone, least of all himself, that he was cold.

All the while the factions moved like great rocks grinding into each other. Sometimes, with his cracked Cornerstone, came sensations foreign to his body. He felt their seismic shifts, the shakiness of the ground underneath. 

To preserve power and transfer it without loss, he gave himself up to ease the friction. He smoothened alliances, ironing out misgivings on either side while ensuring the partnership would fall apart without him. Revashe was a reaper at his back, absurdly efficient in her way, and together they plotted the IPC’s victory. They only had each other in the bowels of this frigid beast. They did not trust each other. They were not fools.

And at night he took the domed cars back to the hotel by himself. He hurt too much to walk. When he forced himself to return by foot regardless, every bump and jostle into another body seemed to take a fresh layer off his bright and brittle skin. 

Still, there were the parties and the dinners he couldn't avoid. The ones he was invited to were hardly conducive to losing oneself. Their drinks and drugs were all too mild for him. Doses that could have taken a native Sevoli to their moon couldn’t even lift Aventurine’s hyperchemical nervous system off the ground.

Without distractions, in the quiet moments, he found his chest ached. It spread slowly through every part of his body, and even the bright and sharp pain of Revashe’s talons couldn’t shake the tectonic slide of pain within him. The medicines that that Chaos Doctor had given him were running out, and he tried to ration them for the worst days, so he could function, but his nights were the real hell. When he was meant to be sleeping, he was often paralyzed by the deep conviction of a bug trapped in amber, trying to breathe air and finding only stone. 

“You’re getting worse,” Revashe said. Her gigantic wings seemed to eat all the space in the room. “Isn’t the IPC supposed to take better care of its best than that?”

“I’m hardly incapacitated,” Aventurine answered. “They’re taking care of me fine.”

She placed her glass pipe down on the mantel and said, “I’m feeling generous.”

“That’s rare,” Aventurine returned. “Generous enough to—?”

Yes, it turned out. Yes. She needed both hands to encircle his throat, and if he closed his eyes he’d go back to a time when someone had held him underwater exactly like this, so he kept them open and warm and fixed on her face as she tightened her grip in expert increments. Wringing out each desperate gasp from his lungs. Only when he was sure he’d die did she finally let go, letting him collapse and shake, black streaks emptying his vision. His heart was hammering, each pulse like a new piece of glass twisting in his chest.

Even that could feel good for a few seconds. Only a few. He repaid her generosity by eating her out until she couldn’t move, and left her to sleep it off while he went into a different room and made a call.

It was a weird impulse. Another person’s pleasure was still sticking to his skin. He looked a little wild. He should have thought twice; he didn’t. He didn’t expect Ratio to pick up at all.

He didn’t. An automated voice message played instead, and Aventurine put his phone down on the sill. The wind howled whitely outside. It seemed to blow right through the thick glass, whistling between the cracks in Aventurine’s stupid heart. Nothing worth wanting ever came within reach; nothing worth having could stay unbroken. He rested his forehead against the cold window and imagined, for a singularly pathetic moment, the shadow of a man beside him. The pain he wouldn’t be able to ease. The pain Aventurine would always strive to keep from him. His nerves felt weak. He wanted to sink to the floor and weep.

The shadow faded. He opened his eyes and caught sight of himself in the reflective window. His hair was a mess, sweaty and yanked into stupid shapes. His throat was bruised. The shirt he wore was buttoned to cover his breasts, but hardly decent, crumpled, a little too tight for him. Bare legs. Whatever had he been trying to achieve, calling Ratio while looking like this?

It wouldn’t have worked. He felt disgusted with himself for a moment. Then he let that feeling drop to the floor and went back inside.

Sevola seemed to take forever. Every day unearthed a new wellspring of pain that constricted his lungs and made it difficult to move when he wasn’t working. The few hours when there was no one around, Aventurine gave himself the grace of curling up under thick blankets with his arms wrapped around himself like he could hold shut the gaping wound in his chest. 

Bleakly, he thought; this was punishment for winning. An accrued debt, extracted with interest. 

Ratio called him back more than once, but Aventurine rarely answered. When he did it was only to listen to Ratio’s increasingly irate questions, without speaking a word in return. He couldn’t. If he opened his mouth he’d only cry. He didn’t want to cry.

They’d flirted and fought, but they’d always done so with the tacit and unspoken understanding that their lives would lead them down very different paths. Penacony was different. It was business. 

That Ratio cared about him at all was not a surprise. For all his sternness, there was a wellspring of incomprehensible devotion in him, a doctor’s instinct for the damned. The surprise was how much Aventurine wanted him to. How he’d slipped and lost his footing the moment he’d felt like someone would catch him. Aventurine couldn’t afford that comfort, and Ratio couldn’t afford the trouble Aventurine would bring him, inevitably, the distractions and the nonsense and all the reckless gambles. 

Aventurine had cheated fate enough. And Ratio had other battles, more worth his while. 

But he was quick to find the times Aventurine was most likely to pick up the phone, when he was trying to sleep and the pain wouldn’t even let him have that. And his annoyance faded into a feathery exasperation. He told Aventurine about the classes he’d taught that day and all the concepts his students couldn’t yet grasp. He told Aventurine about the paper on epistemological frameworks used by certain physicians of the Abundance that he was writing. He even told Aventurine in unnerving detail about how the university coffee shop had fucked up his order. Most of what he said ran clean out of Aventurine’s mind. Nevertheless, his voice echoed through Aventurine’s dreams.

He had a flight off Sevola the same night his work concluded. Revashe was packing as he paused in the doorway. “Work for me,” he suggested. “Whatever she’s paying you, I can double it.”

“What can I do for you?” Revashe snorted. “You don’t need someone like me.”

“I’d find you something to do,” he said. He was aware of how he sounded; desperate. Though he was also eager to leave this fruitless planet behind, he lingered, giving her time to think.

“What would someone like you know about loyalty?” she said at last. “Even if you could give me everything, I don’t want to take it from you.”

“Your sentimentality is adorable,” he replied. “Suit yourself.”

Later, ensconced in the black needle of the IPC ship as it cut through the predawn hailstorm, he clenched and unclenched his hands and felt the luck he’d held so far drip out of his fingers and melt on the floor. He didn’t know when sleep took him—a restless rest, so that when he woke it was as though no time had passed. The pressed creases of Aventurine’s suit had lost their definition, and new creases were forming at his elbows and stomach.

He spritzed himself with his favorite citrus perfume and ran his fingers through his hair, slid on sunglasses to hide his dark circles. The last of Revashe’s bruises smarted under his clothes. When he stepped out onto the glittering port, he looked nearly perfect. He swiped the foggy vestiges of a warm rain from the chilled glass of his watch and adjusted the time. The shades dimmed the bright signal lights of the port as he walked off the landing grid into the dazzling stomach of the port. The rich, hyperreal smells and sights of endless shopfronts, IPC advertisements ringing off every surface, made him feel like a beaten child returning home—comforted by familiar terror.

He flashed his ID card through accelerated customs and was out on the other side in twenty minutes. Then, for a moment, he couldn’t figure out the next step. The world was too large. He didn’t know which door was his.

He ran through travel options. Cabs. His private chauffeur. Renting a bike from the spaceport and screaming down the highways. Walking. He flinched when a great white roar of sound blazed into existence, but it was only something or the other taking off. When the sound faded he picked up his phone and made a call.

This time, Ratio picked up in seconds. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Ratio said. “I was working.”

“Your hours are worse than mine.”

“They’re consistently terrible. I take it you’re back.”

“How did you know—the spaceport? You recognised that?”

“Your caller location, gambler.”

Aventurine laughed. Despite the sting in his chest. “It’s been a long journey.”

Ratio hummed. “Shall I pick you up?”

“That wasn’t why I called.”

“Liar,” Ratio said, neatly. “I live near the spaceport. You know that.”

Aventurine had known that. He’d bet on it. He exhaled, pushing his luck. “I want my own bed,” he murmured down the line. “Call me a cab.”

“No,” Ratio said. “You’ll have to settle for my office couch.”

“Hard bargain.”

“I’m not haggling with you. I’ll be there in ten.”

“Don’t you live further away?”

“It’s late,” Ratio said. “The streets are clear. Stay where you are.”

The shadow of a ship passed smoothly overhead. Aventurine let the call end and tugged his sleeves down over his aching wrists. He suddenly wasn’t quite sure he wanted Ratio to see him like this: shivering despite the wet heat rising off the tarmac, desperate under the crystalline mirage. Lies bloomed but the scent of truth rose above it all.

He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth, digging his teeth into the pads. It was the only way to keep them from shaking.

Ratio’s car pulled up only a few minutes later. Windows rolled down. “Get in.”

Aventurine walked around and got into the passenger seat. “I didn’t take you for the type to break traffic rules,” Aventurine said. 

“I didn’t.” The windows rolled up. “Are you feeling cold?”

“I’m fine,” Aventurine said automatically. The car picked up. Ratio was a smooth, excellent driver, even with his attention divided between frowning at Aventurine and the road. 

Some late-night university radio station was playing low. Aventurine reached out to fiddle with the controls and Ratio knocked his hand out of the way, turning on the heater on Aventurine’s side. 

“I said I’m fine.” 

Ratio ignored him. Aventurine sighed deeply and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, loosened his tie. Wondered if they were going to talk about anything at all, but Ratio stayed silent. Aventurine was grateful for the quiet, just as he’d been grateful for the words back on Sevola. He tilted his head back and glanced sidelong at Ratio, focused on what he was doing, beautiful for it. Beautiful all the time.

Did he know Ratio at all, or was he stuck staring at the same mask everyone else was faced with when Ratio didn’t want to be seen? In the dark he was distant and perfect, beyond all debts. Only the gentleness of his grip on the steering wheel gave anything away.

They got home very late. The house looked imposing and bleak in the deep purple night, but inside the lights were yellow. Aventurine exhaled for the first time in weeks. He tugged off his shoes, comforted by the quiet clatter of Ratio’s routine: keys returning to their rightful drawer, shoes in the cupboard, the door locked. He vanished into the house as Aventurine finished stuffing his socks into his shoes, so Aventurine made his way to the darkened kitchen and rifled through the fridge for a drink. 

“Make yourself at—” Ratio started. “I see you have.”

“No, I want to hear you say it,” Aventurine grinned. He pulled out a can of honey mead and popped the tab, taking a swig as he eyed Ratio up and down properly for the first time. He was wearing a dark blue t-shirt, pale cream sweatpants. He looked soft. Aventurine’s smile faded. “What’s that?”

“Clothes,” Ratio said instead. “To change into.” He set them down on the table. He had such precise ways of moving, especially when he was tired. He didn’t become clumsy, but his grace quietened into an economy of gestures. Nothing wasted or needless. If Aventurine stepped into his space now, he wouldn’t even lift a hand to push him away. He’d simply leave. “I’ll make up the office couch.”

“I can do it,” Aventurine said, even though he didn’t know where anything was.

No response. He followed Ratio through the dark house with the can and the clothes as he pulled out blankets and pillows from his storage room and set up the couch in his office. “It’s comfortable,” he said. “I sleep here all the time.”

