tampering

  Nina walked back to the front of the bus, again. Aine met her first, again.

  "Aw, you washed it off," Aine said.

  It?

  "Um. I mean, if I were covered in it, I probably would have done the same."

  "Should I not have showered?" Nina asked.

  "No, no. I only thought that it could be put to use later. It could be collected, with an octagram."

  "What is 'it'...?"

  "Oh, the ichor, of course! Not that you're supposed to take that stuff into you... most people can't handle it."

  "Ah."

  "And good morning, and I hope you're feeling well, and well done. Do take better care of yourself, okay? Poor Emiliya has been fretting about you."

  Emi sat next to Sophie, and pointed out the window.

  "It's so interesting outside!"

  Was it?

  Nina looked. Aine copied her. Sophia remained seated.

  Nina didn't get it.

  "The modern London is very different from the London in the movies, I think," Emi said.

  "Which movies?" Aine asked.

  "Back in Adelaide I had been binging war movies..." Emi said. "World war movies. The conventional ones... Seven, Napoleon, the two Antideutsche Kriege. The Babylon War, too. Obviously. It's different. More planned. When did that happen?"

  "Cause the War of the Generals hollowed it out, duh?" Aine said.

  Hollow. Nina didn't really know what a full city looked like. London really was planned: no natural roads. They were stuck in traffic in straight line paths, grids or radial. Streets of identical flats fanned out at regular angles? Did Emi expect to see the remnants of... what was the dynasty? Tudor? Or had the name been replaced? Thatched roofs, Edwardian opulence?

  There were probably those things elsewhere. There was no unity in this world. Was there even a single city on the surface of the Earth populated solely by a single style of architecture? Nina doubted it.

  "That's quite a simple explanation," Emi said. "I don't know."

  "Not everything has to be complex," Aine said. "The War of the Generals is complex enough as is, anyway."

  No longer paused at the red light they went into a richer neighbourhood. There was a reinforcement enchantment. Nina couldn't see the edifice it was erected on but she could see the magic, and the style was from the War of the Generals. It shimmered in the air, iridescent.

  It was so overwhelming. Nina pointed at it.

  "What am I meant to be looking at?" Emi asked

  "There's magic," Aine said.

  "Ah. Sorry," Nina said.

  "It's okay."

  Nina had stayed in a hostel for a few days before this. That neighbourhood was less clean than this one. Less green. It was less rich, much less, and it was obvious even to Nina: Shin Kumamoto had too little to really have wealth inequality.

  What had it been called…

  Mayfair?

  "It's easy to get lost in all this," Nina said. She had, a few days ago.

  "Sign up to the mapping app of the city you're staying in!" Aine said. "The Acacia has a single set of services for everything, right? It's a nation-state with a government. You don't get that on the surface of the Earth, so be prepared to connect to city intranets, pay attention to the guidelines. If not the civil stuff the information hygiene guidelines. And download everything they recommend, each time, okay!"

  Nina nodded. She checked her cargo skirt pocket for her phone.

  It wasn't there.

  Wait, obviously it wasn't there? She had changed her clothes.

  Her seifuku didn't have... she hadn't carried it outside during the battle. Unless she'd been wearing her crossbag and somehow not noticed.

  She could recall it, but it contained information. Using her ability on information contaminated it, opening it up to access from the abyss. That was useful sometimes, sure, but it would render her phone a live instrument of magic.

  Michiko had given it to her. She didn't want to request a new one from Haze House's workshop. She wouldn't have the time to stick around and wait for a private workshop to refurbish another.

  Where could it—

  "Wait."

  Aine went over to her bag. She put something in Nina's hands.

  "Sorry, just remembered! You dropped it. When you went outside."

  There it was.

  "Your friends are super mean, by the way," Aine said.

  "Huh?"

  "The contact field said 'Michiko'?"

  Fuck.

