Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 976: Meeting, At Long Last

”The Shogunate Circle,” Emily read, faint. ”THE Shogunate Circle. Japan’s number one guild just sent me a boarding pass.”

Twenty minutes was a strange amount of time for a foreign guild to produce three custom itineraries in the middle of the night. None of them examined it.

The itineraries themselves were short: a dawn flight for Emily and a dawn flight for Leia, both landing at the city’s international airport. Sarah, who lived a short ride from the airport, got a car at seven.

And nothing else.

”Mine ends at the airport,” Emily said, scrolling. ”There’s no second flight. Where’s the Japan part?”

”Same. One domestic hop and the itinerary just stops.” Papers shuffled on Leia’s end; she had printed hers already. ”How are we supposed to cross the ocean? Swim? Is Kaiden going to throw us?”

”Wait.” Sarah sat up slowly, and the jar rolled off the bed unmourned. ”He said ’my treat.’”

”...He did say that.”

”The flights are from the Shogunate Circle. The car is from the Shogunate Circle. And that man looked us in the eye and called it his treat.”

This silence belonged to three women arriving at the same summit together.

”He’s going to make the Shogunate pay for the sushi,” Leia said, in the tone usually reserved for religious experiences. ”He’s going to treat us to dinner with a straight face and a national guild’s credit line.”

Emily gasped, genuinely scandalized. ”He can’t do that!!”

Then she yelped, realizing that he, in fact, could do just that. ”My idol is a freeloader.”

”The most powerful man alive,” Sarah said, ”is about to expense us.”

They were complaining at maximum volume, and all three were grinning so hard it hurt.

”Okay. OKAY.” Leia clapped once, ringleader again. ”Ladies, it’s time to lock the fuck in, because we have five hours and this is the most important operation this team has ever run. Agenda item one: what does a person wear to meet Kaiden Grey?”

Emily already had a search open. ”I’m reading about bowing. There are angles. There are ANGLES, you guys. Fifteen degrees is casual and forty-five is an apology, and I don’t know the number for ’I’ve moderated your chat for months, please bless me with a headpat like what Alice gets...’”

”A gift.” Sarah had a list going already. ”You can’t show up to a dinner empty-handed, my mother would rise from her armchair and know. Do we bring one gift together or three separate-”

”Outfits first,” Leia overruled. ”Priorities. Everything I own says ’basement.’ I need clothes that say ’trustworthy, charming, invite me on the next trip too.’”

”Clothes don’t say that much,” Emily objected.

”Mine will.”

The call ran until three in the morning, produced no final decisions on any agenda item, and none of them would have traded a minute of it for sleep.

...

Emily was airborne by dawn, rehearsing thank-you phrases into her tray table and practicing a fifteen-degree bow against the seatbelt.

Leia spent her own flight discovering that a nondisclosure agreement, arranged thanks to Ms. Rook, which she had already technically violated through a ceiling, is a form of torture.

The grandmother next to her asked if she was traveling somewhere nice, and Leia, legally muzzled, said ”yes” and then stared at the seatback for two hours, vibrating.

Sarah’s car arrived at seven sharp, a black sedan with a driver who knew her name. He took her suitcase, held her door, and said nothing at all for the whole ride. The radio stayed off. She watched her own city slide past on two hours of sleep and did not manage to swallow once.

They found each other at arrivals in under a minute. Emily came through at a jog, suitcase clattering behind her, waving with her whole free arm, and Leia’s laugh reached them across the concourse before Leia did.

The hug happened at full running speed and drew applause from a tour group.

”You’re real,” Emily kept saying into the huddle. ”You’re both real, you have arms, this is the best day of my-”

”Ladies.”

The voice arrived from a pace away. A man in a black suit stood beside them, hands folded, a small silver pin of a threaded crescent on his lapel. None of them had seen him approach, and the concourse was not crowded.

”Sarah. Emily. Leia.” He inclined his head to the three of them in turn, getting each name right without asking. ”The Circle welcomes you. This way, please.”

He led them past the departures signage without slowing for it, to a gray door at the edge of the concourse marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL, and held a badge to it until it clicked. Bare concrete and fluorescent tube light waited on the other side.

”Um,” Emily said.

Two more suits fell in behind them at the threshold, silent, unintroduced, already in step.