“Your bed’s down the hall,” Aventurine murmured. He stepped closer, compelled. “Too far, huh?”

Ratio shrugged. He smoothed down the corner of a blanket and straightened, tensing as though suddenly aware of the scant space between them. “Anything would be, when…”

“What are you even working on?”

It was a useless question, only an excuse to keep this moment alive a little longer. 

Ratio’s expression flickered. “There’s someone here,” he said, a nonsensical digression. “You should sleep.” He raised his hand and Aventurine braced for the shove, but Ratio lifted Aventurine’s sunglasses off his nose and folded them, putting them on the desk. Aventurine’s face heated. 

“Ratio,” he started, but it was too much, even that name in his mouth. It gave too much away.

That hand near his ear, now lifting his earring. Aventurine felt it in his skin. But Ratio hadn’t, even once, truly touched him. 

“Sleep,” Ratio said. His every breath was heavy. Loud. “Please.” He stepped back, lowering his head. Aventurine couldn’t see his face. Ratio had never said please to him like this, with such awful sincerity. As though this had to end, end right this second. 

“Okay,” Aventurine whispered. He stepped back too, sitting on the couch. An emptiness whistled clean through him; he was defeated.

Ratio padded out. The door shut. Aventurine lowered his face into his hands and retreated into the deafening pain in his chest. It was, in this moment, his only solace.

~

Late morning, when Aventurine finally woke up, brought the sound of lemon trees rustling, the liquid hum of beehives. The window was open. He was disoriented for a second, arrested by the sight of walls that were neither stone nor cement nor white plex; rather, shelves of books and curios and lovely glass jars of preserved plants. The ceiling and the other wall was painted a luxurious sea green. Near the window, a standing desk cluttered with last night’s work, books held open by other books, loose paper. The sitting desk was clean, but for a sleek laptop, a pair of sunglasses, and a yellow rubber duck. The sight stirred something in Aventurine, but he didn’t have time to linger on it. His phone was ringing.

The borrowed sweatshirt slipped off his shoulders and he let it, checking his phone. “Madam,” he said, pulling out his bright and perky morning voice. “I’m glad you called.”

“I hope you rested on the way in, darling. Meeting’s been moved up.”

“And my infinitely generous mentor saw fit to personally let me know—how can I ever repay such kindness?”

“You know what I want,” Jade said. “But show me what you’ve got and we’ll settle the tab.” There was a pause; Aventurine could imagine her applying a fresh coat of lipstick. “Goodbye, darling.”

“See you, Madam,” Aventurine said politely. He rolled up the sweatshirt’s loose sleeves and checked his schedule for the new meeting time, then double-checked with his secretary. Already his day’s plan was forming in his mind. He needed to pick up gifts from his bags, which should have reached his home by now. Then he needed a shower. He stepped out of the office and made his way to the kitchen, where he could hear a quiet shuffling. “I’ll probably leave soon,” he said. “I have a meeting at two…”

“Hello,” blond hair, a bright and nervous smile. “Have we met before?”

Aventurine blinked. The man was wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned to display freckled skin and fading hickeys. A thin band of gossamer gold lay tight around his throat. There’s someone here. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Aventurine.”

“Anton,” Anton said. “Um, like, that Aventurine?”

“I see my reputation precedes me,” Aventurine said. “I’m just a drone, like everyone else at the IPC. I must have missed you last night, I came in quite late. Did you spend the night?”

Anton bobbed his head. He was frying eggs. “My housing hasn’t been approved yet, so I live quite far from University. Still, it should be done soon, and then I can stop freeloading on poor Veritas...” He smiled brightly. Aventurine didn’t let his distaste show, but he couldn’t help the thought that Anton smiled too much.

“What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m an assistant researcher in the Department of Linguistics.”

“Interesting,” Aventurine said. “You must be quite smart.”

Anton chuckled. “No one’s as smart as Veritas.”

“Naturally.” The eggs smelled delicious. Anton did not offer Aventurine any; Aventurine didn’t ask. He felt deeply irritated. The seductive impact of his bruised wrists and clavicles was utterly wasted on an insipid lookalike with a gorgeous perm. His target audience was probably still fast asleep, and wouldn’t wake up until long after Aventurine left. 

Moreover, his chest pained him. The social games so common on Pier Point numbed his senses and distracted his mind, but he wanted three cups of coffee and a cigarette and a stimulant and Anton was providing, currently, none of those things and a headache besides.

“I think,” Aventurine said. “I’ll leave a little early. Catch you around, Anton.”

“See you,” Anton replied, waving with the spatula. “Sorry you couldn’t stay for breakfast!”

~

With the bonus from Sevola, Aventurine bought back his membership to his favorite casino.

Then he spent a grinding, exhausting two weeks at work, wrapping up the aftermath. There were reports to file, loose ends to tie, informants to pay and cut off, underlings to manipulate into doing his work for him. What he couldn’t pass off he did himself, mechanically, barely sleeping, barely eating, living on stimulants and the occasional sachet of cocaine. One evening he got out early, around eight, and went to the milliner in Lourand Square. The woman who ran it was old, and her commitment to hattery had led her to a deep disdain of Pier Point’s corporate gentry—she refused to let any of them save face in front of her. But she was patronaged by Opal himself, and thus got away with having a tongue sharper than a pin, and would deign to make Aventurine a hat once in a while if he threw himself at her feet with convincing passion.

Today, though, she was rather happy to see him. She brought out a hat without requiring too much convincing, and was quite visibly pleased when he fell instantly in love with it. She had a tie and cufflinks to sell him to match, and threatened him graphically if he did not stick to her style guidelines. He wrote a cheque and walked out buoyed by enthusiastic splurging.

The work drew to a close with a final meeting with Opal—and Obsidian, the other stakeholder in the Sevola project. He’d guessed right, and therefore his plays had panned out. Aventurine wasn’t surprised, though this was the first time he’d even spoken to Obsidian about it. What had made her stay so hidden? It was not her usual style. She’d deputized Revashe all throughout.

“How is she, anyway?” Aventurine inquired casually.

“She’s been taken care of,” Opal said. “Don’t worry; your little ‘secret’ didn’t escape.”

Obsidian smiled. “A pity,” she said off-handedly. “She was rather good at what she did.”

“A pity,” Aventurine echoed. “Of course, I always trust that my colleagues have my best interests at heart.” He bowed low and took his leave, checking his phone when it chimed with his bonus. The numbers were gorgeous, but there was something sinister in their beauty. He was no stranger to survivor’s guilt, and buried the memories with the rest in the back of his head and thought instead of Sevola—it should’ve been a relief to know he’d never go back to that cold hell again.

Except he missed it already. He missed the fucking ice in his teeth every time he yawned.

Oh, well.

He went to the casino after heading home to whiten his teeth and change (a fresh peacock suit, to appreciate the occasion, bought to match the hat and tie and cufflinks). The rolling jazz inside set his nerves thumming, like the warming notes on a guitar.

He could feel his luck bracing, bright in his hands. They didn’t shake as he raked in the chips. Laughter came easily to him. The electric disco balls tossed acrobatic sprays of glitter over the walls and the faces of competitors that all looked like old friends, and though gloved his hands found gold wherever they touched. He drank only sweet champagne, pearly and always freshly chilled, its opalescent heat flowing through his cracks and making them shine. If anyone saw through him tonight all they’d see were ebullient mirrors, spinning chandelier light into sugary illusions. He smiled so hard his cheeks ached.

Poker and pinball and dice and darts—there was nothing he lost. Nothing he could lose. He raised stakes blindly, without checking his cards, and won everything at once.

A phone call at three cut through his reverie. He slid out of his place at the table, waved for the game to continue without him, and slipped into the shadowy corridor that led to the bathroom. Here, the patterned carpet was worn. The lights were a dark dripping blue that shaded his suit black and the music was a dull beat, thick in his mouth. He called back, fingers trembling.

Ratio picked up on the first ring. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, Aventurine—”

He’d never sounded like this, or said Aventurine’s name like this; he thought no one had. Like he was any kind of savior.

“Deep breaths,” Aventurine said, moderating his voice into something crisp and gentle. With champagne thick in his veins he couldn’t imagine what could have Ratio in such a state, at such a time. But then, Ratio did stay up late.

“I am taking deep breaths,” Ratio snarled. “Fuck!” There was a sound, the clear resounding tinkle of glass shattering on tile.

Aventurine did not know what to say. He took a deep breath, pressing the heel of his hand to his chest until a sharp pain bloomed. “Are you home?”

“I’m in my office, in the Cael Ancarum wing,” Ratio spoke rapidly. Aventurine committed the words to memory. “I’m in my office, and…fuck.”

With a strange, deplorable twist more painful than the throb in his heart, it occurred to Aventurine that Ratio was truly speechless—with anger, and something dangerously like despair. He had never thought, never once thought, he’d hear Ratio like this.

“I’m coming,” Aventurine said.

“Don’t,” Ratio snapped back. “I’ll handle it.”

“Stay put,” Aventurine responded. “I’m coming.”

“Don’t.“

“Ratio,” Aventurine said. Softly, “Veritas.”

“Don’t. Please don’t.” There was a pause, and only the sound of the casino, with its high murmur and music, and Ratio’s loud unsteady breathing.

Neither of them cut the call. Aventurine drove to the University like that, a two hour drive shortened to an hour and change with some expert handling and red light luck and a total disregard for speed limits.

Cael Ancarum was an old building. It housed the linguistics and social sciences departments. Its graystone architecture additionally held classes and common rooms and discussion centers and the professors’ offices, on the top floors. At night, even largely absent of its student and teacher population, the scent of paper and ink and learning hung in the air. Diffusers stood in discreet corners. A student, surrounded by books, slept like a cat half under a chair.

Ratio’s office was on the eighth floor, in the corner, with a view of the whole sprawl of the University grounds. When Aventurine tried the door, he found it unlocked, the lights on.

Entering, he saw Ratio, half-sitting on his table with a bleak and thunderous expression on his face. Smashed glass littered the floor, plant water soaking into the rug. Roses lay fresh and incongruously romantic in the detritus.

New shoes crunching, Aventurine made his way to Ratio. He was irreproachable even in misery, with late night stubble shadowing his sharp jaw. Aventurine reached up, intending to wave his hand rudely in front of Ratio’s face, but without intention or apprehension his touch landed on a stray lock of hair, and guided it behind Ratio’s ear. He felt the breath of an exhale on his hand as he withdrew it.

“I told you not to come,” Ratio ground out, chipping like flint. He was, in this moment, as fragile as one of his statues. Aventurine understood why he hid inside them, understood the need to guard weakness in stone—understood though he had reversed the method, and guarded stone with flesh.

Ratio’s phone lay on the desk. It asked, call ‘the gambler’ again?

“Something happened,” Aventurine murmured. “Tell me what it was?”

Ratio shuddered. “It’s unimportant.”