  Her notifications were—

  Her phone had been immersed in a black pool. Ichor, malediction and it sunk. Information corruption but it wasn't her fault but it had no apparent effect. Nina could feel it and it made her sick, so a normal person would be…

  "Emi hit the button by accident and we ended up answering the call, haha..."

  Emi looked a little sullen.

  "Emi, are you okay?" Nina asked. Michiko definitely shouted at her, and someone as normal as Emi shouldn't have been answering calls, if her phone had been cursed so badly.

  "Ah? I'm fine. You're very kind for asking," Emi said.

  There were so many notifications. A little scary…

  They hadn't spoken all too much, Nina with Reiko and Michiko. Reiko had tried to fix her. Nina couldn't be fixed so easily. She spent her last days with them in Albany her head spinning fucking spinning heartthrobbing, so desperately seeking a way out. For them, from them—fuck...

  They were dimly aware of her plans. Reiko's cheating ability 'connected' things. It was how they met. Bored, 11, Reiko had thrust a line out to the middle of nowhere. Nina had picked it up on her phone. So little reached Shin Kumamoto, normally.

  Penpals. Best friends. Some crybaby from the normal Earth that Nina had to and wanted to take care of, until…

  Nina turned her phone off.

  "Hm. Anything we need to worry about?" Aine asked.

  "No."

  Close the line to the black web and Reiko's golden thread. Forget about it. Forwards. Put those two further away from her. Focus on Route 13. Forget about the rest. Why did everyone else need to know about Reiko, whose gold would blot everything out? Why should they know about April Kauzaki, whose blue had stained everything that Nina was?

  They would be victorious. Nina didn't need to complicate it.

  "Any tragic backstory you want us to know about?" Aine asked.

  "Not really..." Nina said. That was an emphatic no.

  "Okay!" Aine said. "Wanna know about the amazing things that happened in the bus while you were all sleepy?"

  Not really. "That sounds nice," Nina said.

  "Is this the Marzena incident?" Emi said.

  Sophia, who had been reading the two thousand page tome, perked up.

  "That's in a bit," Aine said. Sophia put her head back down. "First, do you want to know what Haio is short for?"

  "I do," Nina said. (Something whispered 'ask Aine when you dropped your phone' but Nina ignored it.)

  "Haenel! She's not legally called that, though."

  Did that matter?

  "Yeah," Emi said, "she's... it's... like being called Kitty instead of Catherine. She's also fine with 'heyo', which is what it was originally, thirty or fifty years ago."

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  "I see. That's very interesting." Nina now knew exactly one thing about Haio.

  Where was she, anyway? Sitting, gaze drifting, a little ways' away. Nobody sat with her.

  "The knight scared her," Aine said. "She got annoyed at me for trying to talk to her about it."

  "Ah. I won't bother her."

  "Marzena cut herself, but Sophia healed her, too!" Aine said.

  "I did," Sophia said.

  "The ritual kicked in for her, you know? Her and nobody else. It hasn't done anything for any of us except her," Aine said.

  "And me..." Emi said.

  "Oh. True, true! That's cool. She brought out... a weapon."

  "Wow. Really," Nina said.

  "So-called lockpicking! It's really scary. Aria kept calling it gross, gross, super gross, she was super unnerved!"

  "I'll judge it when I see it," Nina said. Marzena had failed to use it against the knight, had she not?

  "So fair. So cool! It's cool that you're so reliable."

  Aine flipped her hair, out of habit. Nina smelt her conditioner. Violet and jasmine, could she pick out the base notes? Blackberry, and was that amaranth?

  "She is..." Emi said.

  "Stop it," Nina said.

  "Yeah. You're probably used to it, already," Emi said.

  She really wasn't. April had nothing nice to say about her combat performance. She'd only fought alongside Reiko and Michiko a few times in a few months, none of them extended bouts. She wasn't in a hurry to hear more, though.

  "We'll lay off. Do accept compliments, Nina," Aine said.

  "She doesn't have to," Sophia said.

