My suit motion sensor lit up. I checked my weapons: I didn't have any. Just fists. Size was consistent with one of the other side's light infantry fighters. IFF was hostile red. It cleared the corner. And kept going. A vertical handcart/gurney, rolling along on its own, its passenger me, dead and desiccated. It kept rolling past, turned another corner, vanished.

I looked around. The girders of the station were melted and shattered, severed sections floating next to those they shattered from. There were rents ripped straight into space I could see stars through. I pushed against the ground, testing. This was not zero G. Not the station's modest spin gravity. At a guess, a full one G. My suit sensors told me there was oxygen outside. I kept the helmet on.

Flickering lighting beckoned me towards the steady glow coming from what I knew was the entrance to the program psych office. Someone bade me come in and sit. I came in; I didn't sit. He kept talking.

There were a handful of pins and patches on several table, stacked next to a bunch of old phones and PDAs. They looked familiar, like they might be mine, but the logos on the pins didn't make sense. I'd pull data off the phones later, if I could. I told my suit assistant to record. I kept putting them into my suit pockets. A minute later, I'd pat my pockets, find them empty. This happened several times. No response from my suit assistant. No indication of suit compromise.

He told me to sit again. I came to his desk to tell him I'd stand. He was gone. His laptop was still there, turned towards the patient side of the desk; an older model with a fast e-ink screen, backlight not working, screen cracked. I held it up to the light, trying to make out the screen. It was some sort of release form. It was signed in my own handwriting, but not as the patient: as the releasing official. The names of both were illegible.

I walked through the doorway past his desk and back into the hallway. I woke up. □

They say all witches have weird eyes. Guess that meant you weren't a proper witch yet, because the face you saw in the mirror as you brushed your teeth that morning still had two standard human eyes, colored a dirty hazel.

The woman in the coffee shop looked like every other woman in the midtown coffee shop: bottle blonde, soft grey crop sweater, inoffensive light-wash straight-leg denim, chunky platform sandals, big brown leather purse with a little charm dangling from one end. But her eyes were the crisp yellow-brown of dry straw.

"I need your help," you blurted out.

"I know you. Sit. You're Sarah's little sister, aren't you? Rachel? Royal? Raleigh? Something like that?"

"Rowan. And yeah. She told me you might be here."

"So, Rowan. Nice to meet you again, I guess. I'm kind of in the middle of a jumbo iced caramel banana cinnamon streusel toffee crunch latte here, and then I get to go back to three contiguous hours of meetings, because nobody I work with knows how to do their god damn job. Why not ask Sarah about whatever your little problem is?"

You put your phone down on the table, tap the video file, readying it to play.

"I showed her this. She said that it was out of her league. She said I needed an expert and that you were the closest thing to one this side of ascension. And she said I'd better catch you in person or you'd blow me off."

She pressed play. Five seconds later, her eyebrows went up, and stayed there.

"Hmmm. She's right about all three of those things. This looks… interesting. Well, Rowan, I should probably leave you to your own devices. You'll either learn fast or die. Classic witch development process. Separates the quick from the thick. If you land on the thick side of that split, the vortex's maximum extent will be only a few blocks, nothing I need to worry about, because if you had the power to cause more of a mess, you wouldn't be asking for help."

"What if I made it worth your while?" you asked.

"What does a little witchling have that I might want?"

Sarah had mentioned a rumor about the witch, almost in passing. "Obviously I don't have any personal experience, it's just what I've heard." she'd added, innocently. "I never thought I'd have to tell my little sister something like that, but on the other hand, I'd feel terrible if I left something useful out."

You met her eyes. The striations in her straw-colored irises were curiously vertical. If she took you up on what you were about to put out there, you figured you'd have more opportunities to see those witch eyes up close. An educational experience. Right.

"Girlcock," you said.

She blushed. "I'm not a chaser."

"Wasn't implying that."

She snapped her fingers, and a cylinder of hazy yellow light enclosed both of you, right in the middle of the coffee shop. The world outside it swam and blurred, the coffee-shop chatter dying down to whispers.

"I'm not having this conversation in public. They can't see us or hear us now. And I don't know what you've heard, but I'm not a chaser, I swear."

You'd flustered her. The balance of power in the conversation had shifted. And all it took was preparing to barter with a part of yourself that you weren't all that thrilled about. But when you thought about the slow but inexorable erosion around the edges of the thing back home, the increasing drain on your abilities, and Sarah's worried face when she told you that what you'd created was beyond her, it was easier to say:

"At this point, in this situation, I wouldn't care if you were."

She didn't seem to hear you. "Look, I just like it, that's all. I love to suck dick but I'm not so much into the people it's usually attached to. Is that so weird? And sometimes, you know, with ice cream, you get in the mood for an oddball flavor like pistachio, and there's nothing else that really does it for you…"

Ice cream. You sighed. There was a lot to unpack there and you weren't going to be the one to unpack it for her.