“I won’t know until you tell me.” The champagne’s silver thrill had ripened into a dark and wild courage. Aventurine let himself touch Ratio’s shoulder, curling his fingers over thick muscle separated from him only by a soft layer of linen. He thumbed the lapse of space between neck and collarbone. “I don’t know anything. What happened?”

"I don’t want you to touch me,” Ratio said. He didn’t move.

“Are you telling me to stop?”

“I’m telling you,” Ratio started, and then gave himself away with an empty groan as Aventurine pressed the tips of his fingers into the corded muscle of Ratio’s back, left of his spine. “I don’t want any of this.”

“I’ll stop,” Aventurine promised. “I’ll stop when you say something.” He had to lean on his toes to reach Ratio’s ear. “Anything.”

There was a long silence. Outside the window, starlight beaconed and dimmed over the hills that surrounded the University. And in the distance, the beautiful oracular shape of the Observatory. Aventurine had never been there, only driven by. There was never time.

And here, Ratio, animal in his mute anguish. Unthinkingly, Aventurine stepped closer, drawing their bodies closer, until they were pressed together everywhere. Ratio smelled like soap and sweat and roses. His body was clammy and tight in Aventurine’s arms, not struggling, but unable to relinquish its weight.

“Did someone buy you flowers?” Aventurine asked. “It’s a pity. I wanted to be the one.”

“You wouldn’t be the first,” Ratio said shortly. “He wasn’t the first.”

“Hmm. Anton?”

Ratio tensed even more. “Yes.”

Aventurine waited.

“He was here today,” Ratio said reluctantly. The words seemed to emerge from some well of deep shame. “With the vase. I didn’t think to check… How did I not think? I’m supposed to be a genius.” That last imbued with so much violent bitterness that Aventurine tightened his hold reflexively. “He stole my research.”

“All of it?”

“Some of it has been published already, but my notes. My theorems. The theorizing. The drafts. It’s,” Ratio struggled to speak. “He has all of it.”

Aventurine picked through the words, “Do you still have it?”

“Some of it,” Ratio ground out. “Some of it was deleted. But I have standards, I don’t just—I know the weight of my name, I could publish drivel like everyone else. It would be easier for me, except that I have standards, and I don’t publish things without due diligence—that aren’t excellent. But for anyone else, my notes, they’re a goldmine. They could publish a dozen research papers without cutting a word.”

“I’ll find him,” Aventurine said.

“I doubt he was working alone,” Ratio said. “He must be halfway across the galaxy by now.”

“And whoever his team was,” Aventurine said. Sorry you couldn’t stay for breakfast rattled in his brain. “We’ll find them and destroy their copies and discredit them in every university.”

“We,” Ratio repeated. “You and which army?”

“An army would hold me back, doctor.”

Ratio pushed him away, looking at him sharply. “I’m sure you want something in return.”

“We can settle your debt once I’m back with the goods.”

“You’re leaving now?”

“Well, I’ll help you clean this up first.”

Ratio’s face did something odd. “I’m not you, gambler. I’m only a consultant. I don’t have anything worth what you’ll return to me if you pull this off. If.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Aventurine winked.

“I’m serious,” Ratio said. “And it’s going to be dangerous.”

Aventurine shrugged. “I like to gamble.”

~

Since Ratio refused to be left behind, Aventurine requisitioned a custom IPC Petrel-19 for two. The Petrel series, made with highly gatekept living technology, were an outcome of certain covert deals that Aventurine had assisted Jade in brokering. Those deals had given the IPC access to a vast private collection of the remains of Tayzzyronnth’s progeny. It had amused Jade to barter Aventurine’s life and virtue to win for the IPC the very thing Aventurine had baited them with so many years ago. Now he got to reap the benefits of the pilot program and the prototypes—a worthy exchange.

Sleety, cold wind whipped around them as they walked from the parking lot to the hangar. Thom, one of the project’s engineers, was waiting for them with a golf bag of gear. “Hey,” he said. “This is private use, so if anything happens to the Petrel, it’s coming out of your pocket.”

Aventurine handed him a card. “Bill me,” he said. “How fast does this go?”

“Zero to one-sixty in ten, with five second hyperspace jumps to cut friction and pull ahead of whatever you’re chasing. In-built collision avoidance system, which is a gross simplification of what this beast actually does—you won’t come out of something’s intestines, that’s all. That’s what that means. And if you think there’s a better speed craft anywhere in the universe I’ve yet to hear of it, so it doesn’t exist.”

“The Racers in the Drift Circuit System are on par,” Ratio said circumspectly, examining the Petrel with an avid gleam in his eyes.

“No—” Thom stared, as though noticing Ratio for the first time. “Professor?”

“That’s the one,” Aventurine patted Ratio’s arm. “You guys catch up, I’m gonna change.”

He grabbed the golf bag and headed for the space behind the curtained wings of the Petrel to tear off his suit and change into the pilot’s gear. There were two sets inside, exactly as Aventurine had requested. Blue and white, IPC engineered biofiber. It settled around him with the weight of silk and the confidence of armor.

There were many advantages to working for the richest entity in the Universe. Aventurine smirked, checked his reflection in the polished pervasteel, smoothed out his wind-blown hair, and rummaged through his suit pockets for his sunglasses. Sliding them firmly onto his nose, he headed out. “You should change too,” he informed Ratio, and went entirely unheard over the snappy back and forth of a heated geek session. He slid his hands into his pockets and waited.

The wind had almost dropped before Thom and Ratio were done yapping each other’s ears off about the merits of various microtechnologies of the Petrel series. Aventurine pushed him off to change and faced Thom. “Send my regards to your supervisor.”

“You can send your regards yourself,” Thom said, frowning after Ratio. “He’s still wrong about the thrusters. I don’t care what degrees he has.”

“You can take that up with him,” Aventurine said. “I don’t talk to him about…thrusters.”

“His take is interesting,” Thom said, disregarding the innuendo. “But that doesn’t make it right. He’s not an engineer.”

“Okay,” Aventurine said, not willing to argue this point. “Remember to tell Avya that I said hi.”

“She hates you,” Thom said.

Aventurine shrugged.

“Who hates you?” Ratio emerged, adjusting the collar. He looked depressingly hot in the uniform. Aventurine stared at a gap of early morning light in the clouds and wished for strength against the way the uniform contrasted the column of Ratio’s throat and complimented his hair.

“Let’s get going,” Aventurine said. “Wind is nice, but it’s takeoff weather now.”

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Ratio said, but he didn’t tarry before getting into the Petrel. If nothing else, he’d probably enjoy the ride.

Aventurine waved Thom off and climbed after him. In the closed intimacy of the cockpit, Ratio’s presence was almost oppressive. Aventurine couldn’t avoid him if he tried; he didn’t know why he’d want to try. He didn’t know why he didn’t flee. He slid on the pilot’s gloves and tightened the straps with his teeth, busily ignoring Ratio’s sharp stare.

“Isn’t this an adventure?” he asked, bright through a mouthful of velcro.

“That’s one word for it.”

Aventurine pushed his arm with a closed fist, gently. “Chin up.”

Ratio’s bleak mood was fully back in play. He looked broodingly out of the window, meditating darkly on worst-case scenarios and the like. Aventurine left him to it and guided the Petrel to life and air, lifting it off the ground. It handled like something out of a dream. They were out of Pier Point’s gravity in seconds.

He floated them for a few minutes, aligning the ship to track Anton’s most probable location. The IPC tagged every person who came in or out of Pier Point, though the trackers weren’t available to most; Aventurine was not most, and Ratio’s research was easily spun as a pressing priority for the Guild and the IPC’s interests. Private use, his ass. Then he stepped on it. Thom had not been lying about that acceleration.

“This is a bad time to ask,” Ratio said, briefly out of reverie. “Do you have a license?”

Aventurine laughed.

They caught up with Anton somewhere near the Greenspit Nebula. The Petrel was not a combat craft but it was armed and dangerous, and besides it was a small matter to corral Anton’s ship towards a nearby piece of rock and let gravity do half the work. They hitched the Petrel to the rusty titanium shell of Anton’s ship. Aventurine lifted the broadcaster. “Hello there,” he said warmly. “We’ve met before but I doubt you remember me—but you’d be pleased to know I think of you as friends. So why don’t you let us in?”

It was a rhetorical question. The Petrel was loaded with precision missiles that could blast a ship’s engines without damaging the hull. Grounded, Anton and his crew had no defense against hijacking—other than a voluntary self-detonation, but Aventurine’s implication that a negotation was possible prevented that.

They walked on, Ratio at Aventurine’s back with his gun at the ready. His paralytic despair had crystallized into a horrifying cold anger. Anton’s team was small—the pilot was a bearded man with red-hair who wore a wrist cuff identical to Anton’s gossamer collar. The cockpit was self-sufficient. He was the brains of this operation—though he lacked enough of them to manage it remotely. He probably didn’t trust his crew.

“I see how it is,” Aventurine said to Anton. “You were just the honeypot, weren’t you?”

“Shut up,” Anton hissed. His eyes were bleak with fright; he’d already given up. “You don’t know anything. Veritas—”

“Don’t look at me,” Ratio snarled.

“Tsk, tsk,” Aventurine said, gesturing with his pistol. “Did the big bad man make you do it? Did he tell you he’d love you forever if you lay back and took it like a good boy? Darling, you were never pretty enough to pull this off.”

“I’m not going to listen to an Avgin whore,” Anton hissed. Ratio shot him in the thigh.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been called that,” Aventurine noted. “Thanks.”

“Zero points for originality,” Ratio commented. His voice was dry as dust. “You’re welcome.”

“Nevermind that, now,” the bearded man had a weirdly oily voice. “We’ve already sent out the data—so you may want to cut a deal with us.”

“Such little loyalty to your own crew,” Aventurine sneered. “I’m willing to bet you’re lying, but Ratio’s the math guy. What are my odds?”

“A hundred percent,” Ratio said, and shot the pilot’s panel out with three efficient bullets. He’d seen the same things Aventurine had—Aventurine felt a sharp satisfaction. They worked so well together, even now.

The rest of the crew entered the control room belatedly, guns out and at the ready. They diverged seamlessly—Ratio dealt with the bearded guy and Anton, while Aventurine fought the rest of the crew. Four against one, the odds weren’t good, but Aventurine had had worse. One of them got a lucky shot in at Aventurine’s ankle, and he didn’t dodge out of the way in time. Seconds later he was dead. Another swung at him with an energy whip—he ducked to the side and blasted the one coming at him with a bayonet, then shot the other one in the back. Even with weapons of their own, they couldn’t disarm him. Aventurine gritted his teeth and grinned and finished the last one off before limping back to the cockpit.

Ratio had killed the bearded guy. Anton was out cold, bleeding all over the place. “What happened to your ankle?” Ratio asked. He was crouching on the floor in front of a laptop, copying his data back.

“How’d you know?” Aventurine grumbled, because Ratio hadn’t looked up from the screen.

“How did you know they hadn’t yet sent out the data?”

“Simple criminal psychology,” Aventurine answered. “It was too valuable. Even if this was a prepaid mission they could hold their employer hostage for more cash before surrendering the data, or cut free and sell to the highest bidder.”