  "That's just your opinion," Aine said. "I think she should. She did well. She's reliable, unlike... she's not a wildcard! I won't spread rumours. I'm nice. Nina isn't a wildcard. I'm not saying anyone here is, haha, but..."

  Yes, good. Don't spread rumours.

  "At least take a seat. You're allowed to sit! You've earnt that."

  Aine sat down herself, and took a backpack, her backpack, off the aisle seat beside her. Nina sat.

  Sophia was between her and Emi.

  "Get used to sleeping on these, by the way," Aine said.

  Sophia snickered. "They'll add in a bedroom now that Kaninchen is metaphysically stuck with us, or whatever she said."

  "It's really uncomfortable, though. Nina did it 'cause she's small," Aine said. "Besides, what if you're tall, like Emi?"

  Emi shrugged.

  "We should complain to Kaninchen. Haze House really spent all of their budget on protecting the bus against attack. It has good specs, don't get me wrong, we can survive a nuclear explosion, but what happened to QOL? Ridhwani Motors would never give up on QOL!"

  Nina paused. So many weird terms and acronyms: what was a nuclear explosion?

  No, she remembered. She totally remembered what that was. Nina wasn't so bad at history. It had been important to April and Reiko, so it had to be important to her.

  A short history lesson, then. A physics lesson, actually?

  A nuclear explosion was a type of physical effect in standard reality that had been submerged by the Edict of Ultrablue. That wasn't one of the Nobility's edicts: at some point around 1998, the abyss or something within it had decided to allot chthonic power to the Earth and astral power to the stars.

  In 'Standard Model' physics (please don't complain about how that's a misnomer, Micchan...), reality was made out of atoms. These atoms interacted with each other through four fundamental forces: electromagnetic, gravity, strong, weak. They had a 'nucleus' consisting of 'protons' and 'neutrons' and 'electrons' in orbitals about them. Nuclei (the plural of nucleus) were held together by massive amounts of energy. The act of crashing atoms into each other would release this energy.

  This was how physics 'was supposed to be.' It explained the power of the stars. Was it any wonder that humanity couldn't bear that? That it tapped into illicit ideas to come up with a better explanation, because their own investigative tools did not suffice?

  It had been possible to power electricity grids with this energy. It had also been possible to create powerful explosives.

  In the standard vision of human history prior to 1997, only two had ever been used, supposedly, supposedly winning the Pacific War for the nationally constituted United States of America in 1946. One befell Kokura, the other Nagasaki. In one stroke, each city was levelled. They were filled with poison for months thereafter: nuclear explosions would knock electrons out of the atoms within the human body, damaging the integrity of human DNA. In each city eighty thousand died immediately; in each city eighty thousand died thereafter.

  Knowing how sick humanity was, someone might guess that these weapons became a staple of pre-Babylon warfare. Well, Nina did that. April Kauzaki made sure to call her wrong and stupid for this!

  April (really smart, could figure out any sort of social dynamic) told her about mutually assured destruction. This prevented wars between major national states. How? If two major powers went to war with each other, their thousands of nuclear weapons would kill at least half of humanity, and diminish all the rest.

  How horrible. By the way, didn't you know that enmity came from the outside? Obviously, mochiron... humans were unable to come up with anything so hopeful. Enmity represented the hatred the abyss had for all that exists. The illicit concepts hated standard reality, and sought to be permitted to exist. They hated all that really did exist. They wanted only to corrupt and erase it, didn't you know?

  Opinion polling: ninety nine point nine nine recurring percent of humanity thought enmity came from the outside. Epsilon were heretics.

  A certain girl's opinion: "March—don't say fucked up things like that! March..."

  "—Nina," Aine, a certain girl's lookalike, said. "How many pillows and blankets did you bring?"

  "One?"

  "That's probably not enough."

  "The bus is heated."

  "Yeah true. We should still complain to Kaninchen."

  "I... don't think she'll listen!" Emi said, suddenly. "Not because she's a bad person, or because she doesn't want the best for us, but..."

  "Oh?" Sophia said.

