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Chapter Text

The girl who arrived with the end of Winter - deposited along with her bags by a sleek silver Mercedes which retreated into the horizon as if ashamed to be seen with her - stared up at the old country house and frowned, slightly. Her face was nearly as still and inexpressive as a mask, though the dark circles under her distant eyes and the nervous twitching of her fingers spoke for her well enough.

NO SOLICITATIONS, NO VISITORS, NO QUESTS.

That was fine, she told herself; she was here, after all, because she was not the questing sort. There was no magic in her blood, no miracles in her heart. She had almost nothing left to lose, which was a distinct difference from having nothing left at all; the things that remained must be protected with all the fervour she could muster. She would not lose her self.

She shivered, underdressed in baggy grey sweatpants, plain white t-shirt and second-hand jacket for the black and leafless trees and the ceiling of sullen clouds above her. The kindly men and serious women who'd sent her here hadn't thought, in the Arizona heat, to provide for winter, and she'd felt beaten down enough to forget to ask. She was a ward of the state now, and the state was a harried and indifferent parent.

(On the other hand, her sweatpants had no drawstring and her shoes had no laces; upon seeing arms as scarred as hers the state could become a very anxious and overbearing parent indeed.)

Enough hesitating at the threshold like a cat, she told herself, I went through a doorway more terrible than this and am no lesser now than I was then.

She opened the door, carrying her bulging plastic bags with her, and found the interior much the same as the exterior; old, expensive, and well cared for. Places like this were familiar to her, though it lacked the stained glass and sweet-smelling flowers of the place she'd left behind. She could still taste that cloying scent in the back of her throat, as thickly oppressive as the copper tang of blood.

Don't think about that. Vomiting in Eleanor West's front hall would make a terrible first impression.

There didn't seem to be a receptionist, which even for a place which wanted neither SOLICITATIONS nor VISITORS seemed odd. She was considering going in search of the administration office - and whether that would count as a QUEST, and if she cared - when a strange woman appeared on the stairs.

The doctors and staff at the juvenile psychiatric facility in Phoenix had dressed like sane and sober professionals, as if to lead by example. This woman dressed like a stained-glass icon on holiday, in bright purple jeans, brighter red sneakers, and a royal blue cardigan spangled with golden stars. She was reminded of a mug one of the staff at the facility had been reprimanded for bringing in; you don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps.

"Hello," the woman said, "You must be Penny Smith. Let me take a look at you."

The girl called Penny Smith nodded solemnly, and felt herself scrutinised. The old woman's eyes were sharp, and Penny knew what she was seeing; a slight, unremarkable girl, cut away at and beaten down, dressed in clothes so inoffensive they sucked at what colour and vitality she had left.

"Oh, my dear, where did you go, and what did you leave behind there?"

"Arizona?" Penny offered. The answer to the second question was "far too much", and the answer to the first was unbelievable. There would be time for this woman to poke at her supposed delusions later. "I'm sorry, do you work here?"

"Work here? I am in fact the Headmisstress - do call me Eleanor, please - and you are dodging the question. You're here because you went somewhere, and travelling has left marks on you that the well-meaning folk at Childreln's Services are rather hoping I'll buff out, as if my role were merely the refurbishment of old furniture with a wobbly leg or scratches in the varnish. You are not furniture, however much they may have tried to hammer you into shape. You have travelled, and a traveller cannot easily be nailed back down to the ground - I can see the wanderlust in you, no matter how deep you've tried to bury it.

"I will not have you lie or pretend at normality while you are at my school, Penny; this is not a place for pretences, and there is no need to lie to me. After all, I know about the doors. So; where did you go?"

"I went to Arizona," Penny repeated, "But I came from Mirabel. How do you know about the doors? Nobody on Earth knows about the doors! They told me I was crazy!" Her expressionless mask grew brittle on that hateful last word.

