Yes, strangely, Nico was doing quite well indeed. He and Libby were very nearly getting on, arguing only about academic things （“It’s one thing to stop time and another to try to move it around” was his take on the subject of her latest theory, but of course she’d had Arguments） and he and Reina were doing fine, and in general Nico ate well and didn’t want to murder the people around him. （He could do without Callum and Tristan, but he’d suffered more distressing opposition before.） Sure, he missed normal things, like the freedom to go places that weren’t this house and also, sex—but he had a feeling it was best that he didn’t sleep with anyone here. He’d probably let Parisa do whatever she wanted to him, and that was just not a good look for anyone.
“Je vais bien,” Nico said conclusively.
“Good,” said Gideon. “Then I’ll let you get back to sleep.”
“What, already?” Nico said, frowning. “But—”
Gideon snapped his fingers and Nico sat up in bed, gasping. He was back in his body, back in the Society’s manor house. Back in the place he’d never technically left.
Beside him, his phone buzzed.
Go to sleep.
Nico rolled his eyes. Dumbass.
See u in my dreams, he joked.
His phone buzzed in his hand.
Always, Nicolás, always.
REINA
AS FAR AS REINA WAS CONCERNED, she had already received extravagant returns on her investment in joining the Society. By the close of summer, only a quarter through their allotted year, she’d already wound up with riches. True, she had left very little behind, so perhaps the upfront sacrifice had been minimal, but the point remained that she was enjoying herself, in her way. The access she had to the Society’s archives—to the reading room itself—was everything she had longed for. It was precisely what she had dreamed the Library of Alexandria would contain, and that was only at the surface level; the most elementary access to ancient scientific and magical thought. Having managed a mere three months’ worth of research on the physics of force and space, Reina had already seen the grimoire by Circe and the lost oeuvre of both Democritus and Anaximander.
Which meant that her continuing motivation was, at an extreme minimum, only to not lose access. These were the ancient works in animism, naturalism, cosmology, but what would come from the medieval medeians, who could have only contributed in secret? What about the Enlightened? Would she see the works of both Isaac Newton and Morgan le Fay? Impossible to tell until she got there, which meant, quite inescapably, that she must.
Reina spent more of her free time in the reading room than the others of her initiate class, testing the limits of which texts she could access regardless of the subject at hand, which was why she was slightly more aware of who else came through the Society’s doors on an occasional basis. There was one Society member in particular Reina recognized: Aiya Sato, a woman who sat on the board of directors for a massive tech conglomerate based out of Tokyo. Aiya was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the mortal economy and a celebrated medeian as well. Her face was a frequent feature, each of her feet securely settled in both worlds.
“Oh, you must be Miss Mori,” said Aiya. The two of them were both waiting for the results of a summoning from elsewhere in the archives, and Aiya, a consummate networker, had struck up conversation in their native dialect. “Tell me, how was the installation?”
Reina gave few details, never having been one for conversation. Aiya, however, was very chatty.
“I suppose it must be very different with Atlas Blakely at the helm,” she was saying, at which point Reina stopped her.
“Were you initiated long ago?” It seemed impossible. Aiya looked very young, hardly over thirty.
“No, not very. Only one class before this, in fact.”
“You were in Dalton Ellery’s initiation class?”
“You know Dalton?”
“He still researches here.”
Aiya blinked, surprised.
“I would have thought Dalton would be the first to move on,” she said, looking a bit unsettled. “I can’t imagine what he’d still be doing here.”
“Is it not customary for some members to stay on?”
“Oh, it is, but not Dalton,” Aiya said, puzzled. “You know what his specialty is, don’t you?”
Reina struggled to think of anything he’d said or done that seemed particularly noteworthy.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Dalton’s an animator,” Aiya offered emphatically, as if that should mean something.