The corridor ran flat for a while, then began to slope down. Pipe runs crowded the ceiling, painted lines striped the floor, and behind the walls something heavy thudded in a slow rhythm, like the building had a pulse.

Their escort took every turn from memory, hands loose at his sides. The lights ahead of them were always already on. The lights behind them kept clicking off.

A second checkpoint needed two badges at once, each answering with a soft double-tone. A third had an armed guard behind it, who looked at the escort’s lapel pin and stepped aside for three civilians in a restricted sublevel without one question.

The air grew colder the deeper they went, and the concourse noise was long gone, replaced by their own footsteps and the pulse in the walls. Emily had attached herself to Sarah’s arm at the top of the stairwell, and by the third turn she was effectively wearing it.

”Is this normal?” she whispered. ”This doesn’t feel normal. Nobody’s said anything in five minutes. Why has nobody said anything?”

”It is not, miss,” the escort said, without turning.

Emily made a very small noise and clutched the arm harder.

Leia’s eyes were shining in the fluorescent light. ”This is so cool,” she whispered. ”We’re being smuggled. I’ve always wanted to be smuggled.”

Sarah kept counting turns, mod habit, because if the three of them ever had to come back this way without help, somebody ought to know the route. She lost count at eleven, somewhere under what she guessed was the taxiway, where the ceiling growled every time a plane rolled over their heads.

Then the last door let them out into air and floodlights, and all three stopped walking at once.

The hangar could have held a stadium. It held one aircraft instead, and the aircraft was wrong.

It had the shape of an airliner the way a warhorse has the shape of a pony. The double-decked hull ran longer than any frame Sarah had ever seen at a gate. Lines of silver were inlaid nose to tail through the dark metal, the light in them moving slow as breathing.

Rings of etched glyphs circled each engine housing. The air hummed against their skin from fifty meters away, and Emily knew that hum, because every gate stream on the platform carried it.

The only marking anywhere on the hull was a crescent on the tail, threaded through with silver cords.

”That’s not a normal plane,” Emily managed.

”Can I lick it?” Leia breathed.

Sarah’s contribution was one long exhale.

”No, miss,” the escort muttered, and started across the concrete.

They went up the airstairs one at a time, Emily first because she was pushed, and stepped through the hatch into warm light.

The cabin opened up like a hall, wide-bodied and deep, and it was full of people.

Hundreds of them.

Awakened filled the cabin wall to wall, gear stowed overhead, sprawled out laughing and dozing like a barracks on the move. The recognition hit at once.

They had approved fan edits of these faces, and they had stayed up past two in the morning arguing combat placements during the recruitment wave. The woman by the window had a compilation all three could quote frame by frame, and half the cabin lived on Sarah’s spreadsheets.

The new Eclipse recruits.

Leia grabbed Sarah’s sleeve. ”That’s the axe girl from the tryouts. Sarah. Sarah, that’s everyone. Why is the whole guild on a-”

From somewhere aft came the flick and slap of cards, and a voice the entire planet knew, currently occupied with fleecing somebody.

”Full house. Auntie doesn’t bluff, sweethearts, so start counting out chips before the tears set in.”

Scarlet. That was the Flame Monarch herself, and on any other day of their lives all three would have sprinted toward that voice.

The cards could wait.

Because in the front row, twenty feet away, with his arm thrown along the top of the seat, sat Kaiden Grey, grinning at them. For the first time in their lives, no translucent overlay hung between him and them.

And the seats around him belonged to the women, arranged like the world’s most casual pantheon. Luna had her boots up on the seatback in front of her, Calypso’s horns rose over the headrests, and Aria’s hair caught the cabin light.

Nyx watched them arrive with a giant smile, visibly delighted, while Bastet’s gold chimed and Alexandra came half out of her seat beaming. At the end of the row, Kira and Rika waved with both arms, exactly like Emily had at arrivals.

Every face they had watched for months through the media interface was here, pinned, clipped, defended, and adored from the far side of a screen. Now the screen was gone, and the faces were looking back.

Emily began to tear up on the spot, quietly and without noticing, both hands pressed over her mouth.

Leia, the greatest blabbermouth mouth in the fandom, had held opinions at full volume through every hour the three of them had ever shared. She made no sound at all.

And Sarah, who had met him already in a previous monster incident, thought she was ready.

She wasn’t.

Kaiden stood up.

”Yo,” he grinned.

”Nice to finally meet you all.”