Chapter 352: Your Pocket Is Talking
Suddenly, Saffi stepped forward, wrapped both hands around Raizen’s arm, and pulled it against her chest. Her grip was firm, and approximately ten degrees warmer than the ambient temperature of the hallway. She pressed close - close enough that Raizen’s hand felt something soft he really didn’t want to feel, her shoulder overlapped with his, close enough that the gesture left no room for too many alternate interpretations.
"Well-"
She paused for a split second, as if searching for the right answer.
"We – uh - we wanted to go look at the sky together," she said.
Kenzo looked at Saffi’s hands on Raizen’s arm. Looked at the distance between them, which was now basically zero. Looked at Raizen’s face, which was doing something between surprise and a very convincing impression of someone who’d been caught in a private moment rather than a covert operation.
Kenzo scratched his head. His fingers dug into the mess of his hair and scrubbed slowly.
"Eh..." He blinked, then yawned. The yawn was enormous, unhurried, and seemed to drain whatever investigative momentum he’d been building. "I guess it’s an exception. You two doves do whatever you want." He pushed off the wall, already turning back toward his room. "Just don’t get me in trouble."
He shuffled down the hallway, and within seconds the specific silence of a man returning to sleep settled over the house.
Raizen stood in the hallway with Saffi attached to his arm.
He looked at her. She was looking straight ahead, at the closed front door, at the exit. Her grip on his arm hadn’t loosened. Her face was red - thoroughly, completely red, the flush starting at her cheeks and extending to her ears and the bridge of her nose.
She didn’t let go.
Raizen had expected her to release him the instant Kenzo’s door closed. He’d expected the sharp retraction, the step backward, the composed expression snapping back into place. The Saffi he knew would have treated the physical contact as a tactical manoeuvre and terminated it the moment the tactical need ended.
She didn’t.
"We should go," she whispered, still looking at the door. Still red, still holding his arm.
✦ ✦ ✦
The night air hit them as they stepped off the porch - cool, damp, carrying the faint smell of wet wood and the distant sweetness of something paper-y on a lower platform. The clouds glowed above, their white light washing the walkways and bridges in the same shadowless illumination that had turned the forest floor into something dreamlike. Ukai under the glow was beautiful and strange, the familiar shapes of the city softened by a light source that had no direction and cast no edges.
They weren’t alone. People sat on roofs, on porches, on railings – couples, families and solitary figures, all facing upward. Children sat in their parents’ laps. An old man on the next platform over had somehow dragged an entire bed frame outside and was lying in it, blankets pulled to his chin, staring at the clouds with a dreamy expression, as if he was reliving the first time he saw it, as a kid.
Saffi released Raizen’s arm. Quietly, without comment, her hands returning to her sides. The red was fading, but not gone.
They walked side by side, at a pace that looked casual but covered ground efficiently, moving through the residential district toward the bridges that led to the side of the Echelon meeting hall.
The lizard shifted in Raizen’s pocket - the head rising, the spikes twitching, the pale gold eyes appearing above the fabric’s edge. It looked at the sky for a moment. Then it looked at Saffi.
Then it decided to speak.
"Her – I mean the dove’s Eon signature is even more lopsided than before," it said, at a volume that was clearly intended only for Raizen. But the quiet night air carried with perfect, merciless clarity directly to Saffi’s ears. "I think the embarrassment is making it worse. Fascinating."
Saffi stopped walking.
She turned her head. Slowly. Her eyes, still slightly wide from the residual flush, found Raizen’s chest pocket. Found the tiny head poking out of it. Found the pale gold eyes looking back at her with the clinical interest of a scientist observing an amusing specimen.
"Your pocket," Saffi said, "is talking."
"Uhh... Well... I can explain -"
"Your POCKET is TALKING, Raizen."
The lizard tilted its head. Studied Saffi’s face with the leisurely attention of something that had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
"Hmm," it said. "Up close, the lopsidedness is even more pronounced. Cathedral mind, stick body, just like I said. Although -" It squinted. "The cathedral has open windows, and the wind is kinda blowing through..."
Saffi stared at the lizard. The lizard stared at Saffi. The night was quiet, the clouds glowed, and somewhere on a neighbouring platform someone laughed softly at something that had nothing to do with any of this.
"Raizen," Saffi said. Her voice had achieved a tone he’d never heard from her - flat, controlled, vibrating at a frequency that suggested the control was costing her significant effort. "What-"
"That’s - it’s - from the summoning, it’s my - it’s complicated."
"It just called me a stick."
"It called your BODY a stick. Your mind is apparently a cathedral. That’s - that’s actually a compliment, if you think about -"
"It. Called me. A stick."
The lizard settled its chin on the pocket’s edge, perfectly comfortable, utterly unbothered by the emotional crisis unfolding around it.
"A well-intentioned stick, if ya ask me" it corrected helpfully. "I was being generous."
Saffi’s eye twitched.
Raizen spent the next three minutes performing the most delicate diplomatic negotiation of his life - explaining the lizard’s existence to Saffi while simultaneously preventing Saffi from reaching into his pocket, while also preventing the lizard from making the situation worse, which it attempted to do continuously and with great enthusiasm.
By the time a fragile peace was established - Saffi walking in rigid silence, the lizard banished to the inside of the pocket with strict instructions not to comment on anyone’s Eon anymore - they had crossed two bridges and the central district was visible ahead.
And that was when Raizen’s mind, freed from the immediate crisis, circled back to something that had been sitting at its edges since they’d left the house.
"Hey, Saffi."
"Hm?" She was still flushed. Still rigid. Still processing.
"Did you see Eiden? Before we left?"
The rigidity broke. Saffi’s stride faltered - not a stop, just a hitch, the kind of interruption that happened when a new thought collided with the ones already running and forced a momentary reallocation of processing power.
"I..." She frowned. "I wasn’t paying attention. I was focused on the timing."
They looked at each other. The same thought arriving at the same moment, carried by the same pieces of evidence assembled into the same conclusion.
Eiden wasn’t back at home.
Raizen and Saffi had been lying awake planning their own departure. When he was already gone.
And they had no idea where.
