Inteja snorted. "I didn't ask nicely. I told you."
"Yeah, yeah." Atiya waved a hand at the screen. "Love you too, Mom. See you soon."
He reached to end the call.
"Atiya."
He paused, finger hovering.
Inteja's voice had shifted, into something more mother like.
"Be careful with the coding. Don't force anything. And if any code is misaligned, you stop immediately. Do you understand?"
Atiya looked at her through the screen for a moment.
"Yeah. I understand."
The call ended with a soft chime.
He stared at the screen for a few seconds, then muttered, "Spatial heal would've been cool, though."
He stood, stretched until something in his back popped, and reached for his bag.
****
He didn't start packing right away.
Instead he sat back down on the edge of the bed, raised his right hand with the palm facing up, and let the Yai circuit surface.
It was the magenta interface, the place where he design the physics behind his skill which include formulas and concepts.
He reached into the drawer beside the bed and pulled out a quill which had obsidian shaft, and tip carried a faint iridescent sheen.
Inteja had given the quill to him years ago, back when she still held out hope that he might sit through a full lecture.
It act as an incredible conduit. Whatever he wrote into the Yai circuits with it required less yai energ compared to doing it manually with hand.
He twirled it once between his fingers, then pressed the tip to the outermost magenta ring.
The surface rippled like inside the water, a stone was thrown in.
"Position swap consists of Linear algebras."
He grimaced at the words as he said them.
"Fuck it."
He set the quill down, dragged his laptop to his laptop that he had left plugged to charge an hour ago, and flipped it open.
The screen became alive and folders filled the display.
Linear Algebra Papers, recommended by Correl. Matrix Representations of Life.
A dozen half-read PDFs he had bookmarked with full intentions of finsihing it one day and promptly never returned to.
He opened a random folder.
Vector spaces, basis transformations, invertible mappings, commutators, eigenvalues that supposedly governed how two points in space could exchange positions without tearing reality apart in the process.
He read through it.
Then read it again. Then stared at a proof involving adjoint operators until his eyes started to burn at the edges.
Hours went by in vain.
Nothing came to his mind that was helpful.
He tried sketching a basic swap matrix onto the outermost ring.
'Am I seeing things. Why does it looks like it is sticking its tongue out.'
The quill left glowing traces on the interface, and he felt that it was glaring and mocking him.
Well he knew the code itself wasn't good enough yet.
"Useless," he muttered. He wiped it away with his thumb and the traces dissolved into faint sparks.
He leaned back in and plopped to the bed.
"Will I be stuck at this stage for years."
The thought sat in his chest and didn't move.
It was now past 2 am in the morning, meaning he have not slept even though it was approaching dawn.
He rubbed his face with both hands, held them there for a moment, then dropped them.
"Enough."
He closed the laptop, set the quill inside his pillowcase.
He unsummoned the Yai circuits. He kicked off his shoes, dropped face-first onto the bed without bothering to change, and pulled the thin blanket up over his head.
Outside his window, the debris belt continued its slow and indifferent rotation.
Somewhere beneath the facility in the restricted levels of the branch, a smooth black box glowed quietly inside its cylinder.
And under a white blanket, in the dim of a reinforced glass cage, dozens of eyes blinked once in the dark.
****
The next morning, eleven o'clock sharp.
Atiya stood in the middle of his temporary quarters surrounded by half-packed bags and unorganized messy clothes.
The room looked like a minor explosion had taken place and nobody had been in any hurry to address it afterward. Hoodie on the chair. Laptop charger dangling off the desk.
He had already messaged Kars, the family driver, earlier that morning.
"Pick me up this evening. Heading home for a few days. Will be back later, lectures aren't going anywhere."
He wasn't wrong. The two tutoring sessions with Correl had produced exactly zero breakthroughs on the new skill.
Coding a real skill was nothing like dodging slippers or redirecting baseballs. It took years or sometimes decades depending on luck and complexity of it.
Patience was the only currency that actually spent here.
And well he was patient enough to endure it.
He glanced at his phone.
"Hah. She hasn't seen my text for a whole day."
A long sigh escaped him. He tossed the phone onto the bed and headed for the shower.
"Inna mina tika, laaala kahak lalaaa, love is like a lullabyyyyy."
He butchered a song he came up with on the spot with complete and total commitment, the off-key notes bouncing enthusiastically off the tiles.
The water shut off.
He stepped out, shook the water from his hair, wrapped a towel around his waist, and flopped onto the bed with his phone already in hand.
A notification was waiting.
'At least she's alive.'
Zelaine's reply was short and exactly what he would have expected from her.
"Sorry, can't see you off. We're supposed to be welcoming some useless delegates."
Atiya snorted and typed back without overthinking it.
"Useless delegates over useless boyfriend? Harsh, babe."
This was one of the stranger perks of working within Ansep. The moment you stepped inside a branch, hierarchy of outisde world doesn't apply there.
Race, family name, royal blood, political alignment, none of it carried any weight here.
Scions of the Seven Great Families stood shoulder to shoulder with rebels from E.V.E., old-blood royals, and outright anarchists. Inside Ansep, everyone occupied the same ground.
Or at least, that was the official line.
In practice it meant even someone like Zelaine, Roseblood by name, certified sadist by nature, and currently drowning in protocol, had to play nice with whoever showed up today.
