Trust

Having concluded her unfortunate tale, Galateya fell silent, trembling slightly, her human appearance completely melting away, now looking fully draconic. The miniature snow storm above her head melted into soft raindrops pattering on her shoulders.

Everyone at the booth looked struck down by her bubble life revelations.

Then Laika moved.

The dog wrapped her arms around the dragon.

“It is okay,” Laika uttered very quietly, voice cracking on the second word. She was crying too, tears soaking into her furry cheeks. “It is okay. You are here now. You are out.”

Galateya’s composure shattered like a lightning-struck tree.

The sound that came out of her was half-sob, half-growl, a lost decade of grief behind a dam of ice thawing at once and breaking free. She buried her face in Laika’s shoulder and shook, and the smaller, orphaned prad dog who knew everything about being trapped and used and thrown away held onto her and let her cry.

“You grew a whole world,” Laika murmured, petting the back of Galateya’s head with gentle strokes. “From your tears. You are so much braver than you think. Like the Little Prince from… uhm… a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”

Then, Sage squeezed Galateya and Laika in a foxy embrace.

I looked at Nexxali. The Serval had an extra-guilty look on her face.

Galateya let out a deep exhale, opened her wet eyes and then stared at Nexxali. “You.”

“Me.” Nexxali agreed.

“I recognize your voice.”

“Uh-huh. That,” the feline mewled, “that really shouldn’t have happened. The songs… were entropic, aligned to the Wormwood Star as much as possible.”

The dragon girl stared at the cat.

“They were designed to dissolve after being released to bend the probability of outcome,” Nexxali insisted. “Like sugar in hot water. You were never supposed to hear them, Teya. Nobody was.”

“And yet I did,” Galateya replied. “For twenty years. In every moment between dreaming and waking. Your voice drove me crazy at times but also… kept me alive.”

Nexxali’s ears flattened back. “I was singing to myself. Running scenarios. Planning. Venting.”

“Hm hrmm,” Sage cleared her throat. “The very act of singing into the void gave you a listener.”

“Why?” Nexxali asked.

“T-buns is the most Syntropic critter at this table,” Sage said. “I suspect that if you shove a particular Omnid soul into a particular time bubble operating on particular Frontenachii magitek params, it might act like a focus point, potentially be able to connect to other… duplicate souls.”

“What?” Nexxali tilted her head at the fox.

“Schrödinger’s harem!” Sage declared.

“What?” Shady repeated in the same tone.

“We’re the same soul from four different dimensions!” the fox stated. “Or not. We’ll have to run tests to find out.”

“What kind of tests?” Galateya asked.

“You know what kind,” Sage wiggled her eyebrows at the dragon. “Ones with much loud wiggling involved.”

Galateya let out a small chortle and wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her scales flickered to violet and gold and pink. “You sang about wearing faces. About plotting murder. About pointing the fleet toward a linear dimension.”

“Yep.”

“You did all of those things.”

“Also yep.”

“You sang about a liminal tree. Planted in the future. Blooming across eternity.”

Nexxali’s guilty expression deepened. She glanced at me. “Yeeep.”

“Explain,” Galateya said.

“The liminal tree,” Nexxali said with a pretend-casual tone, “is Ash.”

“Which is what exactly?” Galateya asked.

“Which is… Ash, being our tree, my probability anchor. The thing I planted in the future by engineering the circumstances for me to find Ash, for the fleet to come here, for all of this to converge on one unexpected, headstrong human… An electrical engineer in a drafty mansion.” She rubbed her face. “I dug a probability hole. Ash is the hole. Also the tree blooming from that hole. Also the reason I’m free. The lovely reason we’re all sitting in a bubble tea shop inside a fox’s brain arguing about my crimes.”

“Neat-o,” I said. “Add it to my title list. Hostage. Boyfriend. Liminal tree.”

“Fiancé-tree,” Shady corrected from above.

“Where’s my ring, dude?” I demanded jokingly.

“What am I, Sauron? Blood pacts are better than magic rings,” Shady stated. “No escaping. No divorces. An itty bitty piece of my soul existing in you.”

“Existing where in me?” I asked.

“Wherever I shoved half of your soul into,” Shady added. “Like, sooper deep. No other Wendigos can touch. ‘Cus mine.”

“Uh-huh,” I noted.

“You knew,” Galateya pressed, “You knew someone was listening.”

“I did NOT know,” Nexxali insisted. “I swear on every delicious pasta shape of this planet! The songs were entropic self-therapy. Journal entries set to music!”

“Then why did the songs contain tactical information? Taniwha terraforming theory?”