"I know the same way you know; I went through one myself, of course - six times, in fact, before I turned sixteen. All my children are here because they went somewhere extraordinary, and came back changed. If you tell me about your Mirabel, I promise you will be believed - and it is important that I know where to put you. Nonsense and Logic are like oil and water, and I'd like to avoid the unpleasantness that comes of rooming two girls from fundamentally different worlds together." Eleanor West frowned, and looked suddenly old. "Bloodstains are a bother to clean up."

Penny nodded; she liked her blood on the inside, something that the psychologists back in Phoenix hadn't been able to square with the cuts on her arms. But how to explain Mirabel? The slow surrender of who she was, whittling away at her self to avoid being swept away?

"Blood and sacrifice, under a pretty coat." 

She rubbed her arms, feeling scars under the thin material of her jacket. Eleanor seemed to be waiting for her to continue, though, which grated against her instinct to not give up her words freely. In Phoenix, words surrendered could be turned and used against her. In Mirabel, speaking her woes would have been seen as vaguely blasphemous; who would refuse to sacrifice to the world? 

"The only rule that can't be broken there is that miracles have to be paid for in sacrifice. I gave up too much of who I was, and got too little back, so I had to run before there was nothing left of me. Mirabel is a place for people who think that self-sacrifice is romantic.

"So I came to Arizona. The Earth doesn't care about sacrifice. It doesn't cut at you ... but it grinds."

She was very tired of being ground down. She'd hoped that Earth could be somewhere she could grow, could build faster than the world could cut away. That first glimpse of Arizona - the sun like a hammer, the desert like an anvil, the ground so barren that not even an ocean of blood could coax a miracle from it - had disabused her of the notion. The Earth was as dry and barren as a skull, as zero-sum in its own way as Mirabel's bloody accounting.

"I have just the place for you, then. Follow me."

Penny picked up her plastic bags and followed Eleanor up the stairs to a door on the third floor, where the old woman knocked.

"Hello!" Someone said from the other side. There was a clatter, muttered curses, and the door swung open. "Oh, hello, Miss Eleanor. And ... oh! Are you new? I'd shake your hand, but that would mess up my nails."

The girl in the doorway was short and energetic, waving a bottle of nail polish in one hand and her drying dark blue nails on the other. She wore black leggings, a NASA t-shirt over a black thermal shirt, and a blue silk scarf. Her hair was the only thing Penny had seen on Earth that approximated the searing, radioactive blue of the Arizona sky.

"This is Penny," Eleanor said, "Who has joined us in the hope of going somewhere both more Logical and more Virtuous than where she began. Penny, this is Sara, who comes from a world of unshakeable Logic and moderate Virtue, and who knows something of hard choices. I thought the two of you might get along well."

"New roomie, huh? Come in then, I don't bite! Much. Oh! Important question, Penny: how's your immune system? Earth is basically one giant NBC hazard, and my last roommate was sick practically all the time."

Penny shrugged. Immunology was unknown on Mirabel, where the panacea for all ailments was bloodletting. She'd picked up a smattering of Earth's sciences in Phoenix, so she knew the immune system had something to do with disease, but exactly what it was was a mystery to her.

"I haven't been sick since I got here?" she offered.

"Good enough for me! I've got this, Miss Eleanor. C'mon new girl, I'll show you around."

Bewildered and battered by Sara's enthusiasm - surely there was no time when she'd been so relentlessly chipper - Penny nodded to Eleanor and followed Sara into her room. It felt like she'd been pushed and pulled about by others since arriving on Earth. A part of her wanted to stand up and scream about it, to establish some space and authority of her own, but the greater part of her was just too tired and worn down to care. It was easier to let herself be moved by others than to move herself.

The room was modestly appointed - two beds, two desks, two chairs, two dressers, two bookshelves, two wastebaskets - and clearly divided down the middle. One half, as pale and characterless as everywhere else Penny had stayed on Earth, was clearly hers; Penny put her bags down on the bed. The other half was just as clearly Sara's. Posters covered the walls, and little figurines - some outlandishly armoured, others just as elaborately dressed in colourful, skimpy outfits - had colonised every available surface, displacing little pots of makeup and paint and glue. A poster of the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon was pinned to the ceiling over her bed.

