FULL GEAR — CHAPTER 26: "Sore Lions"
The problem, Miyu decided, was that nobody understood context.
She was limping down a side street in the North Terra Urban District at something past two in the morning, one eye swollen most of the way shut, blood dried in a brown crust from her hairline to her jaw, her stocking torn open at the knee where the asphalt had introduced itself to her leg, and her leather jacket hanging off one shoulder because the strap had given up somewhere around the third floor of the descent. She was a mess. She was aware she was a mess. She did not need the two people at the shuttered noodle stand to look at her the way they were looking at her.
"What," she said to them.
They looked away quickly.
"That's what I thought."
She kept walking. Kept limping, technically, but she preferred to think of it as walking with a temporary asymmetry.
The thing was — and she was going to work through this out loud, because working through things out loud was how she processed and she was not going to apologize for having a functional cognitive strategy — the thing was that she had not lost.
"I didn't lose," she informed the empty street.
The street had no comment.
"Let's actually look at the sequence of events," she said, gesturing with the hand that wasn't holding her jacket closed. "Objectively. Like adults. Because if you look at it objectively, what actually happened is a lot more complicated than what a casual observer might—"
A passerby on the opposite sidewalk, a man walking a small nervous dog, picked up his pace.
"—might conclude," she finished, watching him speed-walk away. "Sure. Run. Cowards run from the truth all the time. That's a documented phenomenon."
She turned down the street that led toward the Den.
"So," she continued. "Point one. That boy. The one in the jersey." She held up a finger, then remembered her hand was occupied and put it back on her jacket. "I beat him. Comprehensively. I put him through a wall, a desk, several other structural features of that building, and up an entire floor with a single uppercut. If the fight had been him versus me, which it was for most of the relevant duration, the outcome is not in question. I won that. That's a win. That's one win for Miyu."
(The jersey was still cheap, by the way. Even in retrospect. Especially in retrospect.)
She stepped over a broken bottle without looking at it.
"Then the other one shows up. The metal one." Her expression soured further, which she wouldn't have thought possible given the swelling. "Who, I would like to point out, was fresh. Completely fresh. She walked onto that roof having spent her energy on a generator, of all things, while I had been fighting for over an hour. Over an hour. Do you understand what that does to a person's reserves? Do you understand the math there?"
The street continued to not understand the math there.
"So it wasn't even a real fight," she said. "It was an ambush by a fresh combatant against someone operating at a significant fatigue disadvantage. That's not a loss. That's a handicap match that I wasn't told was happening. If anything the fact that I stayed standing as long as I did against a fresh opponent while running on fumes is impressive. That's an argument for me being better, not worse."
She reached a crosswalk. There were no cars. There was no reason to stop. She stopped anyway, out of a deep-rooted instinct she'd never examined, and stood at the empty intersection continuing her argument to nobody.
"And another thing." She was building momentum now, the specific momentum of a person constructing a case they needed to be true. "The dizziness. That wasn't her. That was the boy. The jersey one. His stupid delayed-explosion Gear or whatever that was — that's what made me dizzy. That's the only reason her last punch landed. If not for a completely separate person's Gear from forty minutes earlier, that punch does not connect and I do not go over the edge."
(Which, when you follow it through—)
She stopped walking. She had arrived somewhere.
"So really, if you're assigning credit, she didn't even beat me. He beat me. Sort of. Assisted." She frowned. "And he lost. So the person who beat me is a person who lost, which is logically incoherent, which means nobody beat me."
She nodded to herself, satisfied with the airtight quality of this reasoning.
The light changed. She crossed. She did not need the light. She crossed anyway.
"And the fall," she said, gaining volume as she warmed to it, "the fall doesn't count because I survived the fall. You cannot claim a decisive victory if the person you allegedly defeated stands up four floors down and walks home. That's not a defeat. That's a scenic exit. I chose to leave. Tactically."
A window opened above her.
"SOME OF US ARE SLEEPING," a voice announced.
"SOME OF US ARE PROCESSING A COMPLICATED EVENING," Miyu announced back, without breaking stride.
The window closed.
"Rude," she muttered.
She limped on. The Urban District thinned around her, the shuttered storefronts giving way to the older residential blocks that marked the approach to the Den, the buildings getting shorter and closer together, the specific quiet of a neighborhood that had gone fully to sleep hours ago.
Her leg hurt. Her face hurt. Her ribs had a complaint they were filing in installments. The Terran Energy that had flooded her system during the fall had receded, and what it left behind was the full, unfiltered accounting of everything her body had absorbed over the last two hours, arriving all at once now that there was no fury left to mask it.
(Keep talking. If you keep talking you keep walking. That's the deal. That's the arrangement.)
"It was a draw," she said, quieter now. "At absolute worst. A draw. Two units, same objective, both walk away standing — that's a draw. That's the honest read. Anyone reasonable would call it a draw."