“Your footsteps sounded different,” Ratio said. “Well, this is copying. What do we do with him?”

“Kill him. What else?”

“I can’t—” Ratio stared at him. “I can’t do that.”

“Can’t you?” Aventurine poked Anton’s neck gently with the tip of his bloodied shoe. “That collar’s welded to his spine because that guy owned him. It can’t be taken off. You can cut the bracelet off his wrist and wear it yourself, but there’s no way to free Anton.”

“How do you know that?”

“The slave traders that used to operate in Sigonia,” Aventurine said quietly. He raised his fingers to his own brand. “Were primitives. But they got their tech from elsewhere. I heard them talk about these collars. They couldn’t afford them—twenty Sigonian slaves wouldn’t have bought a collar like that. I was lucky, again. They’re set to detonate within two hours if the owner dies. You’d better kill him soon, Ratio. Because if you don’t do it, I will.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Ratio sounded both judgemental and apalled, a winning combination. There was even a heavy coat of accusation there. Aventurine shrugged.

“What’s in it for me? Wait and watch, if you like. Maybe the blood loss will take him first.”

Ratio frowned severely. “I could treat him.”

“Be my guest,” Aventurine said. He took another round of the ship to make sure there were no loose ends. His ankle hurt like a bitch, but he had a feeling Ratio couldn’t currently be persuaded to sympathy on that front.

When he came back, Ratio had finished copying his data and was researching the collar. Aventurine leaned against the wall. The air stank unbearably of blood and gore, the overhead glare beating off the silver panels and down on the scene, applying video game-y hyperreal filter. He had a migraine on top of everything else. “Well? Am I lying?”

“No,” Ratio admitted.

“Want me to do it?”

He knew Ratio wouldn’t let him. He was far too responsible like that. He shot Anton clean in the throat, right through the collar. Aventurine couldn’t pretend it wasn’t the stuff of his richest and most private sex fantasies to see Ratio take an annoying blond twink to task for his crimes, but it was entirely the wrong blond twink. It’d barely been a crime. What was a little scamming, in the scheme of things? There was bile in his throat. He refused to throw up.

“Let’s go,” he said. His voice didn’t shake, but his hands wouldn’t stop, so he stuffed them in his pockets and chivvied Ratio off this stupid ship. “If you’re going to throw up, do it here. They’ll charge me a planet for cleaning the Petrel.”

Ratio shook his head. His shoulders were stiff as glaciers.

Back in their own ship, Aventurine busied himself fiddling with the decontaminant settings. It hosed them down, evaporating the blood, and Aventurine poked a shell-shocked Ratio into the cockpit. He trained his eyes on the starkly gleaming silver of the Petrel’s interior, but no amount of even breathing could erase the vision of intimate carnage from his head. He kept swallowing nausea. He stilled his hands with great effort and switched their desination coordinates.

Ratio sat heavily in the other pilot’s chair and folded in on himself, wracked with deep shudders. Aventurine fidgeted with the glove box and found a handful of energy bars. “Eat something,” he said, brightly pragmatic. “It’ll help.”

“No.”

He was shaking worse than Aventurine. Maybe too bad to notice that Aventurine’s own hands weren’t particularly steady as he touched Ratio’s shoulder. “Hey.”

“How do you do it?”

“I just do it,” Aventurine said. “There’s no trick.”

“There’s always a trick.” Ratio sounded pleading. Like he wanted the secret too. Like he’d do anything. Aventurine couldn’t disappoint him.

“I just think,” he said. Swallowed. “There’s many kinds of deaths. Slow deaths aren’t better than fast ones.”

“Aren’t they?”

“Have you ever seen people die? One by one, once in a while, so it seems like you’re losing them so fast you can’t hold on, and at the same time you see it coming every time. Your mom, your dad, your sister…” Ratio recoiled, and Aventurine withdrew his touch. “But do you think it would’ve been better if we all died at once? Died together?”

“Shut up,” Ratio said hollowly. “Shut up.”

“You asked,” Aventurine said remorselessly. “There’s no good death. If it helps, you can always tell yourself that it was my lucky day. Do you think good fortune can come from nothing? Someone winning means someone loses. You were on the winning side today.”

“You’re sick,” Ratio said. It was matter-of-fact, and wretched.

The nausea cleared. “Yeah,” Aventurine said. “Eat something now.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Aventurine ignored this and forced the energy bar into Ratio’s mouth, bite by bite, and said nothing of the tears sliding down Ratio’s cheeks. Grief was a funny thing. There was a bitter weight pulling his fine features into desolation. Funny that the sight of it didn’t touch Aventurine at all. Betrayal hurt; but then, it was supposed to. He only resented not being the one to touch Ratio like this. He didn’t know whether—didn’t think that Ratio would ever cry like this for him.

How innocent Anton seemed in hindsight. His only crimes were a little lying, a little stealing. He’d never stood a chance against a seasoned cosmic liar-thief-traitor-murderer like him.

But he let Ratio drive on the way back; it was the least he could do. He ached like he’d done something wrong, but when had he not? When had he ever done anything right? Even when he tried, it ended in blood and tears.

They parted at the hangar. It was, by this time, raining.

~

“Are you seeing anyone lately?” Jade asked him. They were out for dinner together at Marite, and as always, their favorite table had been reserved for them. Shoulders against the dark soft glass that turned all of Pier Point into a lacework tapestry of light, shimmering bridges spanning the length and breadth of it. The food was excellent. As always, with them, it went a little underappreciated. All the highs had begun to blur.

“No,” Aventurine said. “Nobody.” He knew better than to ask her the same question, but couldn’t resist: “What about Madam Jade? Has anyone caught your eye lately?”

She gave him a cool look. “I have my hands full without such trifling pastimes. Topaz, I heard, has found herself a woman—some bleeding-heart lawyer. Why don’t you do the same?”

“Do you think there’s anyone out there for me?” Aventurine asked. He heard the lack of wistfulness in his voice, the sharp edge of irony. Wondered if she’d read yearning into it anyway, and offer him a deal he’d be unwise to take. He’d squirmed out of paying her price, only to fill the cost with interest later. It was worth it for the thrill of getting one over her.

“You work too much,” Jade said. “You have no pastimes outside of it.”

“That’s not true,” Aventurine said. “I buy perfumes and I gamble.”

“If this is how you speak to your dates, no wonder you’re single.” There was a note of warmth in the cool words. “Should we get more wine?”

“I want something else,” Aventurine said. He slid her the menu.

She picked through it, and pointed out her choices. He flagged down the waiter and relayed her words, all too aware of the cool weight of her indifference. She had taken off her hat and was combing her fingers through her hair, all artful muselike ease, staring out of the window so its neon wash could paint her cheekbones sharp. He, too, had noticed the journalist three tables away. He’d already picked his angles, and hadn’t dropped them since.

Their drinks arrived. Peach wine for Jade, something smoky and bitter for him. He let the taste melt into an acrid sweetness on his tongue before he said, “Why the sudden interest in my dating life?”

“Just making sure my investments are on track.” She lifted her glass. “To Qlipoth’s Wall.”

“To the Wall,” he agreed, tapping his glass against hers. “If you’re worried about the future of your investments, there are always ways of extracting guarantees, don’t you think?”

She smiled, slow and rich, fanged in the frosty pink light. “But, my darling, you’d be so much less entertaining if you weren’t always half in love with some new specimen every time we spoke. Really, who is it this time?”

“Not half,” he protested. “Not even a quarter. There’s no one.”

“So you didn't requisition a custom plane to impress a date?” Jade tilted her head. “Look, someone’s coming this way.”

It was the reporter, a beautiful man with long blue hair in a ponytail. “What a surprise to run into such distinguished patrons. May I hope for a few words?”

Jade said warmly, “Our names are fine.”

“Though they double as titles, and perhaps lack a certain something,” Aventurine suggested. “You know us, and we don’t know you.”

“I’m afraid I must be honest,” the reporter said. “My name is Maximillian, and I work for the Pier Point Gazette.”

“What a pointless rag,” Aventurine remarked. “We’ll give you a statement, won’t we? It’s the least we could for such a patient stalker.”

“I would advise youngsters to invest in nephrite, taking care to ensure that they are placing their trust in the real thing,” Jade said, nodding. “That’s my statement. Do pay, darling, I forgot I have to call my father. I’ll leave you to it.” She walked away, heels sinking soundlessly on the plush carpet. Aventurine didn’t watch her go.

“Her father is a snake-oil salesman,” he confided to Maximillian. “If I sleep with you, will you write about it in the Gazette?”

Maximillian didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

“Excellent,” Aventurine said. He wrote a cheque, drained his drink, and placed the glass upside-down over the paper to hold it in place. Condensation traced a crescent on the paper. “We’re done here.”

They went to Maximillian’s flat. Drab and small, it rewarded Aventurine with the unpleasant dig of creaking bedsprings in his back. The fucking was smooth, routine and to the point, more akin to water pouring into a tube than a conjoining of warm bodies. What was pleasant was lying there and imagining the flow of cool water in a hollow structure. The gurgle and moan, the creak of the pipes, the liquid friction both painful and pure. He gave himself to it; he drowned.

Maximillian called him Director in bed. Aventurine rather liked it. He liked lying there, kissed by a mouth that tasted like nothing. Director. He was already seeing himself in newsprint. He wanted someone else to tell his story. He wanted to relinquish his stake. He would read the paper with his morning coffee. He would swallow without wincing a sordid and foreign history.

Director.

He came, shockingly. Afterwards, Maximillian traced the spidery cracks in Aventurine’s chest and asked, “Is the damage permanent?”

Like a door without a handle—from one side, no one could open it. From the other, anyone could push their way in. And Aventurine was always sitting on the mat, just inside, waiting for someone to come in.

He smiled, desiccated. “It goes down to the soul.”

“Must’ve hurt.”

“Fishing for quotes?” Maximillian blushed. “Don’t feel nervous. You’ve been a good friend tonight, so I’ll give you a good one. I don’t care that it hurts—I did it for the glory of the Amber Lord.”

“Does that line work a lot?”

“Everyone loves a zealot,” Aventurine answered absently. “When we die, they say we wanted it.”

“I can’t tell what’s real with you and what isn’t,” Maximillian confessed. “I’ve never had that problem before.”

“In your line of work, it’s a mistake to think the distinction rests on truth.” He stood, starting to dress. He’d lost his underwear somewhere in the living room and wasn’t interested in looking for it; he pulled his shirt and jacket on, then swiftly located his trousers. Come trickled out of him, sticky and cold. Maximillian’s blue hair wasn’t nearly so pretty when it was frizzy from humidity and sex. “Did I give you everything you wanted?”

“I’m sure of a promotion,” Maximillian smiled. He seemed like he’d say something more, but instead he walked Aventurine to the door, and then leaned in for an unscripted kiss. It didn’t last long. Aventurine was too tired to improvise.

~

The invitation came to him by way of, for once, not Jade but Pearl. “You’re showy,” she said, “So show them your face to let them know we still have a thumb in their pie.”