Sara saw her looking and laughed, perhaps a little nervously. "Yeah, I'm a total nerd. What can I say, I think I'm the only person who's been to a dimension where they even knew what space travel is. Unless Miss Eleanor put you here because we're space buddies?"

Penny shook her head; in Mirabel the sky had draped over the land like a velvet cloak, and the idea that there might be anything beyond it - that humans had sent craft into the airless night and set foot on the Moon - had come as a surprise.

"Damnit." Sara flopped backwards onto her bed, hands in the air to protect her drying nails. "Everyone else here is all fantasy and magic and none of them have ever read any sci-fi. I talk about giant robots and they look at me like I'm weird, which does not help. What about you, where'd you end up?"

"Arizona. But I was born in Mirabel. It was die or become a stranger, which is the same thing, so I left."

"Wait, your door led me to Earth? You want to be here?" Sara looked disturbed, as if Penny had just confessed to some perversion or taboo.

"No," Penny replied, horrified herself at the thought that someone might want the crushing wasteland of Earth enough to open a way between worlds. "It wasn't my door, just the only one I had. I got caught sneaking into the palace, but the Rose-Crowned Queen just said she'd been waiting a long time for someone who could go through. All she asked was that I lock the door behind me when I went. I had to get away, but I'd hoped that Earth would be ... better than it is. I'm not going to stay."

"Huh. You've got kind of an interesting voice, you know? All raspy. I bet you can do a good Batman impression. I am vengeance, I am the night."

"I don't know who that is," Penny replied. "I sacrificed my singing voice for ... I don't recall now. I woke up one day looking younger than I should, and I realised I'd sacrificed years off my life. Everyone knows when you're giving up years you're really digging for things to give, and if you dig much deeper there won't be anything left. I had to run."

"And so you're here with the rest of us, hoping for another door. It does happen, you know - my last roommate, Nadya, found a door back a few months ago, and so did some other girls, and that's just this year. One girl, Sumi, we know her door will open in a year or two because her world doesn't obey causality and her daughter came to find her. So if anyone tells you it's not going to happen, you punch them in the face. Me, I just have to wait. Artemisia - my girlfriend - will seize the wormhole induction facility, and then she'll come to get me, and we will kick so much ass." Sara's expression went distant and dreamy. "God damn but I miss her in the meantime, though."

Penny had never had anyone who would kick down the doors between worlds for her, unless she'd found them in the years she'd subsequently lost. That she had nothing to say in response didn't seem to matter to Sara, who kept talking.

"Lagrange - the dimension, not the mathematician - is all about staying true to yourself, never giving up, and being loyal to your friends. And punching your enemies with giant robots, which is the fun part. Nobody ignores you when you're piloting a giant robot. But then you get to shit-talking your enemies, and then it turns to flirting, and then you realise you've fallen out of love with the Orbital Kingdom and into love with a pirate queen. And then your ex-friends in the Pilot Corps force you to deorbit, your mech burns up on reentry, and you find yourself on the surface of a planet in a dimension you left four years ago, and it sucks.

"What I'm saying is, I know how it wears you down to fight for something you don't believe in. You stop speaking up, you shut down, every day's another struggle. We can be struggle buddies! You've just got to find a smoking hot girlfriend to believe in." Sara looked at her, judging. "Boyfriend? You're hard to read. You can't have Artemisia, the pirate queen of Mars is taken, but I know a hot goblin prince if you're into that."

Penny was glad for the mask of her features; being expressionless allowed her to keep her words and her feelings to herself. She did not blush.

"I don't know," she admitted, "I've never fallen for anyone. I was always too busy, and then there wasn't enough of me left to offer. I never had the time or the energy. I'm just ... tired."

"Yeah, when I got out of the hospital I was basically a zombie. You could be asexual I guess, that's cool too. Unless you sacrificed your libido for something?"

Penny's hands clenched and unclenched once, twice. "You're probably right," she said, and if her voice was tight at least it remained even. "Every time I think I've found all the parts of myself I've lost, I find another scar."