Atiya smirked at the mental image of her standing in some stiff welcoming line, forcing smiles at people she would genuinely rather throw knives at.
His phone buzzed.
"They're bringing their own math nerds and Correl's already hiding. If you're lucky they'll bore him into early retirement and you'll get your tutor back faster."
Atiya laughed under his breath and typed back.
"Tell them to bring snacks. You're probably eating the branch dry anyway."
He set the phone down and looked out the window for a moment.
A few days at home. Maybe the distance would shake something loose in his head.
Either way he was going.
He stood up, towel still clinging precariously to his waist, and resumed packing in earnest.
One hoodie. Two pairs of socks. The obsidian quill, wrapped carefully in its case and tucked into the side pocket where it wouldn't get crushed.
He zipped the bag.
"See you soon, cursed math hellhole," he told the empty room.
Outside the facility.
A white, four-pointed star-shaped ship settled onto the space port, its needle-like prow and blue-tipped hull gleaming under the hangar lights.
A prominent red zigzag pattern ran down its central spine, and the four blue-glowing engine pods at its wingtips hummed steadily as they powered down.
From the craft's underside, a seemingly holographic staircase detached and extended, paving a clean path down to the platform.
Cornelius Correl watched from the observation deck as the hatches hissed open.
The guests emerged from the ships, they were researchers in crisp unmarked coats, carrying slim cases and data slates. Barely a handful of security personnel accompanied them.
A red-bearded, bald man led first, scanning the platform with sharp eyes before his gaze found Correl on the deck above.
"Heard there was a hailstorm on the way," Correl called down, extending a hand as the man reached him. "How was it, Nastrus?"
Nastrus gripped the offered hand firmly and snorted. "Do you think a ship from Ansep would have difficulty with hailstorms. Don't talk nonsense."
They exchanged the brief familiar greeting of two people who had done this enough times to have developed their own shorthand for it, half handshake and half shoulder clasp, then turned together toward the research center's main entrance.
At the counter near the gate the standard security scan got underway. Biometric sweeps, Yai signature reads, ascension profiling. With Inteja and second-in-command Zextire both absent on external assignments, Correl stepped forward as third in command to review the incoming reports.
He scrolled through the holo-display, his brow pulling together slowly.
"Nastrus: Ascension 2, Stage 2. No improvement in twenty years." He kept his voice low, mostly to himself. "Kellex: Ascension 1, Stage 4. And thirty Ascension 1s overall with only a single Ascension 2 among them. Even their guards are barely into initial Stage 2."
Nastrus leaned over his shoulder with a grin wide enough to show teeth. "What's the matter, friend. Still can't shake that habit of checking everyone's ascension the moment they walk in." He slung an arm around Correl's shoulders, easy and teasing. "I keep telling you, get yourself an artificial Yaicraft. At least then you could awaken one properly."
Correl stiffened slightly. Then he shook his head.
"It's not that," he said quietly. "Never mind."
Meanwhile, across the atrium in the visitor reception wing, Zelaine stood with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on her phone, pointedly ignoring the arriving delegation filing past her.
Her thumb hovered over Atiya's last message.
I fucking miss him. And he's leaving.
She fumed quietly, cheeks going pink with irritation and something softer underneath it that she had no interest in examining.
Her fingers moved across the screen anyway, typing with quick decisive taps.
"I'm busy because everyone capable of combat has been assigned outside the branch. Even your mother is on one of those tasks. So I'm the strongest one here right now. In case anything happens, they're basically hiring me to guard their asses."
She hit send and pocketed the phone with more force than strictly necessary.
One of the junior researchers from Nastrus's team glanced her way, curious or perhaps picking up on the faint aura of restrained violence she was giving off without particularly trying to.
Zelaine met his eyes for half a second.
He immediately found his data slate extremely interesting and did not look up again.
She smirked faintly.
Good boy.
Back near the counter, Correl finished signing off on the last of the reports and handed the slate back to the security officer. He turned to Nastrus and gestured toward the inner corridor.
"Shall we. The lab is ready. And try not to break anything this time."
Nastrus laughed and clapped him on the back hard enough to shift his footing. "No promises, old friend."
The group moved deeper into the branch, footsteps spreading out and fading as they dispersed toward their assigned areas. Behind them the heavy blast doors sealed with a soft and final thud, the sound of it swallowed quickly by the noise of the surrounding.
Outside on the platform, the four-pointed ship powered down completely, its blue engine pods dimming to a faint standby glow, the red zigzag along its spine going dark.
The hangar settled back into its usual quiet.
Atiya spared a glance toward the docking bay as he waited near the exit corridor, trolley handle gripped loosely in one hand. The visitor ships sat silent in their berths, lights dimmed to standby, but something about the facility's outer barrier looked wrong.
It was flickering in places, the faint shimmer of it stuttered like a screen having a glitch.
His phone buzzed.
It was Kars.
"Sorry, young master. There's something wrong with the Ansep barrier. Repairs ongoing until midnight. No departures or arrivals cleared until then."
Atiya frowned and typed back. "Repairs? But the delegates just came in."
He stared at the screen for a moment, turning it over.
Could it be because they're here. No.
Last time he had come, there was also guests at the facility and nothing like this had happened. The barrier had been completely fine.
He exhaled through his nose.
"Can't help it. I'll leave at midnight."