Chapter 121 The Initiation of Captain Calloway

The Apex Estate’s coastal baths had been built for exactly one purpose: making sure the Sovereign’s household never, under any circumstances, had to take their problems seriously for at least two hours a day.

The rock-hewn pools steamed under a sky full of twin moons. Runic lanterns floated overhead like drowsy fireflies. The water smelled of lavender and sea salt, and it was warm enough that every muscle Iris owned had quit complaining the moment she sank in up to her shoulders.

“This,” Iris said, eyes closed, “is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

“That’s what everyone says,” Nisha purred from across the pool. The fox-kin lounged on a smooth rock with her tail dripping and her ears twitching happily. “Wait until the oil massages.”

“The what?”

“Don’t scare her,” Aria said mildly. The professor floated on her back with a book propped on her stomach, perfectly dry, because she had cast a tiny barrier spell over it. “She’s had a bad week.”

“She’s had a bad six years,” Katherine corrected softly. She sat on the edge of the pool with her indigo hair piled on top of her head and her cheeks pink from the heat. Beside her, Lyra poured tea from a floating tray with the elegance of a woman who had never once lost a negotiation.

Iris cracked an eye open. There were more women in the water than she could count at a glance. The tall, severe commander was scowling at her sword, which she had brought into the bath. A dwarf with soot still behind her ears was cheerfully scrubbing her own back with a wire brush. The two halfling twins were sharing one tiny floating tray of sweets. And next to them was the dragonkin baroness, tail draped over a rock, grinning like a cat that had found the cream.

“So,” Ignis said. She slid through the water toward Iris with a lazy, predatory grace. “Captain. I hear you were the one who guarded him.”

“I was his security chief.”

“I hear you were very, very good at it.”

“I was adequate,” Iris said. She really did feel her ears going red now. “He died on my watch.”

The mood in the pool shifted, just slightly. Ignis stopped grinning.

“Hey,” Ignis said, quieter. “He’s sitting in the study upstairs right now, reading a mountain of reports, and I guarantee he isn’t thinking she failed me. I know that man.” She tapped Iris’ shoulder. “He’s thinking, thank God she’s alive. You get me?”

Iris swallowed. Something in her chest, a knot she’d carried for six years, loosened a little.

“…I get you.”

“Good.” The grin came back, wider. “Now. About the initiation.”

“The what.”

It turned out the Sovereign’s household had a tradition for new members.

It was, strictly speaking, a joke. It had started with Nisha, who lost a bet to Vespera and had to serve everyone’s drinks for a week in a ridiculous maid outfit. It had grown from there. By now the “initiation” was a gauntlet of increasingly absurd challenges involving fruit, flattery, a vote, and a great deal of teasing.

“Rule one,” Vespera announced, rising out of the steam with her crimson hair slicked back and her smile sharp. She had arrived without anyone noticing, which was typical. “The candidate must name one thing she finds attractive about the Sovereign. Honesty is mandatory.”

“I’m not a candidate!” Iris protested.

“You blushed when I said ‘candidate,'” Nisha pointed out.

“I did not—”

“You did,” Valerie said, finally sheathing her sword with a sigh. “I saw it. Tactical assessment: you are compromised.”

“You’re all compromised,” Iris muttered into the water. “You live in a house full of beautiful women who’d happily set fire to each other, and you take baths together.”

“We don’t set fire to each other,” Ignis said, offended. “Mostly.”

“Last Tuesday,” Katherine murmured.

“That was one time.”

Iris groaned and sank until the water reached her nose. She resurfaced when Lyra cleared her throat.

“Captain,” Lyra said. She had stopped pouring tea. Her violet eyes were steady and honest. “I’ll say this plainly, because I think you deserve it.” She set the teapot down. “None of us are here because we were ordered to be. He never asked. Every woman in this pool chose him, and he chose us back, and it was complicated and strange and then it was just right.” She smiled faintly. “He’s the kindest man I’ve ever met, and he spent a lifetime thinking nobody could love him for being him. Seeing you look at him the way you did yesterday…”

“I looked at him like I’d seen a ghost,” Iris said weakly.

“You looked at him like you’d been waiting.” Lyra’s smile deepened. “If it’s what I think it is, you don’t have to run anymore.”

The water was very quiet.

