There's a specific and deeply satisfying feeling that comes with standing at the center of a plan that had been built correctly, and it feels, I've decided, exactly like being a general.
Not the kind of general who inherited the position through noble blood and spends battles on a hill somewhere watching things happen at a safe distance, but the other kind—the kind who built the army themselves, piece by piece, from the most improbable materials available, and was now watching those pieces click into operational readiness with private satisfaction.
A week had passed.
I want to say that sentence slowly, because a week, in the context of what that week had contained, was a genuinely absurd unit of time to have contained it.
Preparations were complete—or as complete as preparations got when your operation ran on ingenuity, marginal resources, and the sustained collective commitment of a crew that was, by any reasonable measure, too chaotic to be this effective.
The supplies had been gathered, the positions had been mapped, the roles had been assigned and rehearsed to the point that even the parts with significant improvisation risk had been rehearsed.
Everything that could be controlled had been controlled, everything that couldn't had been identified and accounted for in the plan's structure, and all that remained was the doing of it.
I felt absolutely electric.
I moved through the theater like a storm with good taste, which is a description I'm choosing to stand behind, stopping at each room and doorway to check in on the various moving parts of the morning's mobilization.
The first floor was already in motion—Brutus had the supply crates organized with the systematic thoroughness he brought to everything physical, his single arm directing the proceedings with an efficiency that made the people around him move faster just by proximity.
Grisha was doing something to her equipment in the corner, her dark braid looped over one shoulder and her expression suggesting that she was ready, had been ready, and was now experiencing the particular impatience of the physically prepared waiting for the administratively complete.
Julius was dressed, actually dressed for the occasion rather than for his personal aesthetic, which represented a genuine sacrifice on his part and to which I acknowledged with a nod that he received with theatrical gravity.
Willow caught my eye across the lobby and gave me a look that communicated readiness and mild exasperation at the pace of readiness in others, which was fair.
Felix was beside her, giving me a small, earnest wave as I passed. I gave him one back, the exchange brief and meaning everything it was designed to mean.
I went up the stairs before I raising my fist to knock at the door to Nara's room with brisk authority.
"Nara." Two knocks, clean. "Time to move. We leave in fifteen minutes and I need you downstairs in ten." I waited. "Nara?"
The footsteps that responded were energetic—rapid, light, the particular pattern of someone covering ground quickly in a small space—and then the door swung open with conviction and I stood there with my fist still raised in the ready position and one eyebrow traveling upward completely independently of my conscious instruction.
Nara stood in the doorway wearing nothing at all.
She was also, it should be noted, not especially concerned about this.
Her white hair was loose, her crimson eyes were bright, and her ears were in their default upright-and-alert position, the red bow from her usual ensemble sitting on the desk behind her rather than around her neck, and the general impression she gave was of someone who'd been interrupted mid-process and considered the interruption more significant than the state she'd been interrupted in.
"Where," I said carefully, "are your clothes?"
"I'm changing!" she said, which came out descriptive rather than explanatory.
I was preparing to make several observations about the concept of changing and how it typically involved transitioning between two clothed states rather than pausing indefinitely at the unclothed interval, but the hand that came out and grabbed my wrist had different priorities.
I found myself pulled through the doorway before the observations could be made.
Surprisingly enough, I had never been in Nara's room before. This was immediately apparent because nothing in the rest of the theater had prepared me for it, and the rest of the theater contained Julius's violin collection and Grisha's new wall of weapons.
The room was pristinely chaotic—a distinction that sounds impossible until you encounter it in practice, which is to say that everything in the space had clearly been placed with some internal logic that was consistent, personal, and bore no relationship whatsoever to any external organizing principle.
The color scheme was white and pink, emphatically and without compromise, from the bedding visible on the left to the curtains to the small rug in the center of the floor that had a slightly flattened path worn into it from some repeated circuit of movement.
Fresh underwear was distributed across the floor and the desk with the casual abundance of confetti—not dirty, not discarded, just present in the way objects are present when they live somewhere rather than being stored.
Half-eaten carrots occupied the spaces between and among the underwear with cheerful randomness, some of them propped against desk legs, one sitting on the bed with the blunt end facing outward like it was keeping watch.
I was about to ask about the carrots—not in a judgmental way, just in the way that encountering seven partial carrots in someone's bedroom produces genuine curiosity about the system that led to them being there—when something moved under the bed.