She stopped.
She considered this.
(No.)
"Actually," she said, "no. I won. I'm the one who identified all the factors. She just punched things. Identifying the factors is the harder skill. I won on points. Intellectual points. Which are the real points."
She resumed limping.
Somewhere behind her, four floors of an abandoned building and a crater in the asphalt told a different story, but the abandoned building wasn't here, and the crater wasn't here, and the only witness to Miyu Yamashita's long walk home was Miyu Yamashita, who had reviewed the evidence, consulted with herself, and reached a unanimous verdict in her own favor.
The Den came into view at the end of the street.
There was a light on.
Miyu stopped talking.
The Den had a light on, which meant someone was awake, which meant Miyu was going to have to explain herself.
She stood at the end of the street and considered, briefly, whether she could scale the side of the building and get into her room through the window and deal with all of this in the morning when she looked less like she'd lost a fight. She rejected the idea immediately, partly because her leg was not currently in a window-scaling condition and partly because she had not lost a fight, she had participated in a technically-a-draw that she had actually won on intellectual points, and there was no reason to sneak into her own base like a criminal.
There was also the matter of the mission.
(It's not my fault,) she told herself, approaching the front door. (I was attacked. By two poor people. In a building. While doing my job. That's not something a reasonable person gets in trouble for.)
(I took the mission alone, which — okay, yes, technically Marlon said take the long route and coordinate, and I did neither of those things, but the outcome would have been the same and I retrieved valuable field intelligence about a rival unit, which is worth more than a briefcase.)
(The briefcase.)
She stopped at the door.
(I don't have the briefcase.)
The Den rose in front of her — the Lion Cubs' base, a converted three-story building in the older residential blocks of the Urban District, its brick face worn but maintained, the front windows lit warm against the two a.m. dark. It was not a beautiful building. It had the specific dignity of a place that had been made into a home by people who didn't have the money to make it anything fancier and had decided to make it theirs instead.
From inside, she heard Marlon laugh.
It came through the door and the brick and the night air with no difficulty whatsoever, because nothing about Marlon Brute had ever had difficulty being heard. The laugh was enormous and genuine and rolled out of the building like weather.
Miyu felt something in her chest unclench very slightly.
(Okay,) she thought. (Brain still works. I can still recognize that laugh, categorize it correctly, and feel appropriately annoyed by its volume. No lasting neurological damage from the fall. Good. Filing that under evidence I won.)
She opened the door.
The first thing she saw was Ilyana.
Ilyana Aishitemasu Love was sitting sideways across the arm of the common room's least-destroyed couch in the specific way that Ilyana occupied furniture — like the furniture existed to display her rather than support her. Sixteen years old, not technically an official member of the Lion Cubs, not technically recognized by the Empire as existing at all, and carrying herself with the total, unbothered confidence of someone who had never once in her life doubted she was the most interesting person in any given room.
Dark black hair, shoulder-length, blunt bangs cut in a clean line across her forehead, bright teal underlights catching the warm light of the room. Dark eyeliner. Wide teal eyes that matched the highlights exactly, because Ilyana did nothing by accident. The teal over-ear headphones resting around her neck. The black crop top with the white stylized feline face printed across the chest. The baggy olive cargo pants with the loose straps hanging from the pockets, the long black utility belt with its length trailing down the front, the oversized chunky white sneakers.
She had one hand up, twirling a strand of teal-highlighted hair around her finger, and she was looking at Miyu with an expression of profound, luxurious boredom that shifted — the moment she took in the full state of Miyu's face, leg, jacket, and stocking — into something considerably more entertained.
"Oh," Ilyana said. "Oh, no."
Miyu closed the door behind her.
"Don't."
"I haven't said anything."
"You said 'oh no.'"
"That's a factual observation. You look like oh no." Ilyana unfolded herself from the couch arm with the slow, deliberate grace of someone who was aware of being watched at all times, mostly by herself. "Someone did that to your face on purpose. I need to know who. Not to help. Just to understand the kind of person who could do that to you, because in my experience"—she gestured vaguely at Miyu's entire situation—"that's supposed to be hard."
(She's always been like this,) Miyu thought.
She and Ilyana had met two months ago, on Miyu's first day at the Den, and the first thing Ilyana had ever said to her had been a joke at her expense so smooth and so precise that Miyu hadn't realized she'd been insulted until several minutes later. It had been the first time anyone had called her useless without using the word — and somehow that had landed harder than any of the direct cruelty back at the palace ever had, because the direct cruelty had at least taken her seriously enough to be cruel. Ilyana had just been amused by her.
And now this girl was her best friend.
Her only friend, technically. But whatever.
"I won the fight," Miyu said. "You should see the other people."
"People. Plural."
"There were two of them."
"So you lost to two people."
"I won against one and got ambushed by a fresh combatant, which is a completely different—"
"I would love to hear more about this," a new voice said, "but I have a more pressing question."
