The bounty hunter and her wife pace through the halls of a sprawling villa, behind an age-shrunken human man in a neat uniform. The soldier-mind has splayed wide the osseous constellation of her torso and clamped it shut, like a bony flytrap, around Poppi's containment cage.
Her friend, still confined, they left on the deck of their canal boat, at the nearest mooring quay. "Nobody asked for you," 141 The Jewelled Sandal Lightly Treads had said. "You're only here so you'll stop ambushing us and letting her loose," and in a flurry of haloed verbs had set 79 All Along We Should Have Been's cage to unlock itself in an hour. "Whether or not we've returned by then, you're free to go."
Poppi slumps dramatically against the bars, arm across her face, until they step into an inner courtyard, bright flowerbeds surrounding a tree that sheds drifts of pink-white blossom.
"The bounty hunter, 141 The Jewelled Sandal Lightly Treads," the butler announces. "A former soldier-mind, now known as 17 Nonetheless. And Miss Porpoynt."
"This is obscenely ridiculous, if you think," Poppi says loudly behind her arm. "A single simple copy-paste and you could have an identical villa of your own, in the new countrysides, and never want for anything. My family's once wealth means nothing. My family's once power means nothing, now. Every one of you could stop the pantomime servility at any moment and simply leave them to wallow."
"Hello, Porpoynt," sighs an older woman, kneeling, hands soil-coated, tending to plants.
"Mother," Poppi says, as if she's being sentenced to death.
The woman rises, halos and selects some skin-cleaning verb, flicks her fingers as they're instantly unsoiled as if prestidigitating the earth away from them, and summons into her hand from inventory a heavy envelope, sealed with wax.
"Your agreed-on payment," she says, handing it to Lightly Treads. "Thank you."
Lightly Treads' soldier-wife plucks the cage out of the vise of her ribs as though it, and Poppi, weigh nothing; sets it on the ground, verbs it unlocked and swings wide the door, facing Poppi's mother.
Poppi takes a moment to stop leaning against the inside of it, and slouches a single step outside. "What now, then," she says sulkily, refusing to look in anyone's direction.
"I understand you have a number of duels to honour," her mother says wearily. "Your opponents have been good enough to allow some time for you to learn how."
"What," Poppi says in outrage, forgetting to stare moodily into the distance. "I can't fight!"
"That's the purpose of the time to learn," her mother says, quietly but with steel inside it.
"But—! How do I even learn that!"
141 Lightly Treads makes a soft throat-clearing noise. "My wife can duel," she mentions thoughtfully, and both mother and daughter look at her.
"Not two hours ago you were saying she'd pull my head off!" Poppi squalls.
"Learning to avoid having your head pulled off sounds educational."
"Could you?" Poppi's mother says, with a distinctly brightening face. "You're the only ones, in the end, who'd even try returning her—"
"Mislaid family," Lightly Tread says, "is my expertise. Combat is my wife's."
"I can't fight duels if I'm murdered!"
"Don't be unpleasant, Porpoynt," her mother says. "17 Nonetheless — name your price."