A white shape, compact and fast, shot out from beneath the bed frame and made directly for the nearest carrot, seizing it with the focused intentionality of a creature that had been waiting for this exact carrot for what might've been hours.
A few more emerged from various locations with the unhurried confidence—from behind the curtain, from inside a half-open drawer, from somewhere I couldn't identify because I was tracking three more of them simultaneously.
One of them landed on my head.
It settled there with immediate comfort, its weight small and warm. I felt its nose doing investigative work against my scalp while my entire body performed the very specific full-system shudder that had become my involuntary response to the bunnies ever since the night they'd introduced themselves to the slums by eating several people in explicit detail.
They were soft. They were objectively adorable. They also lived in my nightmares. These two things coexisted without resolving themselves into something comfortable.
Nara, unbothered by all of this, was standing in front of the wide mirror that dominated the wall above her desk, surrounded by a ring of light bulbs strung around its frame that gave the whole thing the quality of a theater dressing room.
She was applying something to her face—eyeliner, applied with the focused precision—and I watched this for a moment before the specific absurdity of it caught up with me.
"Nara," I said, with the patient clarity of someone choosing their words for maximum informational delivery, "we are going to be beggars..."
Her ears shot straight up before she froze mid-stroke, the eyeliner pen hovering.
Then she let out a nervous giggle—the particular high, involuntary kind that arrives before the brain can intercept it—and nodded quickly, setting the pen down with a slightly rushed movement.
"Right!" she said. "Yes! Obviously!" She turned away from the mirror and began what I can only describe as the most energetically chaotic search for clothing I had ever witnessed.
The first drawer she opened was the wrong drawer—she registered this, closed it, opened it again as though checking whether it had changed its contents, closed it again.
The second drawer she tried stuck and then gave way suddenly, depositing its contents into the front of the search space in a cascade that she stepped over without looking.
She found a garment that might have been relevant, held it up, dismissed it, placed it on the bed, picked it up again, dismissed it a second time.
She turned twice in a circle. She looked under the pillow. She looked at the ceiling, which contained no clothing but seemed to be part of her process.
A bunny wandered across her path and she sidestepped it with the automatic grace of someone who'd been navigating around them for long enough that it required no thought, which only made the rest of the activity more conspicuous by contrast.
Nara was, by default, energetic in the way weather was energetic—constant, multidirectional, and somehow covering a great deal of ground without seeming to try.
But this was different. This was the specific variety of movement that had edges to it, corners, a slightly elevated quality that wasn't quite frenetic but was adjacent to it, and the giggle had done something I filed separately from the rest of her behavior as worthy of attention.
"Are you scared?" I asked.
"No!" she said, immediately, from inside the wardrobe she'd just fully committed to.
"That was fast," I observed.
"I'm not scared," she said, emerging with a bundle of fabric that was possibly what she was looking for and possibly something she'd grabbed at random.
"I'm fine. I'm ready. I'm completely—" She dropped the bundle, retrieved it, held it up, and confirmed it was two separate things rather than one. "—fine."
I crossed my arms. The bunny on my head shifted to adjust to the new angle my posture created and then resettled. "Nara. Why did you pull me into the room?"
The question landed differently from the previous ones. She went still—not immediately, but gradually, the flurry of motion decelerating over three seconds into something that held its position rather than moving through it.
Her ears, which had been in constant motion, came up fully and then angled slightly back in the way they went when she was navigating something internally.
The color in her cheeks, already present, deepened into something warmer as she dropped the bundle of clothes in her arm.
Her breasts rose and fell a fraction faster now, the full, heavy curves of them swaying with each ragged breath. The muscles of her stomach tightened once, then again, as if something deep inside had clenched without her permission.
Between her thighs the soft, bare lips of her sex were already beginning to gloss, a thin sheen of wetness catching the light as she shifted her weight.
Her thighs pressed together for a heartbeat, as though she could hide the evidence of how thoroughly her body was answering the heat that had taken her. Instead it only made the wetness smear higher along the soft inner skin.
"I—" she started.
I waited.
She looked at the floor, then at the mirror, then at somewhere to my left that contained nothing of interest, and then she said, very quietly, in the specific register that information takes when it's being disclosed rather than announced, "I'm in heat."