“Because I’m a compulsive planner who rant-sings to herself!” Nexxali’s striped tail smacked my side. “I process information through song! I always have! I sang about everything I observed. The guard rotations, weaknesses, rebellion plans, the food schedules, my dumb Commanders, all of it went into the music because THAT’S HOW MY BRAIN WORKS! How Riffweld works.”

“All singing, all-dancing cat,” Shady petted Nexxali, mussing up her ginger mane.

“You sang me the formula for magisynthesis,” Galateya stated. “The key to the creation of plant life.”

“I sang the formula for magisynthesis to myself a bunch of times because I wanted to see if I could bend reality with my music to make plants grow, Sixth Fleet Terraformer style. Turns out I can’t. I got zero creation alignment. I hummed it for a week to a plant seed and some ferns I bought and then gave up and moved onto another thing. It was a theoretical exercise and failed practical. A thought experiment set to music.”

“Your thought experiment saved my life.”

Silence from Teya. Shady chortled softly into my hair.

Nexxali’s ears twitched as gold, feline eyes shimmered with moisture she was clearly trying very hard to blink away. “I… yeah. Okay. This is… all very unexpected. I do hear you.”

“You hear me NOW,” Galateya said. “I heard your abyss-damned voice for years!”

Something shifted between them. The tension in the booth rearranged itself, the bristling distrust Galateya had carried toward Nexxali melting like frost on a window facing the sun.

“I really didn’t like you,” Galateya confessed. “After I came out of the bubble… On the day I arrived in the Third Fleet, you sang the Hymn of the Frontenachii Dominion in the morning. I recognized your voice, but could not understand where I heard it before. I didn’t like your attitude one bit, because you sounded so… casual. So free. Laughing with the other prads and Wendigo Commanders, making jokes. All of it tasted sour, wrong, fake… and now I know why.”

Nexxali made a small feline noise.

Galateya wiped her eyes again. “I didn’t like your voice because I forgot you, erased you from my mind. It was easier not to pull at the frozen thread… easier than admitting I loved a voice before I loved a person. You were my ghost, Nexxali Everrim. My invisible teacher. The madwoman in my walls who plotted treason and murder and accidentally taught a starving, doomed dragon how to grow up, how to survive.”

“I am going to need a moment,” the Serval let out, exhaling.

“Sooooo,” Shady said. “Catio accidentally raised our dragon babe. That’s all kinds of funny.”

“Without knowing. While planning a mutiny,” I added.

“Multi-tasking rebellion queen!” Sage grinned.

“Much impressiveness all around the table. The dragon grew her own flesh-tree too,” Shady added.

“I grew… a home,” Galateya said.

“Still pretty metal,” Shady stated. “I thought that you were a sus, albeit boring… antisocial loaf. But you’re… actually pretty cool, Teya. A genuine fighter.”

“The Wendigo dispenses a rare compliment!” Sage stated in the nature-documentary accent and broke down into laughter.

Laika was staring at the dragon and cat with the expression of a puppy witnessing rain for the first time. Her lower lip trembled.

“You… really do care about each other,” she said with a smile, sniffing both. “All of you. So much… so much more than anyone I’ve ever met!”

“Yeah,” I said. “I reckon we do.”

“Okay, you guys,” Sage sniffed dramatically. “Okay. This is officially the most emotionally devastating Yesterweave I have ever hosted.”

“Is it always like this?” Laika looked at me. “With your pack?”

“The crying part or the supernatural revelations part?”

“Both?”

“Too damn often.” I shook my head with a smile and then looked at Galateya.

“Teya,” I said, and the dragon girl stared back at me with brilliant, wet, violet eyes. “Thank you for… sharing all of that.”

She nodded, then immediately looked extra-embarrassed.

Sage petted Teya across Laika. “Aight. Our scalie, emotionally compromised narrator needs a minute. Laika, you’re up, hon.”

Laika blinked. “Me?”

“Yus, you!” Sage bobbed.

The prad dog suddenly looked very small sitting between Teya and Sage. Small and uncertain and young.

“Go on now, what’s your unique thing, doggo?” Shady asked.

“I am… I do not think I am that unique,” Laika said.

“Oh, push posh, everyone’s unique,” Sage encouraged. “Even mass-produced plushies have slightly different stitching.”

“I am a stray,” Laika mumbled, kneading the little dog toy nervously. “Strays are common. We exist in every city. We eat scraps from trash bins. We sleep in alleys. There is nothing remarkable about being hungry and alone.”

“Wrong-o,” Sage shook her head. “You are incredibly unique, Laika, one in three hundred million!”