Aliyah Saiko Fantasia stepped into the common room from the hallway.
Nineteen years old, vice-leader of the Lion Cubs, and radiating the specific exhausted authority of someone who had been holding a chaotic unit together through sheer force of organizational will for longer than she'd planned to. She stood two inches taller than Miyu, which Miyu was aware of and resented in a low-grade background way. Her arms were crossed over her chest in the posture she defaulted to, which was the posture of someone bracing for whatever was about to be her problem.
Messy shoulder-length lavender hair, shaggy and swept, longer strands framing an oval face with a sharp defined chin. Black-rimmed rectangular glasses sitting on a small nose. Narrowed, sharp eyes behind the lenses, thin eyebrows slightly furrowed, mouth set in a tight straight line that had no interest in becoming a smile. The white zip-up hoodie pulled up over her head, halfway-zipped over a black undershirt. The grey heathered sweatpants with the white drawstrings tied in a neat bow. The pristine white sneakers that somehow stayed pristine through regular combat deployment, and which Miyu happened to know cost more than most people in this district made in a month, because everything Aliyah wore was designer despite looking like she'd grabbed it off a floor.
"Where," Aliyah said, "is the briefcase."
Miyu opened her mouth.
"The mission," Aliyah continued, before Miyu could deploy whatever she'd been about to deploy. "The one you took alone. Without coordinating. Against direct instruction. The briefcase that was the entire objective. Where is it."
(Respect the authority,) Miyu reminded herself. (She's the vice-leader. She's earned it. She's also the single most annoying person I have ever met and I grew up in a palace full of annoying people.)
"I'm the victim here," Miyu said.
Aliyah's expression did not change. "The victim."
"I was attacked. In the building. While doing my job."
"And you won."
"Yes."
"The victim won." Aliyah let that sit in the air. "You were attacked, victimized, and emerged victorious. All three."
"I made a comeback," Miyu said. "I was the underdog and I made a comeback. That's a very respectable narrative and you're being unfair about it."
Aliyah looked at her.
She looked at Miyu's swollen eye. The dried blood. The jacket off one shoulder. Then her gaze traveled down and stopped, deliberately, on the leg Miyu was very much not putting her full weight on, and stayed there long enough that Miyu shifted her stance to try and disguise the limp, which made it worse.
"You've been with this unit two months," Aliyah said. "Two months. And you're already going out alone, ignoring instructions, losing the objective, and coming home looking like that while telling me you won." She pinched the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. "This is not how members of this unit conduct themselves."
"OoooooH," Ilyana said, from the couch, drawing it out with obvious relish. "The princess is in trouuubllllle."
"Shut up," Miyu said.
"The princess is in trouble and she doesn't have the briefcase," Ilyana continued, delighted.
"I said shut up—"
(I cannot believe this,) Miyu thought. (I fell four floors. I have a concussion. I walked here. And I'm being scolded. For being attacked. In a building. By poor people. This is the most unjust thing that has ever happened and I have been through genuinely unjust things.)
Aliyah rolled her eyes.
Miyu stared at her.
Aliyah stared back.
The two of them stood in the common room of the Den with two inches of height difference and two months of accumulated friction between them, neither one giving the other anything, the specific standoff of two people who fundamentally could not understand how the other one's brain worked and had stopped trying.
"HAHAHAHAHA!"
The laugh arrived before the man did.
An enormous hand came down between them — huge, dark-tanned, scarred across the knuckles — and physically separated the two girls, one palm landing gently on each of their shoulders and easing them a step apart with the casual strength of someone moving furniture he was fond of.
Marlon Brute filled the doorway behind the hand.
He was a giant. There was no other honest way for Miyu's brain to categorize him, even after two months of living under the same roof. Very tall, extraordinarily muscular, dark tan skin over a physique that looked carved rather than built — enormous shoulders and arms tapering to a slim waist, a thick neck, a strong jaw under heavy stubble. White and black hair pulled back into a short ponytail, parted down the middle. Red eyes, bright and warm and lit with the perpetual excited energy of a man who had never once found life boring. The tight black short-sleeve shirt. The grey camo pants.
He was grinning. He was almost always grinning.
(Loud,) Miyu thought, the way she thought it every single time. (Loud and proud. Too freaking loud.)
"Aliyah, Aliyah." Marlon's voice was a landslide with good intentions. "Give the princess a break. Look at her. She walked home like that. That takes something, whatever else happened." He turned his head, and the red eyes found Miyu, and the grin widened, and something in them lit up with genuine, uncomplicated interest — the look of a man who loved a good fight more than almost anything and had just realized one of his people had been in one.
"Now," Marlon said.
He crouched slightly, bringing his enormous frame down closer to her level, red eyes glowing with anticipation.
"Miyu."
A beat.
"Please."
The grin was enormous.
"Tell me your side of the story."