Sara's eyes were uncomfortably shrewd. "You're freaking out in there, aren't you?"

She was, and she hated that it showed. She needed to be iron, to stand unflinching even if everything else of her had been cut away. If she collapsed now, there would hardly be enough of herself left to push herself back upright.

"I'm fine," she said, but it was an obvious lie.

"You know what "fine" stands for? Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional. Yeah, you're fine. Look" - Sara got up from her bed and moved to sit beside Penny on hers, her arm closing around Penny's shoulders only to withdraw when she stiffened - "Not a hugger, huh? I won't do that again, then. But look at this."

Sara pulled up her sleeve, revealing what Penny's education in Mirabel immediately identified as stigmata; an ugly, puckered scar along the back of her wrist. 

"You've sacrificed?" she asked, confused - she hadn't followed most of Penny's description of 
Lagrange, peppered as it was with incomprehensible jargon, but she hadn't thought it was a world that demanded sacrifice but rather zeal.

"What? No, I refuse to give up a thing. What've my scars got to do with sacrificing things?"

Penny extracted her arm from her jacket, revealing the ladder of silvery scars running up it.

"Blood is the currency and guarantor of miracles; no wondrous happening shall occur but for those willing to bleed for it." The cadence of scripture was leaden on her tongue.

Sara's eyes widened. "Fuck, girl, that's definitely a Wicked world. Lots of razor blades in that candy floss."

Penny shrugged. "It's not my religion any more. And the religion here seems to like blood and sacrifice too."

"You're ... really not wrong, but that's not my religion any more either. What I was going to say is, this is where my input jacks used to be, well, one of them - I've got a matching scar on my right arm, and one on my neck, and stuff - the interface where I plugged in to my mech's computers, you know? When I crash-landed back down here, the doctors were like "oh no, some diabolical genius has implanted fiddly metal bits into this poor confused young lady, allowing her to command war machines undreamt of by DARPA! We must remove them immediately!". I had to talk fast to stop them from cracking open my skull, and I still ended up with seizures for months because the doctors here are butchers who think "wetware" means "let's get you out of those damp things". I still get phantom inputs all the damn time.

"I got out of the hospital feeling like my whole world had been surgically extracted - you can't pilot a mech worth a damn without implants - it was like my parents were trying to erase any evidence that anything had ever happened. I felt like my self had burned up on reentry, like I'd have to go back to being the boring quiet little girl who got ignored by everyone.

"I was a mess when I got here. It took me a while to figure out the truth, which is that everyone here is fucked up too, including Miss Eleanor. Even the girls who like to pretend that everything where they went was cotton candy clouds and rainbows are fucked up, because if they weren't fucked up they wouldn't be here. Everyone leaves their magic swords and talking turtles and whatever behind when they come back to Earth, and everyone misses them, because if they're not the hero any more, what's left for them to be except miserable and fucked up?

"So you don't have to be "fine" here, not when you can be fucked up and nobody gets to fucking judge you for it. But you don't have to stay fucked up forever, either. Everyone is fucked up here but none of us are actually crazy. You don't have to wait for your door to open to be the hero of your own story. You just keep kicking ass and you don't ever fucking stop."

"I understood maybe half of that," Penny admitted, "But I appreciate the sentiment."

"Yeah, I tend to spontaneously burst into monologues, I guess. It's a hazard of living in Lagrange. And I'm the right hand of a pirate queen, so I'm practically a supervillain, mua-ha-ha! And they say Lagrange isn't Wicked."

"What do you mean by Wicked? Eleanor used it like it was meant to mean something, too."

"Shit, of course you don't know about that yet. It's metaphysics, and you can tell it's metaphysics because Kade keeps having to revise his charts whenever he wants to fit a new world in, but everyone ends up using it because Miss Eleanor believes in it, and because if you put enough people in one place they're going to want a way to describe everyone else. Especially when it lets them judge each other. So this is horoscopes 101, and lucky you, you get one of the bad ones.

