Chapter 90: Set. Cast. Reel. Explode less.
"Kori?" Hikari said, too loudly, as if saying one name might scare the other away.
Both names arrived.
Kori came first, leaning sideways to let the door finish sulking open, coffee cup in one hand, the kind of expression you bring to a room you’ve found this boy in after curfew too many times. Alteea followed with a coat that looked like she’d absolutely stolen from a romance movie, and a look in her eye that meant she was about to flirt with the day and dissect it at the same time.
Two heartbeats of tableau: Hikari, earrings quietly new. Raizen, hands wrist-deep in machine guts, a line embedded in the backstop. A bandage with dark red spots. Overall, a room too awake.
"Well" Alteea said, delighted. "Either I’ve walked in on a date or a violation. Either way: exhilarating."
Hikari turned pink. "Neither" she replied, not 100% true.
Kori’s eyes didn’t widen. They narrowed by half a millimeter, which for Kori is practically a gasp. "Of course it’s you" she told Raizen, kindly. She set the coffee on a safe corner and flicked the primed anchor’s safety with a finger. It obeyed her like a dog that liked her best. "And then, of course it’s you" she told Hikari, even less mean.
Alteea had already ghosted closer to the bench. She didn’t touch anything, something new. She always touched a machine regardless if she had permission. I mean... She technically WAS the permission. She circled, eyes on the drum, on the anchor pods, on the little overrun clutch exposed like a secret in surgery. Her mouth did a slow, involuntary smile that didn’t belong to flirtation at all. It belonged to reverence.
"This... is not Saffi’s tidy handwriting" she murmured, like a prayer. "Don’t get me wrong; she is precise. But this - this is improvisation. Tactile logic. A person who learned a thing with his hands and decided to teach the machine that same grammar."
Raizen, whose ears had begun to ring for absolutely no reason, shrugged without shrugging. "We were iterating. I diverged after midnight."
"Hmm." Alteea crouched, peered at the line where it met the drum, at the subtle give built into the foot of the anchor pods. She laughed once, delighted and a little offended. "You put a slip in the system, not to protect the motor, to protect the user."
"To protect the user’s shoulder" Raizen said. "It warns you you’ve been an idiot before it finishes punishing you."
Kori rested her hip against the table as if she had been born there. "He snuck into the Rust Room three times in one week" she offered to Alteea, as if providing the final footnote to a thesis. "Begged to take another round. Got turned away twice. Came back anyway."
Alteea’s head tipped without looking at Kori. "You did?" The question was for Raizen because questions are always for the person who could answer them best.
He stared at a screw like it had insulted him personally. "Wanted to be ready before anyone told me I was allowed to be."
Kori made a small, private noise that could have been called proud if it hadn’t been so disguised as exasperation. "This is why I’m not surprised to see him here after midnight" she told Alteea. "This is why you are."
"I am surprised" Alteea said, standing. "And I’m going to pretend I’m angry so the others will thinks I did my job. But after I’m done pretending, I’m going to bother you for a week about your drag curve and how you’re sensing anchor set. Because if this works, you’ve solved half the problem no one even asked out loud yet."
Raizen blinked. "Which problem?"
"Arrival" Alteea said, warm and razor at once. "Everyone is obsessed with speed. Everyone forgets arrival. I prefer you alive and embarrassed to half-dead and cinematic. And to be honest, I think that even if you completely nail the model, you’ll be the only one that will be able to use it without being ripped apart or crashing into a wall."
Hikari coughed into a fist to hide a smile. Kori sipped coffee and let the kids be kids, which in The Heart meant letting them be dangerous and mocking them when something goes wrong.
Alteea reached for the anchor pod and then didn’t, remembering herself. "How does it speak to you?" she asked instead. "Words I will not understand. Use them anyway."
Raizen tapped the drum. "I don’t really know how to explain... It’s just... Like it’s made for me" he said, half to the machine, half to the girl with stars in her ears. "Repeat until the room obeys. Like an extension"
Alteea pointed two fingers at his bandage. "And safely. And by safely I mean just don’t die or lose a limb"
"Slight incident" Hikari said, too quickly to process. "Handled it."
Kori’s stare landed on the line sunk into the backstop. The smallest crease tried to form between her eyebrows and was bullied into submission. "You will run safeties like your life depends on them" she said, which came out as not-negotiable because it always did when Kori spoke. "Because it does. Because somebody else’s will. I don’t really care, but others might as well cancel everything"
"Got it" Raizen said, and meant it.
The room relaxed by degrees. Alteea straightened, coat settling with the kind of swish you only got from coats that belonged on balcony scenes. "It’s late" she said, in the voice of a person who had never gone to bed before three in her life. "Saffi will arrive in four hours bright-eyed and mortal. I prefer you not look like ghosts. Hikari - bed." There was fondness there. A lot. "Raizen... You do you."
"I won’t stay long" he lied with a practiced sincerity that fooled no one.
Kori’s mouth did a half-smile that wasn’t, precisely. "He’ll stay too long" she translated for Alteea. "He’ll also be here at dawn, so it’s alright."
"Good" Alteea said, eyes still on the machine like it might choose to grow on its own if she looked away. "I love talent that refuses to be reasonable. I hate funerals. Like, totally hate them."
Hikari slipped the helmet back onto her forearm and touched the new earrings once again with two fingers, as if to tell it this was real and not a fun lab hallucination. She looked at Raizen, and the look said so many small things the room had to pretend it didn’t hear them or it would blush.
"Don’t bleed on the blueprints" she said, and stepped backward toward the door.
"I’ll try to -" He almost said "blow up less-" remembered he was not Esen, and settled for, "- not ruin anything we can’t fix."
Alteea gave Raizen one last long, appraising look that held amusement, expectation, and a promise to be a problem later. The door hissed, their footsteps faded, the lab exhaled and became a confessional again.
Raizen stood alone with the prototype and the hum of The Heart’s lungs.
He picked up a part. He tightened one screw, then loosened it again because it felt wrong tight. He palmed the drum and turned it, listening for a sound only he could hear. He whispered the three words into the machine like you teach a child to sleep.
Set. The line purred.
Cast. The brake kissed.
Reel. The thing obeyed.
Above the bench, the soft lab lights showed him a face that had stopped pretending it didn’t care about being careful. In the reflection, the stars in Hikari’s ears were two small, stubborn lights.
"I won’t stay long" he told the empty room again, and the empty room, being kind, didn’t argue out loud.
"Just long enough"