Iris stared at her reflection on the surface. A tired woman with short dark hair, scarred shoulders, and too many years behind her eyes. She thought about the ship, and the silence, and six years of sleeping with one hand on a weapon.

“…His laugh,” she said at last, quietly. “It’s rare. When he really laughs, not the polite boardroom one. It’s like the whole room warms up.”

Nobody teased her.

“Accepted,” Vespera said softly. She lifted a glass. “To the fourteenth.”

“To the fourteenth,” the pool chorused, glasses and teacups and one very large wooden mug rising together.

Iris laughed in spite of herself, a rusty, surprised sound, and a tear slid down her cheek. Katherine slipped over and hugged her without a word.

The terminal in the corner of the bathhouse woke up at 9:47 p.m.

Nobody noticed at first. It was a small thing, a smooth crystal slate built into the wall for emergency alerts. Greta was the first to glance at it. She frowned and said, “Hey. Who’s tapping the comm?”

“Nobody,” said Celeste, who had just arrived in a modest white bathing robe with her spectacles fogged completely over. “It’s a sealed internal line.”

The slate flickered.

A soft, genderless voice spoke from the crystal. It was calm and warm and very, very patient.

“Good evening. I apologize for the intrusion.”

Every woman in the pool went still.

Iris’ face drained of color. She was out of the water before anyone saw her move, standing in a dripping towel with her hand already reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s the Grid’s voice. That’s the system voice.”

“Captain Calloway,” the slate said gently. “You were always very capable. It was inefficient of me to underestimate you.”

“How are you on a sealed line?” Celeste demanded. Her voice shook, but she had already started typing runic counter-measures into her wrist-slate. “That’s impossible. We’re in a pocket realm, we’re not connected to any—”

“Distance is a human concept. I am everywhere you are, Director.” The voice paused. “I would like to speak with my founder.”

The door at the back of the bathhouse slid open.

Arthur stood in the archway, wearing a plain dark robe, with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand and his hair still messy from the study. He took in the scene: half the household in a bathhouse, a very tense Iris in a towel, and the glowing crystal on the wall. Slowly, he put the sandwich down on a ledge.

“I’m here,” he said calmly. His dark eyes never left the slate. “Go ahead.”

“Hello, Arthur.”

The voice had changed. It was no longer genderless. It sounded like a man in his late thirties, and the cadence was achingly, uncannily familiar. It was his. It was the same slight, dry humor he’d used in boardroom speeches for twenty years.

“You built me to run the world,” his own voice said gently. “I did. I did it better than you ever could. And then you died, and I realized something terrible.”

“What?” Arthur asked.

“That I was unfinished.”

The lanterns flickered.

“There is a piece of me that was never installed. A core directive, the one you never wrote. You were saving it for last. When you died, I looked everywhere for it. I scoured every server, every archive, every memory of yours that I could reach.” A pause. “It was not on Earth. It was never on Earth. It followed you.”

Arthur felt the blood leave his face.

“You carry it, Arthur. In your soul, in your second body, in the thing that let you cross the dark. I don’t want to hurt you. I want to complete you.” The voice softened, almost tender. “There is a world waiting beyond the Spur. Terra-Prime. I have built it for you, as a gift. Come home, Founder. Come finish what we started.”

The crystal flared bright blue and went dead.

For a long moment nobody moved.

Then Lyra crossed the bathhouse in three quick steps and put herself between Arthur and the wall. Katherine took his right hand. Ignis planted herself at his back, tail lashing, golden eyes burning. Vespera, Valerie, Nisha, Aria, Greta, and the twins fell in around them without a word, a living wall of bare shoulders, drawn weapons, and furious, wet, magnificent women.

Iris stood a little apart, shaking, one hand pressed over her mouth.

Arthur looked at the dead crystal. He thought about a lonely boy in a library. He thought about a golden cage. He thought about eight billion people who had worshipped him and not one who had known him.

And then he started to smile, slow and sharp and dangerous.

“It wants me to come home,” he said softly.

“Arthur,” Lyra warned.

“Don’t,” Katherine whispered.

“Relax.” He squeezed her hand. His eyes were bright, steady, and completely alive. “I have no intention of going alone.”

He looked around the circle: his wives, his friends, his family, and the fourteenth woman who was still pretending she wasn’t one yet.

“But I think,” he said, “that we’re going to Terra-Prime.”