  "Have you ever heard of the Maximilian Gerlach Girls' Academies, Sophia?"

  "Can I respond?" Aine said.

  "I haven't. Is this like 'our' university?" Sophia asked.

  "No... Valeriya Nekrich is a standard university, as far as I know. Maximilian Gerlach is... more like us. It's a system meant to help troubled girls. Their troubles are a little less deep than ours... they don't need a wish granted."

  "I see," Sophia said.

  "I guess I can't respond..." Aine said.

  "Yeah. It's for, um. Orphans. Troubled teens. Girls from troubled homes."

  Weren't their troubles more deep than Route 13's? Nina was from a troubled home, but hadn't Emi spoken about how rich she was, how much her parents and older sisters loved her? Was the difference that they were less desiring?

  Nina didn't say that. She shouldn't be mean.

  (Don't say mean things like 'I didn't drop my phone.' Maybe Nina did. Nina probably did. It totally made sense.)

  "He was a knight," Emi said. "Maximilian Gerlach, during the Babylon War."

  "Like Young-hoon!" Aine said.

  "Yeah. He fought... valiantly. He established the academy system towards the end of the Babylon War. It wasn't clear what the Treaty of Nowhere was going to consist of. He really worried about vulnerable children, and he saw girls as especially vulnerable. He wanted them to be able to bear the new world."

  Not something Nina could do.

  "I couldn't bear... I wanted to join, when I was a little kid! It sounded cool. I was a boy, though, so I couldn't. My family is too good, anyway."

  "Lucky you," Sophia said.

  "I am..." Emi said.

  "Wait, what does this have to do with sleeping on bus seats?" Aine asked.

  "They have a dorm allocation system," Emi said.

  "I imagine most boarding schools do," Sophia said.

  "I mean, rooms are assigned based on performance. The best rooms go to the best performers."

  "Performance? Like in school?" Aine asked.

  "The large colleges in the English and Scottish cities do this, I believe," Sophia said.

  "Yes. Not just academic performance. Your entire life. From seven until seventeen. Sports and games, preternatural development, participation in the defense of humanity."

  Nina, try not to laugh!

  "Doing your part to maintain information hygiene? To fall in love, have a big family?" Aine asked.

  "Is that last part really the defense of humanity?" Sophia said.

  "That's what people say!" Aine said.

  "Preternatural combat," Emi said. "Against the abyss. Gerlach wasn't a sadist, but he wanted his girls to be prepared. He started them on combat at fourteen."

  "Either far too early or far too late," Nina said. It took her a second to realise she had said her worthless opinion aloud.

  "When did Nina start?" Aine said.

  "A while ago," she said.

  "That explains everything. If you do something for long enough, you become good at it," Sophia said.

  "Explains everything?" Nina asked.

  "Sophie's being silly," Aine said. "There aren't always easy explanations."

  "That's not what you said about London's architecture," Emi said.

  "No, that has an easy explanation," Aine said, pouting. "But I meant and she meant, regarding you."

  "Do I need to be explained?" Nina asked.

  "Yes. A little. You're a little mysterious. There are mysterious things about you. The actions you choose, the things you can do..."

  "Don't obsess over her! You're going to scare her." Emi said.

  "It's fine," Nina said. "You were saying something, about the room choices?"

  "It's part of the Haze House ethos, I think. That you have to work hard and be willing to suffer, to live comfortably."

  "Hope not. That's so generic," Aine said. "Many Houses think like that. It's boring. And it's a shit policy too. Imagine it. Being a little girl, in such a competitive and cruel environment. If you fuck up, do they put you in a shit room?"

  Imagine it. Emi's eyes were all dreamy, when Aine had said that. Then Aine said all the rest and she went to stuttering, uhming, 'uh'ing—

  "Some rooms are better than others..." Emi finally said.

  "Yeah, see. If you fuck up they put you in a shit room. And these are four completely separate things, aren't they? Academics, sports, being psychic, combat—what does being good at sports have to do with fighting anomalies?"