“Up to the elbow,” Aventurine commented. It went unnoticed. All the Stonehearts above him knew they could saddle him with work they hated, and he only had one junior, so in tried and true fashion he attempted to bully her into being his plus one; she turned him down to go to a pre-release screening with her girlfriend. Aventurine disapproved, and made it clear. “You should just confess to Madam Jade already.”

“I can’t confess to her!” Topaz hissed. “I’m a virgin. I have to know how to eat someone out before I try to offer—she’ll never look at me that way in any case.”

“Are you trying to move on or is this a training camp for sex?”

“Whichever works,” Topaz mumbled. Aventurine laughed at her until she hung up; he still had no date.

So he went alone, in creamy peach velvet, a candied smile for the cameras. He was too adult to avoid his problems, too adult to hope for a shield. It was entirely by chance that it had been so long since he’d last seen Ratio. The event was an award ceremony, something or the other, the University’s best and brightest lined up sweating and nervous to receive their prizes from Ratio—depressingly handsome, his navy suit suggesting broad shoulders without being vulgar about it. Aventurine watched and politely clapped in the right places, and made sure to be seen chatting with the students, the researchers, and the Dean. At some point, entirely by chance, he glanced up and met Ratio’s eyes across a clear space in the murmuring crowd.

He was arm in arm with a devastating redhead. She was saying something to him; Ratio wasn’t looking at her. Every detail sharpened to the finest point; the subtle weight of his rings on his hands, the silvery taste of champagne in his throat, the burning tension in his chest. Every sickening beat.

Without thinking, and in a suitably adult fashion, Aventurine retreated from the greenhouse to the lawn, with its cool twilight air, firefly-drones sprinkled decoratively on and above the grass, in the trees. One flitted inquisitively to the knee of his pants, and he grasped it delicately between gloved fingers and threw it back into the flowering bushes.

There were people out here too, in sparse smatterings on the lawn. He found a bench and sat down. Breathed silently through the pulsing pain.

“Director?”

It was one of the doctoral students. He gestured her to the seat next to him and smiled. “Hello,” he said easily. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

“I’m Firoza,” she said, shy as people often were around him when he was preceded by the reputation of the Stonhearts. “Are you alright? You looked like you weren’t doing so well.”

“A minor migraine,” Aventurine said. “Nothing to worry about.” His vision was swimming oddly; things poured into focus, then drained out. Nausea made it harder to maintain a level tone. “Can I help you with anything?”

“Are you sure you don’t need help with anything?” she asked.

“Quite sure,” Aventurine said firmly.

“Okay,” she said. “Um, I saw your—I saw the article in the paper.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

But she was already walking away to her friends, and he sensed in their giggling voices that it had been some kind of dare, and didn’t quite find it in himself to let it matter. Not when the worst of the pain had not yet hit. It was still around the corner, coming ever closer.

He would have given anything for some privacy right now, a room in which he could bend and press his forehead to his knees, vomit without having to answer questions afterwards. It was not in his nature to tap someone on the shoulder only to say it hurts. And so what if it hurt? Which it did, abominable searing ribbons of pain in every breath and strip of bone. It hurt.

If it had to be public, couldn’t he have a dedicated audience? A stage and a spotlight, the most spectacular shattering. He couldn’t find entertainment in his own misery, and he did not want to bore anyone else. He didn’t know how long he sat there, paralysed in the crosswire of sightlines.

Eventually his heart let up. He stood and made his way into the trees to throw up. He washed away the taste with more champagne and returned to socialize.

At the open bar, he flirted with the bartender (black-haired, in her forties, dressed like she deserved to hold a whip) and acquired two shots. He tossed them back in quick succession and looked around, only to be arrested again by the sight of Ratio and his date—girlfriend?—against the parapet that overlooked the rest of the property. Their heads were bent together, but their words were running thin. As he watched they leaned in for a kiss, his arms around her, hers looped over his neck.

He got another drink and thought he’d never seen anybody kiss like that. Had never taken himself for a voyeur, either. It was the isolate perfection of their bodies did him in, the way Ratio moved, stark and lonely against the golden sky. Like he wasn’t with anyone, even when he was; like he was running in the morning, or going to the gym—measured by his own heartbeat.

He could’ve watched them forever, but he gave himself until Ratio tilted his head back, her mouth on his neck. Then he left, and let himself be absorbed into conversation, smiling his candied smile.

Night crept in, cold and tender. The luminous drone-flies dimmed and brightened. When he sat down again his feet were aching. He leaned back and lit a cigarette, letting the nicotine cool what the night’s chill hadn’t touched.

“Mind if we join you?” someone said. Aventurine gestured absently. There were four or five of them—Ratio, and his date, who’d asked. Aventurine recognised her up close. A man with red hair just like hers, a middle-aged professor. “You seem familiar.”

“I’m in the billboards and the papers,” Aventurine said. He tapped off his cigarette and dropped it into an ashtray. “Take your pick.”

“The papers, most recently.”

“Which paper?” Ratio asked.

“Don’t you read the Pier Point Gazette?”

Ratio’s nose wrinkled. “That rag? I will introduce you all—”

Aventurine leaned forward. “I know Eloise.”

“Really,” Ratio said, unbuttoning his jacket to sit. “That’s Edmund, Eloise’s couin. Hence the hair. Vikrant Middlemarch, from the Department of Historiophysics. Eloise, Aventurine.”

“I know Director Aventurine,” Eloise said. “He’s one of our patrons at the Sigurd. But how do you two know each other?”

“Work,” Aventurine said, at the same time that Ratio said, “We’re friends.”

“Rare is the man that Ratio would call a friend,” Vikrant said. “So what is it that you do, Aventurine?”

“I work for the IPC,” Aventurine answered. “Just another cog in the machine, I have to admit.”

“There must be something special about you,” Vikrant insisted.

“There really isn’t.”

God, he was tired. He was rude and it was inexcusable, but he wanted nothing more than to be left alone. And then Ratio said, “Aventurine labours under the weight of many confidentiality clauses, Middlemarch. He can’t say.”

He let himself lean back, grateful for the reprieve, pressing his knuckles to his mouth and listening as the conversation turned academic, department gossip followed by an expiation of grant corruption. Ratio rubbed steady circles into Eloise’s wrist with his thumb. When Aventurine let his eyes wander, he inevitably found Ratio looking at him. Seeing too much.

The party thinned. Occasionally Aventurine rejoined the conversation, doing his part to avoid suspicion. But Vikrant left first, then Edmund rose, and Eloise said, “Coming?” invitingly, to Ratio. Aventurine braced for departure, but Ratio said, “No, you go ahead.”

“Take care,” Eloise said, unaffected, and left with Edmund.

And then they were alone.

Ratio took off his jacket. Lipstick stained the white collar of his shirt. Aventurine thought, without wanting, of delicate fingers sliding a space between worsted lapel and silk shirt, breath filling the gap. But the gap between their bodies defied filling.

Ratio said, circumspect and cool, “We’re not friends?”

“I didn’t think you’d want to associate yourself with me,” Aventurine replied. Made the mistake, weakened by pain, of closing his eyes. It was only for a moment.

“Aventurine—”

“Please, spare me.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Whatever it was,” Aventurine whispered. “If you consider us friends.”

Ratio sighed, and said nothing. Eventually Aventurine stood and made his way to the bar. “A Penicillin and a dirty martini,” he requested. The party was thinning; the drunks were still dancing, a group of giggling students was taking photos with their prizes. He watched them idly. Then he went back to Ratio.

“Here,” Aventurine said, bending to offer him the drink. “I’m sorry. I needed a moment.”

“Sit down, gambler.”

Aventurine sat. This time, he didn’t lean back, but forward, resting his cheek on the heel of his hand. He ached all over, but it was strangely pleasant, like the aftermath of a thorough beating. Ratio sipped his Penicillin. The hum of the drone-flies, uninterrupted by chatter, was almost musical. Their light burnished the gold ornament in Ratio’s hair, stroked the brilliant panes of his face, drew attention to the veins of his hands.

“You were saying something,” Aventurine said, to distract himself. “Before I so rudely interrupted you.”

“No offense was taken,” Ratio replied. “I was going to apologize, as a matter of fact. And I wanted to ask if you’re quite well, but I’ve since figured it out to my own satisfaction.”

“That’s charming.” Aventurine laughed, easily ignoring the first part. “I’m unnecessary to the diagnostic process. And here I was hoping the doctor had something to ask me.”

“Hoping?”

Aventurine straightened, chastised. “No. That was the wrong word.”

“Gambler,” Ratio said again, overwhelmingly gentle. The nickname slid right under Aventurine’s defenses, bypassing his contrite front. “Come here.”

He tried to disobey. He really did. He relocated, when he failed, to Ratio’s side, a polite and proper distance away, clutching his drink. “A public seduction?” he teased. Trying to re-establish some semblance of control. “I might remind you that you’ve been kissing other people.”

“So?” Ratio murmured, silken. He smiled at Aventurine like he knew everything. It was terrifying and beautiful. Like any ace interrogator, Aventurine knew that the real trick was convincing the mark that you already had the answers, so they felt no guilt when they spilled their guts to you. He knew the trick and still he fell for it.

“I won’t be second,” Aventurine protested.

“Do you trust yourself so little?” There was an electric heat in Ratio’s eyes, a honed instinct for the hunt. “Do you think you’d ever lose?”

“Can I answer a different question?” Aventurine offered. Pleaded, really, worn down and wanting mercy. “Anything at all.”

“Alright,” Ratio said generously. “Are you sick?”

Aventurine stiffened. This wasn’t mercy. He drained his drink quickly and laid it aside, then said, “Straight to the point, aren’t you? But I’m afraid that’s the wrong question. I know you don’t trust me, but some cards aren’t in this game. You can ask me something else.”

“It’s a simple enough question,” Ratio said. That electric gleam was simmering into quiet fury. “Of all the things I’ve asked tonight, I could note you haven’t honestly answered a single one.”

“I’m afraid expecting honesty from me was your error.”

“I don’t think it was,” Ratio said crushingly. “I don’t think I make mistakes. But since you insist on prevarication, I’ll prove my own assertions. Give me your wrist.”

Aventurine’s hand fled, only to be arrested against his chest—his body betraying his will and losing. “So eager to touch me, doctor,” he insinuated sleekly, as though it could hide the momentary lapse. As though he didn’t know he’d already lost.

“You’re not entirely untrustworthy,” Ratio responded.

The words worked, despite the cold tone. After all this time he was still a false god that fed on belief. He held his hand out, trembling in the space between them. Ratio caught it in a light grip, as though he wasn’t even afraid Aventurine would snatch it back again, and tugged the glove off. Slid over scarred knuckles and turned it over to unpin the cufflink. Folded back Aventurine’s sleeve, the jacket first, and then the shirt. Measured and warm; it almost didn’t feel real.

And then Ratio was pressing two fingers to his pulse. Aventurine swallowed his nausea and held still. Held very still. Hoping to escape notice.

Seconds ticked by. Ratio frowned.

“Well?” he asked lightly. “Do I have days left or just hours? Either’s alright, I’ve already got a will.”

