Arashi looked at Raizen. Raizen looked back. Neither of them had any idea what she was talking about.
Hikari was watching the sky steadily, her face turned upward, shoulder turned toward Raizen. Whatever Kori had brought them up here for, Hikari had the patience to wait it out. The rest of them were going to have to learn from her example.
The cool air settled into the spaces between Raizen's clothes. The city below produced its usual night sounds - the distant hum of the Heart's surface vents, the occasional drone passing on a periter sweep, the wind moving across the lower districts. Sowhere a few houses over, soone was playing music quietly. The notes were too far away to make out properly - just a distant lody, pleasant, anonymous.
Three minutes.
"Kori," Arashi said. "I love you. I respect you. I would die for you. But if this is a joke, I'm going to be sad."
"It's not a joke."
"How do you know?"
"Because I just know."
Arashi turned to Hikari, and whispered with the most silent whisper he was capable of. "Did you know about this?"
Hikari shook her head.
"Then how is she so calm?"
"She's just like that," Hikari said quietly, her first words since they'd co up.
Arashi opened his mouth to argue, then closed it and decided not to.
Raizen was just looking up. The sky was the way it always was. The cloud ceiling was the cloud ceiling. The grey-white blanket of his entire life was sitting where it always sat, doing what it always did, which was nothing special. Sure, they were glowing now, and it was pretty, but he knew it wouldn't last. His eyes drifted across it without finding anything to land on.
He'd seen this before.
He didn't know how he knew. The cloud cover looked the sa as it always did. There was no obvious change. But sothing in the back of his foggy head was reaching toward a mory the way a tongue reaches toward a missing tooth - finding the gap, finding the shape of what should be there. His mories were still foggy since he woke up on Saffi's lap, but he could rember if he struggled enough.
A blurry cliff, his hands smaller than he ever rebered them… His mother humming a tune…
The night before the third day.
His chest tightened.
Keahi sighed audibly. "This is the most boring thing -"
The clouds had begun to do sothing.
Not move. The cloud layer didn't move that way - the standard cover sat where it sat, drifting only with weather, its position fixed. What it was doing now wasn't movent. It was colour.
The white was warming. Not toward orange or red - toward shades Raizen couldn't na, a quality of light that sat between gold, amber, pearl, but sohow it was neither of those, the sky's own private third option. It was barely visible at first, and he thought he was imagining it. The white threads between and behind the clouds started shifting, just like the pocket scanner changed its modified tal's hues when you shone a different light at it. Then Hikari beside him made a small, quiet sound - a single soft sigh - and he knew she was seeing it too.
The colour deepened.
Slowly. Steadily. The whole cloud cover, in every direction, beginning to glow from the horizon. Everything ca from the west, as if soone dropped all the kinds of paint on the clouds, now beginning to bleed their different tints.
Arashi's mouth fell open. He didn't say anything.
Keahi made a small, startled sound and slid closer to Raizen without seeming to decide to.
Hikari's hand tightened into a fist - not a defensive movent, not quite an offensive one either. Just the reflex of soone whose body had instantly recognized a presence.
Raizen looked at Kori.
She wasn't looking at the sky. She was watching them - watching their faces - with an expression so unfamiliar he almost didn't recognize it. Her usual neutral set had relaxed by a fraction. The corners of her mouth were neither up nor down. Her one visible eye was smiling.
She'd brought them up here to see this - the entire sky lit from within, the grey-white ceiling of his entire life turned into sothing that looked closer to neon glow than weather. All the possible colors Raizen had ever seen, intertwined in the already-white glowing clouds.
The roof was bathed in it.
Arashi had finally found his voice.
"Okay," he said. "Why does it feel like it's been ages since I've seen the clouds like this?"
"Maybe because a year ago, you were in the Underworks, and I didn't really bother to take you anywhere else to see it" Kori said.
"One hell of a legal guardian you are..."
"Legal guardian?" Raizen turned his head. "What's that?"
"Uhh…" Arashi scratched his head. "I don't know how to put it… Kori's legally my mom, but biologically she's-"
He instantly stopped after Kori raised her brow at him.
"She's… A very strong… And capable… And beautiful… And-"
"Ok, just stop at this point" Kori covered half her face with her hand.
Keahi was holding her bowl again. She went down to the kitchen at so point and was now clutching it with both hands, the way soone holds a comfort object during a thunderstorm. Her eyes were huge.
"It's so pretty," she said. "Back where I'm from, it's more orange-y"
"Really?" Hikari asked with unusual interest.
Raizen didn't say anything. The light from the clouds passed through him in a way he could almost feel - not warmth, not exactly, but a presence, like standing close to sothing that was alive, right there, next to him. He'd seen the first-day version of this in Ukai. The white glow above the platforms during the festival. Then the second-day phenonon. The low hum, the strange, yet comforting sounds.
This was the third day, arriving in Neoshima.
Suddenly, a shape crossed above them.
It ca from the east, traveling west, cutting across their field of vision in a hard arc that registered before any of them processed what they were seeing. A silhouette. Human-shaped. Backlit by the glowing clouds, dark against the warm light, traveling at a speed and an altitude that made no imdiate sense.
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