"Basically, every world is different, and lots of them have different laws of physics, and you can arrange them on a line from Logic to Nonsense. Lagrange is High Logic because we don't mess about with bullshit like wave-particle duality and quantum mechanics, and on the other end you've got worlds where Tuesday doesn't always follow Monday and everything is made out of cake.

"The problem is that they add a second axis, from Virtue to Wickedness, and it's basically the most subjective bullshit ever, because it's ranking worlds on how nice they seem. How much of the world is candy floss and fluffy bunnies and how well hidden the razor blades are, versus how much of it is grimdark and full of wolves made out of knives. Yeah, you got a High Wicked world.

"Then there's a bunch of different axises, like Rhyme and Reason, or Death and Life, but they're basically only there to paper over all the ways the metaphysics don't make sense. Yours probably falls on Wickedness and Reason.

"And some people think that going anywhere Wicked is some kind of moral failing, so yeah, they're going to be bitches to you about it. As if being a child soldier looks better in soft focus. What can you do, a lot of the cutesy worlds aren't exactly Logical and bitches gonna bitch. The end."

"I see," said Penny, and it was only partly a lie. "Should I worry about what your bitches might do?"

"Oh god, they're not mine! I guess they can be pretty unpleasant but it's mostly petty bullshit, they're not going to shiv you in the showers or anything."

"Then I don't care. There are so many more things to worry about than people being mean to me."

"Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. You've got a pretty good poker face but I'm pretty sure you didn't sacrifice your emotions under there."

Penny shuddered. "No."

"There are things you can do to probably fly under the radar. Like emphasise that you came from your dimension, you didn't go to it. Are all your clothes like that?"

"Like what?"

"Honestly? You look like you just escaped from an asylum, those are the most featureless inoffensive clothes in the multiverse. People are going to look at you and get reminded that they're here because they're supposed to be crazy."

"I didn't escape, I was transferred. I only have what they gave me."

"That's worse, not better! Grab your bags, we've got to fix this before I go blind staring into sartorial nothingness."

Sara's fashion opinions aside, it was true that what had been suitable for autumn in Arizona was inadequate for winter further north. And it was still easier to let herself be pulled about in the other girl's wake, no matter how much she might want to be immovable and inviolate. Even iron rusted, and tall stones were worn down by the tide. Penny picked up her bags and followed Sara out the door without bothering to ask where they were going.

Sara had a shorter stride than Penny, but a quicker step - and Penny was laden with her bags - so they moved at much the same pace up the staircases. They met nobody else on the stairs; the house might have been deserted except for the odd snatch of conversation overheard as they passed.

"Huh, I was right." Sara stopped, and held out a hand to stop her in the diffuse grey light coming through the window of the fourth floor landing. "You don't have a shadow. Sorry if this is weird, but you're not actually a vampire, are you? Only we've had problems in the past."

"What? No!" Offence cracked her mask. Vampires were supposedly as fictional as doors on Earth, but the fact that anyone here knew what they were suggested that the bloodsuckers had come to Earth the same way they'd come to Mirabel. It made a certain amount of sense that they'd be here, dead things hiding in the bones of a dead world.

"Sorry! I suppose Jill wasn't technically a vampire, but she was raised by one, or groomed as a vampire's midnight snack or something, and she did kill two girls and a teacher before she was stopped. That was this summer, and everyone's still a bit on edge, and you come from a dimension which seems to like blood a lot ..."

"I'm not a vampire," Penny said firmly, "And I'm not going to kill anyone. My shadow's just another thing I sacrificed. Shadowraiths can't see you if you don't have one, but it leaves you vulnerable to other things." She'd only seen a lucivore once, but once had been enough to make her regret ever surrendering her shadow.

"Sorry," Sara repeated, "I was just ... it was like a horror movie, you know? Not knowing who was doing it or who'd be next, going everywhere in groups, that niggling bit of suspicion against everybody you know ... it sticks in your mind, the suspicion. Sorry."

"It's okay. What happened to the murderer?"

"Jill? She got taken back to her world. Mostly dead, but she might've been able to be reanimated. It was that sort of place, apparently. Creepier than your world. Come on, let's keep going."