It was hard to distract Ratio when he was so focused. If only the subject of his focus had been about anything else—it would have been a pleasure to watch him. Finally he said, steady and penetrating, “Does it hurt a lot?”

“No.” Aventurine cracked. “Why would you ask me that? Why?”

“Pain is the one thing I can’t discern,” Ratio said. “I won’t know until you tell me.”

“I’m fine,” Aventurine said, and kissed him. It was the only thing he could do to change the subject—and they were so close already. He kissed Ratio, whose lips still carried the flavor of another person’s makeup, and was rewarded, for a scintillating moment, with fervent pressure. Fingers tight on his wrist. As though Aventurine was the only other person in Ratio’s lonely universe.

And then he was being pushed away, firmly. “I thought you didn’t want to be second.”

Damn Ratio. Damn him and the ache that shut up only for him. “How does it matter?” Aventurine snarled, hard and malicious as blood-mined gemstones. “I’ve been a homewrecker before. I’ll be one again.” Though he’d never leave a mark, never more than a fading citrus sillage. He stood. “Did you expect anything better from me?”

Ratio followed him to his feet. “What are you doing?” he demanded, the frission of his fury striking sparks between them. “Do we forever circle each other like vultures? Where does this spiral conclude?”

“Here, if you want,” Aventurine answered, coolly turning to leave. “I’ll consider us even.”

~

There was no rhythm to the seasons in Pier Point. It grew cold and warm and cold again. He travelled for work for a couple of weeks, and when he came back it was snowing. Every flake fell like a graceful dying star, beautiful engineered crystals as big as his fingertips. They’d be smaller at night when there was nobody to impress. He sat on the pavement with his suitcase and just watched the snow for a long time, until the white of it began to burn his eyes.

Once, on Penacony, deep in the Golden Dream in the Moment of Stars, Aventurine had managed to convince Ratio to dance with him. He’d already convinced two other people to lay their hearts on the line for him and no matter what happened to his own, the thought of letting them down chilled his sweat. He barely rested, barely ate, courting death and running from life. Only Ratio saw it all. Aventurine couldn’t seem to convince him to look away.

And that night he hadn’t tried. He’d given in, stepped into the spotlight, tugged Ratio onto the club floor and convinced him to dance. He was good at it, was the thing. Where’d the doctor learn that move?

Wouldn’t you like to know? Come on, gambler, I thought you wanted to dance.

Sweat in their hair, sweat in their eyes, all the club’s lights electric beyond belief. Feet aching in his shoes, even in the dream, blistered and overused, and worth every moment. It was worth it to die because he’d once felt so alive. So alive. Seeing himself in Ratio’s eyes. Smiling through the haze.

Now he found himself wondering if that had ever happened. If it hadn’t been another trick of the dream. He couldn’t complain if it was; he simply wanted to know what he could trust.

But what right did he have to want something so ridiculous?

This, then, was freedom—a freefall minus the thrill. Aventurine crushed a handful of snow in his hands and went up to his apartment. Upscale, minimalist, black and gold and white, he used it more like a walk-in closet than a home. He’d once or twice half-heartedly considered redecorating, but it was always so much work. Besides, he liked the emptiness, the tall ceilings and cream walls, the conditioned air, the feathery quiet that permeated it. No breeze stirred it. He was always cold. His singular indulgence came in the form of scented candles that he rarely remembered to light. But he never once woke up thinking of deserts.

Nevertheless mornings were routinely painful. Every time he slept, the pain faded, and when he woke, it came back with a vengeance, like notifications flooding into a restarted phone. He took to waking up with the dawn, just so he could coax himself into a semblance of healthy humanity by the time he went to work.

Life became routine. Aventurine didn’t complain, although he found himself a trifle bored. Often he felt like crying for no reason, and practiced card tricks or coin tricks until the urge faded.

At a corporate mixer in an art gallery with some Xianzhou Amicassadors, he saw Benjamin again. He was arm in arm with a pink-haired woman. The gallery wasn’t closed to visitors despite the mixer, so Aventurine didn’t have to wonder how Benjamin or his wife (ex-wife?) knew the Foxians. And he’d intended to avoid them, but between one conversation and another, he found himself standing next to Benjamin’s partner—Isabele, if Aventurine recalled correctly. He smiled politely at her. “Do you enjoy this style of art?” he inquired.

What looked from a distance like paint splatters, on closer examination, revealed fantastical human and animal figures that emerged from the chaos. Just looking at them made Aventurine’s head ache. The colors were garish and upsetting.

“Quite,” Isabele said. “They’re very interesting, don’t you think?”

“I find that they do speak to something fundamental in the human condition,” Aventurine said noncommittally. “How is your husband doing?”

“My husband?” Isabele returned blankly. “I’m not married. If you mean my boyfriend, he’s around here somewhere.” She peered around. “We haven’t known each other that long.”

“I’m sorry,” Aventurine said. “I used to know him, a while ago. I don’t know why I assumed you were married.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Isabele replied. “Do you know, it’s not even the first time someone’s mistaken us for a married couple. Ben!” She waved him closer. Ben gave Aventurine a hostile look, and slipped his arm around Isabele’s shoulders.

“Isabele and I were just talking about this painting,” Aventurine said. “How are you? Long time, no see, eh?”

“There’s a reason for that,” Benjamin muttered. “What did you think about the painting?”

“Mister…” Isabele peered at him.

“Aventurine.”

“Mister Aventurine thinks that the paintings speak to something fundamental in the human condition.”

“Does he, now?” Benjamin sounded suspicious. “Mister Aventurine’s knowledge of art leaves a lot to be desired.”

“I do okay for myself,” Aventurine reassured. Had he said something stupid?

“I’m going to speak to the curator,” Isabele said. She patted Benjamin. “Be good, darling. I’m right over there.” She wandered off. Benjamin gazed after her, guilt-ridden and all the more devoted for it.

“I’m sure you think I’m a terrible person,” Benjamin said, after a moment.

“I don’t,” Aventurine lied.

“You wouldn’t get it.” They looked at the painting together. “It was like a second chance. Like getting to start over. She’s happier now.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, right?” Aventurine clapped Benjamin’s shoulder and left. Outside the gallery, he smoked his way through half a pack until he could blame the cigarettes for his nervy, stretched-rubber misery. A second chance. He hadn’t even gotten the first one.

But he couldn’t complain; he was rich. He put his wealth to use rigging a spheroid racing simulator championship and bet on the outcome. It was thrilling until he won. Then he was bored again.

Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t gotten his hands on Ratio. He was a creature built for gut-wrenching edges and dizzying falls—a sure thing had never been his style. He’d break every bone in his body before he’d admit he wanted to be caught.

He went down to the seashore. Cruise ships and liners set stately courses along the horizon. It was what he did when he wanted to remember the texture of sand. But in Pier Point even the beach was strewn with gems, glittering the crystalline loneliness of the pure. Beautiful stones cut his feet as he walked along the edge of the water, too beautiful for him to mind the pain. On Pier Point, as they said, even bleeding was a luxury. And the seas were made of red gold.

He went back to his apartment late in the night. And dreamed, by turns, of Anton and Revashe. In his sleep he tried to save them. But when he awoke he found himself perversely relieved by the fact of their deaths. The past was only beautiful in the place it was found.

Sometimes when he awoke, he found himself in tears, strange surging sobs that he didn’t notice until he was in their throes. There was no sadness to accompany it. He wished for it. He ached for it. Every chamber drew him blanks. Like a crime scene before the crime, he wanted someone to come and leave their bloody fingerprints all over his heart.

On a warm and humid day, Aventurine went to the opera. Eloise Franzen was an actress, and her company was renowned across this half of the galaxy for their beautiful tragedies. Once, he’d asked Jade how a capital of commerce could boast such a vibrant array of arts—Jade had looked at him with pity, and told him that people who owned more individual wealth than some planets had to be adequately supplied with things to spend that money on, or they’d become insane, and moreover insufferable. So he found his own pet projects to throw money into—research grants in the University, custom spaceships, fashion and perfumes and ever-more-elite ways to gamble his fortune. And the opera, which he funded because Jade funded it, and thought it useful for him to acquire a reputation for culture and sophistication no matter how much it reeked of dressing the family dog as a virtuoso pianist.

He went alone and watched the show, unmoved and numb. Afterwards he went backstage to meet Eloise. “How was it?” she asked. She was taking dripping clusters of jewels out of her hair.

“I cried like a baby,” Aventurine said.

“They all do,” Eloise said. “Though I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a baby; they don’t cry like that,” she gestured to his face. He checked it in her mirror, puzzled, but there was nothing wrong with it. “We’re going out for drinks, do you wanna come with us? The fresh recruits have never met you.”

So he went to a bar with the actors and stagecrafters of the Tournament Sigurd. It was a good night, one of the better ones in recent times. One of them put a hand on his chest and drew him in for a soft kiss, and he indulged, but only for a minute. The erratic scrape of his heart was far too loud in his ears. It burned like a sparkler, crackling brighter as it dwindled. “I have to work,” he said, “All that money won’t make itself. Why don’t I get you a cab home?”

“It’s a bit early,” Eloise said, overhearing. “Are you going home already?”

“Just getting one for Ilshad here,” Aventurine replied, but Ilshad had vanished in the crowd. Aventurine kept moving. Made his rounds, said his goodbyes, turned down another proposition. It was exhausting, but it hadn’t been a bad night. That was all Aventurine could bring himself to say, these days: not a bad day, not a bad time. Until he learned to feel grateful again.

When he got home, there was a package waiting for him.

It was nondescript, wrapped in brown paper, somewhat bulky but not heavy. Oddly shaped. Aventurine’s throat constricted at the sight, so incongruous in his bare and impersonal home, its sure and careful knots evidence of a sender who did not own tape.

He could have fetched scissors. Instead he sat on the white pleather sofa and undid each knot by hand. Stalling for time, maybe. Every dropped piece of thread wound into a knot in his stomach. Finally he pulled apart folds of crumple-marked brown paper. His breath hitched.

What had seemed like one delivery was really two. A translucent foil bag full of pill bottles, a folded piece of paper tucked behind them. He tore open the bag and pulled out the scrip, which was a printed timetable for a week, dosages and medications all marked neatly. For a moment, he almost didn’t realize what it was for. How it must be used. He simply held it, dumbly—a piece of paper as heavy as a heart.

He reached for the other box. It contained two glass jars. One was full of loose dark leaves, simply marked laurel tea. The other held pale honey. And there was a note, in a stark and clear hand:

Now we’re even.

He thought, strangely, of holding the muzzle of a gun to his chest, smiling like he knew how the world would end—all bangs, no whimpers. He’d still be smiling when he walked out of that room with a bullet lodged between his ribs and every chip in his pockets. He never doubted himself when he gambled. He hadn’t doubted himself then, staring into Ratio’s eyes with all his fears silenced behind his back.

But there was no gun to his chest now. Quite the opposite. How easy it was to disarm him. Without weapons. Does it hurt a lot?

Yes. More than bullets. Yes. He pressed a hand to his chest and started to laugh.