“What?” Laika blinked. “Why?”

“You were the first dog in space,” Sage said. “Everyone knows your name!”

“Everyone?” Laika blinked.

“Bazillions of humans, prads and Omnids across the finite boundary curve do,” Sage said. “Wizard Revolution chose you for a reason. You were her hero of USSRA!”

“But I… I died,” Laika said with a bitter expression. “She… Vladimir sent me to die. I was betrayed… sacrificed.”

“Says the perfectly alive doggo,” Sage pointed out. “System Wizards don’t work in obvious ways, mah doggo. They’re devious mofos operating on long term narratives with sneaky-ass foreshadowing.”

Laika fell silent and contemplative at that.

“Laika, did you ever… read any other books?” Galateya asked. “You read the Little Prince, yes?”

“I… I did,” Laika sighed. “I was taught to read when I was seven. There were some old books in the orphanage I grew up in. Pushkin poems. French fantasy. Volkov’s Wizard of Oz. Bulgakov’s Fatal Eggs. Revolution’s… Manifest Destiny.” Laika’s eyes suddenly went wide. “Shit. Oh. How did I forget this…”

“Forget what?” Galateya asked.

“Revolution… wrote of a hero in her book, a key to the stars… A girl meant to die and be reborn from the ashes… A girl who brings about change and renewal, grows an ocean of trees across the world…” Laika opened and closed her mouth, eyes wide. “Slayer!”

“Bingo,” Sage snapped her fingers. “Foreshadowing. The truth, remembered at the right moment, when it’s needed most. Deffo’ the kind of shit System Wizards inject in their work.”

Laika’s mouth moved without sound for a few seconds, working through something enormous.

“The ocean of trees,” she whispered. “Revolution wrote about it in her book. A hero who dies in fire… a forest blooms from the ashes. A forest of liberation from decay, a world’s conceptual rebirth, emergence, reincarnation. I thought it was a fairy tale. Another bedtime story for orphans who wanted to believe the world could be… different, nice.”

Her tail thumped against the booth.

“She wrote it before she chose me,” Laika continued, voice climbing. “She knew, wrote the ending first and then crafted the path towards it. Years ahead of me boarding Sputnik Two. She… always knew!”

Sage nodded, fox ears angled to the prad dog.

“I died in a fire too,” Laika pressed on. “The capsule caught fire and… and then the Krampus… Saint Nikky pulled me out and I thought she saved me, I truly believed she saved me… Yet Revolution had already written the next chapter. The rebirth. The forests. The Soviet colonies. Camp… Sunshine Archipelago! That’s the next step in her plan, the…”

Her figure suddenly rippled.

A shimmer along the edges of her silhouette, like heat distortion rising off summer asphalt. She blurred for half a second, then snapped back into focus.

Laika looked down at her paws. They were flickering, the dark claws going translucent at the tips before solidifying again.

“Shoot. Someone is pulling me out.” Laika’s ears flattened.

“Yah. You’re getting forcibly awakened,” Sage sighed. “Wah. I didn’t even get to tell you my tragic backstory… thing.”

Laika’s figure wobbled again, harder this time. For a full second I could see the booth through her torso, the leather seat visible through her ribs.

“I… have to go,” Laika said.

She looked around the table with frantic, memorizing eyes.

Sage. Galateya. Nexxali. Shady above my head. Me.

“Don’t forget ‘bout tha’ pendant,” Sage said quickly. “Simply think about it n’ it’ll connect you to me. Kay?”

Laika clutched the wooden star hanging from her neck. “I will remember. I promise. Promise, promise! Cross my starry heart!”

She grabbed Galateya and squeezed her so hard the dragon let out a squeak. Then she reached across the table and took my hand. Her grip was fading, the pressure weakening with each heartbeat.

“Thank you for the tea,” she chattered. “And the plushie. And for letting me inside when I was cold. For good times and for… friends! And bubble tea and stories! For…”

“You’re wel…” I began.

Laika winked away, leaving her seat empty, her drink featuring only a couple of lonely bobbas at the bottom of the glass.

“She’s not going to fuck us over, right?” Shady asked into the silence.

“Not after what T-buns shared,” Sage stated. “That was… far too honest and far too fooking brutal. The big push. Her doggo-heart is ours now for sho’.”

“And what if the Sleigh-dungeon has a mind reader?” Shady pressed on.

“That’s what the fox-star pendant is for,” Sage winked. “I’ll be there with her, helping her escape the Sleigh. No fret! The skulk is on da’ case! Much ass-kickin’ will be had!”