"Where are we going?"

"I didn't say? Shit, sorry. Kade is our historian and cartographer and librarian and assistant headmaster and tailor and keeps all the clothes people leave behind when they leave. He'll be able to find you something not horrible to wear. Only he lives in the attic - it's the only place with enough space - so we have to go all the way up."

Sara continued up the stairs, which stopped at a narrow landing made small by the angle of the roofs. A plain white door was tucked away, with a neatly lettered sign instructing them to KEEP OUT.

"He has to say that, or else all the girls from Nonsense worlds would be coming in whenever they wanted, on account of how he's nearly hot enough to turn me straight," Sara said, and knocked.

The boy who opened the door - the young man, really, with a fine peach fuzz on his chin and a smattering of acne - was, Penny supposed, quite pretty, with his golden brown skin, dark eyes, and fine features; but he stirred nothing in her, though she rather wished he would. The idea that she'd given up her libido - and for something she couldn't even remember - was galling, another amputation in her list of missing parts.

"Huh," he said, "Hey, Sara. What're you doing up here?"

"I've brought you a fashion disaster! From a world of great Wickedness and cruellest Logic, where they believe in sucking a victim's soul out through their clothes! A world called ... some god-awful mental hospital in Arizona!"

She moved aside, revealing Penny and her bags.

"Oh, you must be the new girl," he said. "Hi, I'm Kade."

"Penny Smith," Penny replied. "Sara says that my clothes will make other people think they're crazy."

He looked her up and down, much as Eleanor West had, and nodded slowly. "I can see how they'd think that."

"Give her a straightjacket, and she could be the Ghost of Asylums Past!" Sara said.

Kade eyed her. "I'm getting the feeling that this is more about you than about Penny. D'you actually want new clothes?"

Penny shrugged. "I don't know what's proper here, I only have what they gave me. I could use a better coat."

"Come in, then. What were the clothes like where you were, before the hospital?"

Penny considered the flowing gowns the Rose-Crowned Queen had worn, all floating silk and lace and semi-precious stones.

"Impractical," she replied, "But it doesn't matter. I'm not going back."

Chapter Text

Penny shut her mouth in a hurry - had she said too much, pinned the bleeding wound of herself to her lapel like a lady's favour for every stranger to see? Had the boldness of her refusal marked her out as aberrant, in this place where everyone seemed defined by the doors that had closed behind them? Thankfully, if he thought her strange Kade didn't comment on it, just raised an eyebrow and held open the door for her.

The attic was piled high with books, overflowing their bookshelves and piling in tottering stacks wherever there was a gap in the furniture, and with fabric, and with clothes spilling out of mismatched closets. Penny was reminded fondly, and painfully, of the workshops she'd apprenticed in as a child back in Mirabel - the materials were different, but the enthusiastic clutter of someone dedicated to his craft was the same. Some small measure of tension unwound from her bones.

“Practical, huh?" Kade asked. "I can do practical. We get a lot of girls from Nonsense worlds whose parents would really like it if they were practical. Just tell me what you like. Having the right clothes is important.”

He moved through the clutter with not a foot out of place, throwing open closets and tossing Penny selected treasures from within. In short order she had her arms full of clothes - sturdy trousers of thick denim, a plethora of shirts in flannel and cotton, and - best of all - a heavy men’s jacket in brown suede, well-supplied with pockets.

“Very butch,” Sara commented, “I like it.”

Penny shrugged. She didn’t know what that meant, but that merely made it match half of what Sara said. In any case it hardly mattered; the clothes were practical, which meant they were close to what she’d been accustomed to wearing back in Mirabel, and simultaneously nothing that the great and the good of that world would have been seen dead in.

“What do I owe you for this?” She asked Kade.

“Tell me about your world? Before Arizona, I mean. I try to talk to everyone who comes here, if we can only find out enough about how the worlds connect …”

Penny carefully unfolded her hands from the fists they’d formed. Talking about Mirabel was a higher price than she’d like to pay, and here she’d sold her words unknowing of the cost. In Mirabel, payment was always up front. A price was a price, and she’d been an honest tradeswoman, but -

“Maybe later?”