~

He was arranging the pills on his desk and admiring their variety when Topaz entered—without Numby and without knocking, too fast for him to hide his treasure. He tried to put a hand out to cover them, then seamlessly turned the gesture around to gather them into his other palm. “What are the medicines for?” she asked. “Since when are you sick?”

“Not sick,” Aventurine said, vibrating slightly. At eleven, his alarm went off, and he tossed the whole lot into his mouth and chugged them down. “How can I help you today?”

“I wanted to go over this budget proposal with you before the meeting.” She slammed a sheaf of papers on his table along with a handful of highlighters, cueing the thunder that rolled off the grey clouds outside. Aventurine slid his dainty laptop out of the way.

“Is this necessary?” he asked, but he was already picking up the pink highlighter with trembling fingers. “Where’s Numby?”

“Spa day,” Topaz said, dragging a chair around to his side so that she could sit next to him. There was no need; the desk was enormous and absolutely clear. Aventurine relocated to sit on top of it, picking up the top sheet of paper and scanning over the contents. “I’m sitting in your chair.”

He nodded, tapping the highlighter against his teeth. Then he opened his laptop and tapped in a search one-handed, and Topaz tugged the papers towards herself and they got into it.

The meeting itself was in the evening, at a cloud lounge in the Paramounts. The Intelligentsia Guild was also there—that is, Ratio was there. He didn’t look at Aventurine. He was busy discussing something with his colleagues. Aventurine’s own colleagues were making snide conversation around their side of the table. And his mouth was dry.

Something hummed awake inside him. A wanting. A long-forgotten weakness wedged in his teeth, waiting for him to be able to taste it again. In the near-absence of pain, it had silently found purchase; he hadn’t seen it before this. The pain wasn’t entirely gone; it drifted back in tides. Some nights, even now, he couldn’t stand it. He’d curl up around himself in his bed, arms tight against his body. Counting the minutes until the next dose.

Now, he realized, it wasn’t just the medicines he was waiting for. He thought of Ratio when he took them, only then. A reminder antithetical to anguish.

It was late when the meeting ended. Most of their colleagues drifted to the buffet. Aventurine assiduously took out his nightly pills and uncapped a small bottle of water to chug them down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ratio staring.

Aventurine got up and turned his back, deliberately heading over to where Topaz was talking to a Guild scientist. “Are you doing anything after this?” he murmured to her.

“I can’t hang out,” she said, distracted. “Sorry.” He touched her elbow lightly and stepped away. Walked past Sugilite sampling the buffet’s offerings, past where Ratio was talking to a grey-haired woman, to the small circuitous corridor that led out of the lounge to a small sky-garden, bio-engineered trees clinging to survival in the thin atmosphere. There, Aventurine sucked in a deep breath, and then another.

“Want a cigarette?”

Aventurine tilted his head to look at Ratio, dressed for the weather in a long brown coat. “I was waiting for you,” he confessed. Ratio held out a pack. Aventurine shook his head. “My doctor wants me to stop smoking.”

“Your doctor must be quite talented,” Ratio commented, “To make you improve your lifestyle.”

He put the packet away, but Aventurine held out his hand for the lighter. He clicked it on and held it steady, letting the heat touch his fingertips until it was too much. Then he said, “He is. A rare talent, that is. There’s nobody like him.” He smiled, clicking the lighter a few more times before surrendering it. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“I was thinking of leaving, actually,” Ratio replied. His gaze slanted at Aventurine, inquiring, and Aventurine suddenly wanted to hide. There it was, suspended between them. The wanting. Like a shy creature that hid under tables when too many people were around. He didn’t even know what he wanted. It was enough to feel it, sweet longing in his throat. Perhaps it had always been there, unnoticed.

They commandeered one of the transparent lift-pods that shuttled between the cloud lounge and the ground. All of Pier Point lay under them, a great gleaming reef in the rich blue sea. Ratio selected a landing bay from the menu. Aventurine rested his elbows on the railing that ran around the pod, pulling off one glove so he could press his bare fingers to the thick glass.

The lift-pod began its slow, spiralling descent. Ratio finished with the screen and came up next to him. There were seats along two sides of the pod, but he, like Aventurine, eschewed sitting for the view.

Shoulder to shoulder they gazed at the ever-distant world. His presence was an austere counterbalance to Pier Point’s gravity. Aventurine could fall into him.

But the full weight of his regard was too much to bear. As a sleeping man might feel, on his face, the sun cracking through a half-open door. Sleep still maintained a hold on him, even as the day slid in, claiming the whole room with an inch of light. Caught between two poles, Aventurine didn’t know what to do, whether to retreat into comfort or surrender to this warm pressure. He found himself thinking of all the times they’d brushed past each other, without succumbing, but repetition couldn’t make some habits stick. So much for a lost cause.

“Thank you,” he said clumsily. “For the medicines.”

“Don’t mention it,” Ratio replied. He turned, leaning backwards with his elbows on the railings. Some sculptor’s dream; he never slouched, and even in a well-tailored suit his lean body was apparent. Aventurine wanted to touch him, just to admire him. In the way one would touch a statue in a museum. In the hope that it would come to life. “It’s been a while since we met like this.”

“Oh?” He bit his lips guiltily, then asked anyway, “Did you miss me?” Ratio didn’t answer. It was enough. He turned away. “I know that I was the one to end things.”

“Yes,” Ratio said suddenly. Aventurine gripped the railing and lifted his head. He didn’t mean to look at Ratio, but he was right there, before him reflected in the glass; his expression open. Shockingly and unmistakably tender. “If I did?”

All of Aventurine’s insides felt like glass—brittle panes on the verge of breaking. Unable to feel his voice in his throat, he managed to say, “Is that wise?”

“Wisdom and foolishness aren’t always opposite,” Ratio answered, with faded bitterness.

“No,” Aventurine said. “No, they aren’t. You haven’t been the only—when you sent me the medicines, I was delighted, because I’d be in your debt again. I suppose I am that sort of reckless gambler, to relish the aftermath of losing so much.”

“And is that all you know?” Ratio asked. “Owing and being owed?”

“I work with what I have,” Aventurine said waspishly. “We all have our own ways of doing things, don’t we?” Ratio yanked Aventurine around, face-to-face, searching intently. Aventurine felt the glass at his back and realized he was cornered, with nowhere to run, while Ratio wanted something from him and wouldn’t say what it was. Despite the heat in his cheeks and ears, he searched himself as well. Found little of note or worth. But poor men gambled with what pennies they had, didn’t they? “I missed you too.”

It meant nothing. An absence where once there had been a shadow of a presence. They’d never claimed enough space in each other’s lives to leave a deeper mark. And Ratio’s face gave little away, no matter how hard Aventurine looked. They were alike: hungry reticent creatures.

Finally, he stepped away. Folded his arms on the railing, leaving Aventurine foilsick. Wishing he’d said nothing. “Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”

“I think it’s the best I’ll ever get from you.” The set of his shoulders belied the indifference in his voice.

Ah, but that hurt. “Since when have you ever wanted anything more?”

“Since when?” Ratio said tightly.

“You didn’t say anything,” Aventurine pressed. “You didn’t say a word.”

“What would I say?” Ratio sounded surly. “Even in the unlikely event that you had any notion of reciprocating—what would be the point, but to remind us of what we can’t have?”

Aventurine recoiled. He didn’t know what to say for a moment. It was one thing to read meaning into Ratio’s actions, and know that he was being read in turn—another to have the extrapolation before him, inarguable. Self-evident. “I didn’t say anything either,” Aventurine admitted. “I can’t blame you when I hardly gave you any reason to believe.”

“I didn’t think,” Ratio said, withdrawing. More careful now, still heavy. “That you blamed me. When you walked away that night, I thought we’d be finally free of each other. But I’ve thought as much before.”

“Are we to be prisoners in a dilemma forever, then?” Aventurine didn’t know when his shoulders had hunched in like this, defensive, staring down unseen at a world that never seemed to come into reach. He’d known it was a long ride down—he’d hoped they could kiss, and skip the talking. Kiss and forget, forget and kiss again. “If we’re so predictable, then why can’t we escape?”

“Predictable and faithless,” Ratio said dryly. “The fault’s not yours alone, either.”

Aventurine closed his eyes. “It’s rude of you to read my mind,” he murmured. “When I never know what’s going on in yours. I can only ever guess, while you lift the thoughts right from my head.”

“Your guesses are worth a great deal to some,” Ratio replied.

“You couldn’t,” Aventurine hesitated, “I suppose you couldn’t imagine how we’d live. Any universe in which we’d work out, when nothing keeps us together, and so much keeps us apart. And what good is desire, without an anchor?” He added, wryly, “I’m known to be something of a ship in the night.”

“As I’m no lighthouse in the dark.”

Aventurine shivered, and turned to Ratio. Everything that flew away returned to the ground somehow. “If you’re going to say something like, ‘but for you’…”

“Aren’t you more than capable of carving your own exceptions?” Despite the jab Ratio’s voice held a reserve of gentleness. Aventurine ducked his head to hide a bitter smile. “We’re almost here.”

Another minute. The lift-pod drifted to a stop halfway down the east slope of the Paramounts, in a landing bay circled by poplars and elms, their damp leaves sheened with the duplicated glow of the floating waterfall gardens on the other side. Their own path down was lit only by shaded yellow streetlamps, and there were no taxis here at this time of the night. Ratio slid his hands into his pockets, scouring information from their surroundings.

Did he have to be so tall and so beautiful? There was no one quite like him. No one with his stillness, his unnerving ability to recast the world into something at once lucent and free.

If this was all Aventurine got for the rest of his life, he thought he could learn to be happy—or the misery would be lovely. He’d perfect the art of tribute: Friday nights that ended alone, a pink diamond ring gathering dust in his closet, cabinets stocked with everything Ratio loved to drink. And every year on Ratio’s birthday, he’d buy the latest Petrel, douse it in gasoline, and watch it burn.

And he’d attend every award show and guest lecture, sit in the back. Just another fan, he’d say to anyone who asked. No, I don’t know him. And Aventurine would marry a man while carrying on an affair.

Eventually Ratio would stop recognising him. They were built to orbit different stars.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ratio asked. “Let’s go.”

Aventurine tripped into step next to him. “Nothing.” Easy, cheerful. An arm looped around his shoulders. “Didn’t you drive here?” he asked, unsteady.

“I parked below. We don’t all have your deep pockets, gambler. It was cheaper down there.”

“Next time, just send me the bill.”

Ratio did not respond. Aventurine looked at his shoes. All evening they’d sheltered from the deluge above the clouds, but on the ground the consequences caught up: a liquid chill in the air, mist on the mountainside, water and helifuel and yellow light all pooling in the asphalt, like northern lights pasted onto the ungrateful earth.

They walked down the road. Ratio’s arm was still around him, and Aventurine didn’t want him to take it away. If this was all he got, then he wanted to bite into the sweetness until the rot stained his teeth. And still he was afraid, somewhere, always. Afraid that he’d lose all he could and find something he’d yet to stake, some enduring likelihood of a mistake he hadn’t yet found it in himself to make. But they were standing so close, so close the fear melted into lucid resignation.

