fingers. They stick their bare feet straight out in front of them and keep their gaze on the maz, spinning that one thread into a more robust string that folds and twines in around itself. The golden glow of it—some of our stolen sunnaz mixed with something else—illuminates the pillow creases on their face and the dark circles under their eyes.
With a motion too complicated for my eyes to follow, Remi suddenly folds the whole weave in half, does something while it’s cupped in their hands, then crushes it. The spell explodes into a dazzling cloud of tiny stars that rush toward me, fly a lap around my head, and settle into my hair. They tickle where they rest on the close-shaved side of my head, and a smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. I pick one of the stars from a lock of hair hanging near my face and pinch it between two fingers, then crush it and sprinkle the sparkling residue over Remi’s head.
“There, now we match,” I say, watching the glittering dust settle on their cheeks and the tips of their ears. Their whole face glows warm. Touching maz like this would have majorly freaked me out a few years ago. Remi has helped me get used to it.
“Shouldn’t you be getting your beauty sleep for our job tomorrow?” they say, their voice pitched low, for my ears only.
“Shouldn’t you?” I reply automatically, suppressing a wince at the reflexive snap in my voice.
“Touché. I’m just surprised you’re not hacking into the dating profiles of Kyrkarta’s head of police or something. Isn’t that your usual insomniac boredom killer?”
I shrug, blinking the deck interface out of my contacts altogether so my vision holds nothing but city and sparkling cheeks. “I ran out of interesting people. There are no mysteries anymore. Tragic.”
“You’ll have to start in on the politicians of other cities, I guess. Bring a little spark back into your relationship with the internet.”
I let the hint slide right on by. I can do that just as well here. No need to follow them to Jattapore to dig up their new landlord’s sick tastes and secret hobbies. Besides, if this job goes well, in a day or two they’ll be formally enrolling at KyrU and staying in mystery-free Kyrkarta with me anyway. I watch as they draw a new strand of maz from the necklace I made them last summer. It’s constructed from five concentric circles of fine metallic tubing that act as maz chambers, letting Remi carry a bit of maz wherever they go. I gave it to them for their seventeenth birthday, almost a year ago. The look on their face when they opened the package and heard my explanation, the way our eyes caught and held . . .
My stomach tightens, and I cut my gaze back out to the lights of the city.
“What are you doing up, anyway?” I ask.
They shrug. “I slept too much after the clinic. Wide awake now. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine to do the job tomorrow.”
I breathe long and slow through my nose.
“Good,” I reply, as if that’s my only concern.
Their mouth twists into an odd shape, then smooths back to blank. They coax another strand of sunnaz from the innermost ring of their necklace and twine it around their pointer finger, then weave in the barest trace of motaz from another ring. Making something animated then, able to move on its own. Remi’s specialty. They work silently for several minutes, spinning the maz into a complex tangle of light until, with one taut pull of a thread, the whole thing shifts from strings of light to solid form. A tiny, palm-sized golden bunny.
The bunny hops from their hand up their arm, onto their shoulder, pauses, then leaps straight at my face. It smacks me in the nose with its little rabbit feet, bracing against my face for the jump back to Remi, where it finally nestles into their tousled bedhead. I reach a finger up to pet its tiny glowing ears, catching a few strands of Remi’s hair in the process. It’s soft, so dark it’s almost black, with just a bit of wavy wildness to it, a total contrast to the tame, golden bunny. My gaze slides from their hair to their eyes. And there we pause, suspended in time, under the stars and the neon of our city, locked in connection. The air becomes heavy.
I snatch my hand back and let my gaze fall to