Kade’s eyes said he’d spotted more than her face would admit to; she felt flensed, exposed. The idea that other people could tell what she was feeling was unpleasant. What was the point of sacrificing her facial expressions when people could apparently read her like a book anyway? What had she even bought for that price?

“Sure,” he said, “Later’s fine. I’m usually pretty good at guessing sizes but you come back if those don’t fit.”

“Thank you,” she replied, for both the clothes and the delay in payment for them.

“You’re welcome.” Kade smiled and nodded, acknowledging both, and ushered her and Sara back out of the attic.

“Sooo,” Sara said, waggling her eyebrows, “Hot goblin prince, huh? Huh?”

“Him?” Kade had hardly looked like a goblin, however a goblin might look.

“Yeah, he’s adopted or something. Not your type?”

“I don’t think I have a ‘type’.”

“It was worth a shot, though.”

“You don’t need to.” Really, she’d rather Sara didn’t. Pointing out attractive people did nothing but emphasise just how much libido Penny didn’t have.

“Sorry.” Sara’s smile drooped, like a flower wilting. “I know I can get too enthusiastic sometimes. I’ll try to rein it in.”

Penny considered that. The virtues of Sara’s world were zeal, determination, and loyalty; before she’d found her door, had someone tried to squash Sara’s enthusiasm the way Mirabel had tried to cut away Penny’s everything?

“No, I like your enthusiasm. It’s … nice. Just … that’s a sore spot.”

Sara gave her a look that plainly said that she could tell that Penny had more sore spots than not, but she smiled again.

“So! What is it you do for fun? It can’t have been all blood and religion all the time, right?”

The saints and nobles of the Rose-Crowned Queen’s court might have liked to pretend to such a world, but where you had saints and nobles you inevitably had all the soldiers and servants and craftsmen required to support a life of pious dedication.

“I made … clocks,” Penny admitted. “Mechanisms. Making something, with all the parts coming together to do something, it’s … satisfying.”

It had been one of the few areas of her life where she’d felt that her existence was more than zero-sum, that she could create something without giving up parts of herself; a craft that asked her for no sacrifices but her time and effort, and spending those in the service of her craft had hardly been a sacrifice at all.

“Hmm. I think I might have something you’d like!”

In short order Penny found herself seated on Sara’s bed, holding a box of little plastic parts.

“This is your … giant robot?” The figure on the box - a mix of armoured knight and war machine - seemed too ornate for actual combat, all sharp pauldrons and spikes. An actor’s version of full plate, made for the glamour of the stage rather than the battlefield.

“Sorta? I mean, it’s fake, not based on a real mech, since there aren’t any real mechs on Earth, so … no, it’s not the same. It’s from a show I used to enjoy, you know. Before. It’s as close as I can get for now.”

Penny could hear the words Sara hadn’t said; not close enough.

“I figured you might enjoy putting it together? I mean, there’s nothing actually mechanical involved, but there’s a lot of little greebly bits you clip out and glue together …”

Penny eyed the model, seeing little mechanical body parts affixed to an armature of plastic tubes like a metal cast just broken from the mold. As much as Sara might say it wasn’t the same, this was clearly something she cared about, something she was trying to share with her as a bridge between their worlds. It was kind in a way few people on Earth had been to her.

“I think I can work with this,” she said. “Show me your tools?”

Sara grinned, as wide and white as a crescent moon.

The brush and little pot of glue Sara proffered weren't anything like Penny’s own tools, drills and files and tiny, precise sawblades. Injection-moulded plastic was in some ways an entirely different medium to brass and steel. In other ways - in the careful way Sara clipped parts from the sprue and filed down the protrusions, in the delicate precision of gluing parts together just so - it was similar.

Time became liquid and slipped away under the pressure of her concentration, no longer frantic grains of sand to be counted but soft and liquid as glass. It was not the same, but it was as close as Penny could get. It was enough for now.

By the time a distant bell rang them down to dinner, she thought she might have made a friend.