“It’s a nice night for a stroll, right?”

“It’s quite the walk, actually.” There was a faint smile in the way Ratio said it.

“You don’t think I can keep up.”

“I think we’re going to find out.” He was grinning a bit now, somewhat mean. Smug that he worked out and Aventurine didn’t. Then the expression faded. Casually, he said, “New perfume today?”

Aventurine took a minute to breathe, caught in a sudden, sour desire to be elsewhere. “You noticed?”

“Of course, I…” he hesitated. Aventurine thought there was nothing of course about such attention to detail, but he didn’t say that. Thought if he waited, Ratio would say something clever and clean that left no room for the errors of intimacy or yearning. “Of course.”

Was that all? All of Aventurine’s better sense told him to leave it alone. Of course he couldn’t listen, “It seems like there might be more to it than that.”

They were still walking, but Ratio withdrew his arm and swept his hair out of his eyes. Aventurine’s bad ankle creaked on a loose paving stone. “There was a bottle of perfume,” Ratio said finally. “That ended up among my things on the way back from Penacony.”

Aventurine remembered that bottle; it had proved irreplaceable.

Ratio continued, “It broke. My clothes smelled of it for months.”

“Must’ve driven you insane,” Aventurine commented shakily.

“It did.” Ratio shook his head, as though trying to clear away the sense-memory. “It was unbearable, and then just annoying. And then…”

“And then?”

“I grew to love the scent,” Ratio said.

Suddenly, Aventurine couldn’t breathe. He stopped walking, forcing Ratio to stop too. Gripped the lapels of Ratio’s coat urgently. “I thought we’d established that this is a bad idea.”

“It is,” Ratio lowered his head. He seemed, as he was, just a man—tired and forlorn. “It is.” His fingers over the back of Aventurine’s hand. “But it wasn’t just the perfume.”

“I’m not worth the risk,” Aventurine said rapidly. “I’m annoying, I’m needy, I want too much attention. I’m jealous and reckless. I make bad decisions. I snort coke at work and drink every weekend. I’m shallow, and vain, and a workaholic.”

Ratio didn’t have the grace to be surprised. He looked steadily down at Aventurine. “You are all of those things. Should I add more? I hate your gambling. You cause chaos and revel in it. You lie all the time, often to little gain. You waste yourself. I don’t know how long you walked around with your heart in pieces, never asking for help—I don’t even know why. You’re incomprehensible. I was once jealous of your luck, but the thought of living your life disgusts me. You’re ruthless, and most ruthless of all with your best self, who languishes in some forgotten corner of your cluttered mind.”

Aventurine’s face burned so hard he almost couldn’t feel it—to be so insolently reduced to filth by a plainly delivered handful of words felt cruel, and hot, all the hotter for how accurate it was. It was cruelly hot, to be insolently reduced to filth by a plainly delivered handful of words; so thoroughly, and so accurately. “I’m not—it just didn’t occur to me,” he tried, childishly defensive. “It didn’t occur to me that something could be done about my heart.”

“It didn’t occur to you?”

“Oh, don’t start,” Aventurine shot back. “You’re hardly better. You’re arrogant, and a hypocrite, and you claim to love mundanity but despise it at the same time. In fact, you’re the greatest hypocrite I’ve ever met, including myself. You scare everyone you talk to and secretly you enjoy it, though you pretend you’re above such pettiness. And not only do you think you’re better than everybody else, you’re still angry that Nous hasn’t validated that judgement.”

“You forgot to mention that I’m condescending,” Ratio said. “I take two hours in the bathroom almost every day. I like to talk, and I don’t always like to listen. I leave most parties early. I don’t clean the coffee machine after I use it. I hate being comforted, no matter how bad I’m feeling. I’m persistent to a grave fault. I am also a workaholic.”

“I,” Aventurine started, then gave up and leaned forward, resting his forehead against his knuckles, still clenching Ratio’s lapels. An odd, untethered laugh bubbled up from somewhere inside him. “Well, isn’t this perfect? Why did we wait so long? Why didn’t we try?”

“Fear,” Ratio said. “It grew so late.”

Aventurine stepped back, slowly. Made himself straighten. “I thought I’d move on. Didn’t you?” A night breeze ruffled their hair, but he was too-warm, insulated by the suit’s layers and humidity. Too-warm and too-open. As though there was a crack in the plaster itself.

“I gave up a long time ago on finding happiness,” Ratio said. “Let alone—what I really wanted.”

His voice was crude, opaque with the residue of real emotion that hadn’t yet been refined into something more transparent and less revealing. “I understand,” Aventurine said quietly. He did; he understood that airless feeling, living in a bubble out of which the world was visible but resolutely out of reach. But if he let the world in, he’d drown. “What did you really want?”

“Something that would hold me to what’s real—the world that’s neither mundane nor genius. I saw that world. But it was always, always behind another door.”

Aventurine said nothing, for a moment. They’d been apart for so long, it was a struggle to come closer. He didn’t know where to stand. Where to place his eyes. Like picking a lock, it was a slow and awkward process, figuing out where each thing went.

“And you?” Ratio asked.

“And me?” He shuffled to Ratio’s side, and they continued to walk down the slope. “I’ve nothing for you. Nothing on me.” He tried to shrug, tried to seem casual; it didn’t work. “Have you ever been to the dessert—a place you know you won’t find water for miles? You really do start seeing it everywhere. And it’s never there, you know. It’s never there. You’re dying and you’re thirsty and you see the oasis in the distance and you know it’s a lie, but you go towards it anyway, because you need something, you need to walk towards something. And you wait for it to vanish. But you’re left waiting...”

“Because?”

Because they were both made of stone. Because something clicked, and Aventurine felt that door open, the future stealing through. Because—

“It’s real,” Aventurine said. “This time, it’s real.”

~

“Will someone play poker with me?” Aventurine asked, walking around, his mind assaulted by springtime colors and scents, each one a garden. He alone was fruitless, a seed of winter biding the thaw. “Will anyone play poker with me?”

Obsidian tugged on his collar. “So you can wring us dry? No thanks. Look elsewhere.” She tripped him with that same grip, laughed when he stumbled. Undeterred, he kept moving.

“Anyone?”

“Me,” Ratio said, unexpectedly. He drained his glass. “I will. Poker is a kind of math.”

A handful of professors, and Pearl, and a guy Aventurine recognized vaguely as Topaz’s secretary—they commandeered a table. No one would let Aventurine deal, no matter how earnestly he showed them his empty hands, his mastery of card tricks. “I’m an honest man,” he complained; no one heard him. Ratio had another glass of champagne. It was the same sparkling gold as his eyes. Aventurine, moderately tipsy, thought he wouldn’t mind taking a sip of either.

Oh, but his luck was good. The champagne bubbles were in his stomach, bouyant. Sour and fragrant. He turned cards lazily. Bet all he had, raised every stake.

Lost. Lost again. Lost a lot of money, and a car. A watch, two rings. Drunk, wound through with pure misery and pure delight, unmixed and bright. The colors swam and wounded Aventurine’s overwrought senses. When he could see out of them again, Ratio had won—won everything.

He kept winning. Aventurine bet, increasingly desperate. He bet all he had, and lost it all too, even himself. For champagne eyes and strong hands. He bet his coat. Ratio laughed, and laughed. “Keep it.”

“No,” Aventurine insisted. “This is the one, I can feel it.”

Lost again. Laughter found him too, swirling up out of the sweet sweet terror. Nothing left to bet now. Nothing left to lose. He’d always wanted to be so free. He couldn’t stop laughing. Was glad when the others left, leaving him alone with Ratio, and the dealer, a young woman in a smoky cocktail dress. She was stacking cards and chips. Aventurine wanted to climb on the table, so he did.

“I’ll come there,” Ratio said. Still laughing, warm as fresh beeswax. “Wait.”

“No,” Aventurine said breathlessly. He sat on the table, legs swinging gracelessly. Ratio staggered to his feet, but when he walked, he didn’t sway all that much. Didn’t, at all. Maybe it was in Aventurine’s mind. “Hi.”

Ratio put an arm on the edge of the table. Another on Aventurine’s shoulder. Grip too tight.

Aventurine raised his hands, wiggling his fingers until they found purchase in the lapels of Ratio’s dark green suit. Tugged, for the sake of tugging, needing something to hold. He was a bird, he thought. They were both birds. One on the grass-dark ground, the other in the whispering crowns of trees. Separated by a fall—or an improbable rise. Tonight nothing felt improbable. He had lost even his own life.

“Come,” Ratio said. “Come inside.”

He wanted to collect. Agreeably, Aventurine followed. “As good a time as any,” he said to no one in particular, so they wouldn’t be surprised when he didn’t come out. Didn’t know what would happen now. It wasn’t scary.

Wasn’t it? It was.

Against the door in the bedroom. Against the shirts and bags that hung from the hooks on the back. Aventurine closed his eyes. “Take it,” he whispered. “You won. Won’t you collect?”

“Should I?” Ratio’s mouth was on the side of Aventurine’s neck. It wasn’t a kiss; it felt like it belonged there. Behind his teeth he held the sun. When he dug canines near an artery, Aventurine thought of Heimmlich maneuvers. An infusion of daylight to the nocturnal kind. “I’d have to take you too.”

“Anywhere,” Aventurine said, with no passion for lying. He felt helium in every vowel. “You won. You won me. You own me now. I’m your slave.”

They were both drunk. Ratio’s smile darkened and did not slip. And Aventurine smiled back, helplessly. “I’ll put my own collar around your neck, then,” Ratio said, and sank again to place his mouth in the delicate untouched place just under Aventurine’s ear, just behind. “Proof that I survived your nights. I want to take off your clothes.”

“Because you won,” Aventurine agreed. He should have felt threatened. He should not have felt so free.

“And because you lost.”

The fact of his defeat reverberated through him, white lightning, summer storm. All his thresholds were invitations. I want to take off your clothes. Simple, naked relief. He held out his wrists.

Ratio unpinned the cufflinks and tossed them aside, unbuttoned the wrists, inside and out. Dragged Aventurine closer by his tie, then undid his belt first, letting his pants slide to his ankles. He found himself with his own gloves in his mouth, reducing him to soft whimpers, earnest whines, his gemlike entreating eyes. He was stripped with method and patience, each layer of cloth peeled back until he stood there in just his skin. His cracked and broken skin.

Ratio lay his warm hand flat against the spidering lines. “Aventurine?”

“It’s yours,” Aventurine said, blunt and damaged. All too fragile. “This too is yours.”

“Mine,” Ratio agreed, and pulled Aventurine closer, into his arms. They stumbled like that to the bed, where Aventurine thought finally, and Ratio draped himself over Aventurine and shaded his hand over Aventurine’s chest, considerate, yearning despite all their nearness. Aventurine’s vision blurred. “Sleep with me.”

“Like this?” Aventurine asked.

“Like this,” Ratio confirmed. “Just like this.”

The door was closed, Aventurine noticed, the last thing on his mind before sleep pulled him under. The door was closed, and they were both inside.