  "Is it not obvious?" Sophia said.

  "No, it isn't?" Aine asked.

  "Haven't play and playfighting always been an important part of teaching norms? My father took me to Skukuza, once, to see the chora and study the latifundia scattered about that city, so I would know where our food came from."

  "Is Skukuza near Johannesburg?"

  "Not really."

  Memorising the names of cities to fill out quizzes was the hobby of June Sakuraba, so Nina hadn't needed to pick it up. April cared that Nina could follow her into her hobbies, the other five did not. She knew major cities in the Acacia, and the major Japanese, Chinese and West Coast cities... her knowledge on the geography of the sane Earth was quite weak, otherwise.

  "Still," Sophia continued. "Around Skukuza you saw lion cubs playfighting, so they could eat large prey—rawr!"

  Rawr. Sophia put her book on her lap and made cat claws; how unnecessary.

  "Might it be like that, Emi?"

  "It might."

  "Cricket and rugby until you gain auctoritas, imperium..."

  "Cool it with the Latin, Sophie," Aine said.

  "I'll use as much Latin as I like, Anny," Sophia said.

  Aine huffed.

  "Well, if you got to be a boy in some British Empire boarding school, all's well that ends well. You got to oversee the mining of diamonds, right? Emi's scenario is like. We're hydrocarbons, to Haze House. Fuel. Food. Then they apply pressure and we become diamonds."

  "I don't know," Emi said. "You, uh, don't know the specifics."

  "Tell me," Aine said.

  "Five campuses, eight hundred students each. There are about thirty girls who get the solo bedrooms... they have their own dorm, twenty-five—that's the bottom limit, not the top limit, I'm thinking mainly of the Maximilian Gerlach site in Dvinsk—"

  "Dvinsk!?" Aine said.

  "I lived there for some time," Emi said.

  "Oh. Okay," Aine said. Her voice betrayed her judgement. Some cities teetered on the limens between the Earth and the abyss.

  "Twenty-five or more, the top twenty-five, they all have solo bedrooms. The top five or so get en-suites."

  "This doesn't really change my opinion, about any of this! It makes me really wonder about Haze House..." Aine said. "I'm sure the old British Empire girls' boarding schools were much better! It's 2067: hasn't humanity gone forward?"

  Nina tried not to laugh and failed.

  "Nina..." Aine said.

  "Sorry," Nina said without meaning. "It's the opposite of what everyone else says, you know?"

  "I'm free to say that!" Aine said.

  She wasn't. Who was? How could she say such things without judging herself for them? Why express such opinions knowing what could be listening to ill opinions? Why answer calls with Nina's phone on corrupted lines?

  "I don't think I could live in the pre-Babylon War era, anyway," Nina said. Only this accursed world could produce such an awful creature.

  "Too used to modern amenities?" Aine asked.

  "Something like that," Nina said. Shin Kumamoto didn't have many amenities, but most of the ones it had were cutting edge, patented by the All-Acacia Government, so she wasn't lying, really. All Nina did was refuse to expose her awful self to Aine or anyone—

  She yawned.

  "Oh my. Getting sleepy because all of the sleep talk?" Aine asked.

  "No..."

  "She totally is," Sophia said.

  Aine moved past her. From the top compartment she got a pillow out, and gave it to Nina.

  "I could open the hatch and crawl into the underside apartment to get more, but we're moving..."

  "It's fine," Nina said. "Thank you."

  How annoying. She hadn't overexerted herself, surely? Perhaps it was the burden of the new image-of-a-curse, the katzbalger. She held it in her spirit and, unused to it, it was eyelid-heavy, drooping off.

  Emi paid attention, Sophia didn't. It was only an hour to Milton Keynes, surely? Ignoring any strange phenomena on the road. A short nap wouldn't…

  She clung to the pillow, her head fell by the seat headrest. It was into Aine and then Aine's voice went "Huh? Good night?" and then she let herself go.