Chapter 382: Dressed in Celebration
They climbed down through the trees.
The building was surrounded - guards at every step, smiling at the crowd personnel moving through the perimeter with the urgent efficiency of people dealing with an incident they’d already been told to classify as something else. Getting down through the front was impossible. Getting down through the maintenance ladder was risky. So they went sideways - from the roof’s edge to a branch that overhung the building’s western wall, the one Raizen climbed with Hikari before, when the Echelon activated the anti-gravity mechanism. They went down through the canopy’s network of limbs and trunks, moving from handhold to handhold and branch to branch with more care than necessary.
Saffi went first. She moved through the branches with the quiet precision that she brought to everything, each handhold tested before committed to, each foothold assessed. Raizen followed, his body operating on automatic, his mind still processing the conversation he’d overheard.
On its own, it’s geometrically perfect. Inside a body, it’s wild.
A kind of Eon, somehow completely opposite to the normal kind of Eon. In every way, at every level, the reverse.
After all... Was the Eon they were used to – the one they used for everything – even the normal kind of Eon? Is this dark Eon the primordial form? Or just some kind of error in the system?
They reached the lower platforms and dropped to a walkway, landing softly on wet wood. Raizen straightened up, brushed bark from his clothes, and looked around.
Ukai was celebrating.
The firefly festival had begun, and the city had transformed. Paper lanterns hung from every railing and every bridge, their surfaces painted with designs that caught the amber sunset light and glowed. Stalls lined the walkways - vendors selling food, trinkets, carved figurines, painted masks. The smell of cooking filled the air - grilled vegetables, spiced rice, something sweet and warm that Raizen couldn’t identify but that made his empty stomach clench with sudden, urgent interest.
And everyone was looking up.
The hole in the sky dominated everything. The perfect circle of open air, around a hundred meters across, pouring amber sunset light down onto Ukai like a spotlight on a stage. The cloud ceiling surrounding it still glowed its first-day white glow, and where the two light sources met - amber from above, white from within - the colours blended into something that made the entire sky look like it was on fire.
People stood on walkways and stared. Children pointed. An old woman on a bench had her head tilted so far back that her hat had fallen off and she hadn’t noticed. Vendors forgot their customers and customers forgot their purchases and everyone, everywhere, was looking at the same thing - a circle of real sky in a lifetime of grey, painted amber by a sunset they’d never seen directly.
The cover story had already taken hold. Raizen caught fragments of conversation as they walked - "the Echelon’s gift for the festival" and "they blew up a hole in the clouds, can you believe it?" and "apparently it lasts, they said it won’t close." The Echelon had dressed the catastrophe in celebration’s clothes, and the city had accepted it without question because the alternative - that a weapon of unknown origin had erupted inside the most secure building in Ukai and punched through the permanent, century-old cloud ceiling by accident - was not the kind of thing people wanted to believe on a festival night.
Raizen walked through the celebration in a daze. His body was fine - no pain, no fatigue, no evidence of what had happened. But his mind was full, overfull, processing too many things simultaneously and doing justice to none of them. The scanner in his waistband. The empty chest pocket. The conversation between Eiden and Maren. The colour flicker when he’d woken up - grey replacing colour for frames at a time, the world going monochrome and coming back. The memory of pain that was gone, taken by something he couldn’t name.
Saffi walked beside him. Close, their arms occasionally brushing. She’d returned to her composed state - the flush faded, the fidgeting stopped, the analytical exterior restored. But she stayed close. Closer than usual, closer than the walkway’s width required.
They passed a stall selling handmade jewellery - bracelets and necklaces and rings, each one crafted from materials native to Ukai’s forest. Wood, polished stone, woven vine, small beads carved from seeds encased in resin. Saffi’s pace slowed. Her eyes caught something on the display - a bracelet, thin, woven from pale vine with small blue stones set at intervals along its length. The stones caught the amber light and reflected it in a strange purple color.
She stopped. Looked at it. Her fingers rose, almost touching the bracelet, hovering above the surface.
Raizen reached for his pocket. "I can -"
"Shut up."
"Excuse me?" Raizen took a step back on instinct.
"I don’t want to hear anything." Saffi’s hand came down on his wrist, gentle but firm. "I’m buying it myself."
She paid the vendor - a small woman with weathered hands and a smile that suggested she’d seen thousands of customers fall in love with her work and never got tired of watching it happen. Saffi slipped the bracelet over her wrist, held her arm up to the amber light, and studied it with the same analytical focus she brought to Eon barrier frequencies and guard rotation patterns.
Then she lowered her arm and kept walking, the bracelet on her wrist, and didn’t mention it again.
They walked deeper into the festival. The crowds thickened. Music drifted from somewhere - stringed instruments and drums, playing something lively that made the walkways feel more like dance floors. Children ran between the adults’ legs carrying unlit sky lanterns, and Raizen thought of the unicycle boy, wondered if every single one of those lanterns had been delivered on a squeaky wheel balanced on a teenage head.
The sunset deepened. The amber turned to pink and red, the red to purple, the light through the hole shifting as the sun dropped lower behind the cloud ceiling. Shadows lengthened on the walkways, and the paper lanterns began to take over the illumination duties, their painted surfaces glowing warm as the natural light retreated.
Raizen was watching a man carve a wooden bird at a stall - quick, precise cuts that turned a block of pale wood into something with feathers and a beak in under a minute - when Saffi tugged at his sleeve.
"Raizen."
He looked where she was looking.
Walking toward them through the festival crowd, unhurried, hands in his pockets, his face lit by the warm glow of paper lanterns and the fading purple light from the hole in the sky above -
Eiden.