"I have a bottom surgery date early next year. Help me deal with this thing and you can use me as much as you want until then, provided you don't kill me or do anything else that'd make me miss that date."

"Is this going to be weird for you?"

"Huh? Not weirder than what might happen if I can't fix this. And would you care if it was?"

"Probably not." She bit her lip, considering. Then she asked, "What about afterwards?"

"Afterwards?"

"After your bottom surgery."

"Are you even gonna be interested in my junk after that?"

"I don't know. Never had the opportunity. I'm curious."

You weren't expecting that. But it wasn't like you had plans with anyone.

"Fine. How about once. Only after I'm fully healed. And you can't break it. Or me."

Those straw-colored eyes flicked up and down your body.

"Okay. Deal."

You closed your eyes to summon a bit of power, and then opened them, and your hand. A swirling blob of navy ink sat in it.

"We should shake on it."

"Ah, so you're not completely untrained in the standards. Did Sarah teach you that one?"

"Yeah."

"Figured. She always said navy looked better on her than the usual black."

You clasped hands over the blob, and the arbiter tattoo sliced into the skin of your palm like a knife. You grimaced, trying not to cry out, as you felt half of it crawl into the slit and burn its way up your arm to coil around your bicep, at which point the burn died down to an ache as it settled in.

There was a little blood afterwards. You healed quickly, and it only stung a bit when you licked the last of the blood off your palm.

The other half of the arbiter tattoo was in the witch. Going by her face, she didn't seem to feel it. Maybe she was used to it. You decided right then and there that you'd be happy not knowing how she knew what color of ink your sister used to mark a contract.

You slipped the arm partway out of your jacket to show her. The arbiter tattoo had coalesced into a botanical motif of intertwined branches bearing fruit: peaches and rowan berries.

She slid the sleeve of her sweater up a few inches. "Samesies. Terribly literal, but not badly rendered."

"So…"

"So?"

"When do we get started? Kind of a ticking clock situation here."

"Oh, right now's fine. Give me a sec."

The witch your sister had sent you to see stripped out of her clothes in front of you, down to her underwear. Of course she noticed you looking, because how the hell could you not, with a half-naked woman right in front of you and no warning whatsoever?

"The love that dare not speak its name runs in your family, huh," was mercifully all she had to say about that. Then, addressed apparently to her purse, "Lily. Hey. Wake up."

The charm on her purse raised tiny hands and rubbed them against tiny eyes. Not a charm, in fact. A tiny doll.

"Yes, Miss?"

"You're going to need to be me for a bit. Full size, let's go."

The tiny doll reached up to unclip herself from the witch's purse hardware. Then she trotted over to the edge of the table and slid herself off into empty space and was person-height before she hit the ground.

"Good trick," you said.

"I'm very well made," the doll replied. "Hold this," she said, stepping out of her neat red gingham dress and passing it to you. This doll wasn't wearing any underwear. No point to bras when you're perfectly shaped porcelain, you supposed. Lucky. She slipped on the witch's clothes and fussed with her own hair, looking remarkably like the witch in short order.

"Can I finish your latte, Miss?"

The witch stuck out her tongue.

"Gods. No. They're eleven dollars, off-menu, and the barista hates making them. I'm surprised mine isn't mostly spit. Get your own."

"She can be you that easily, and you still go to meetings ever?" you blurt out.

"She's a doll. They're very detail-oriented, not exactly brilliant at project management and other big-picture tasks. However, my Lily takes excellent notes, has a charming smile, and I'm sure she can disassociate through a few hours of meaningless interdepartmental alignment sessions as well as I would."

"But why go to work at all? Why pay for anything? Why pretend to be…"

She took the doll's dress from you.

"Human? Normal? A mere splotch of paint on the canvas of the world instead of a knife slicing through it from underneath?"

"Yeah."

The witch pulled the red gingham dress up, tugged the zipper tight behind herself.

"You don't know me well enough for the answer to that question."

The snap of her fingers broke the spell.

5 ♢ - The Reflecting Pool

The rails stretched the length of the jetty in both directions, and vanished across the lake.

She looked down, and there was the world again. Aspens grew inverted, peeling white trunks and brilliant yellow-green leaves reaching down to a cloudless blue summer sky. She stood upside-down among them on the red brick of the jetty. Same as when we parted, she thought. Same weight, carried everywhere it wasn't fashionable. Same blotchy grey complexion. Same long and pointed ears. Same glossy obsidian braid worn down past her left shoulder… stop moping, Slate, there's nothing wrong with your hair, at least.

Her reflection rippled. A mere hitch, at first. Then a constant train of pulses. Not wind. Train's coming. She was miffed that she saw it before she felt it, but the lake didn't do her any favors, nor the soft sand of the station island beneath the jetty. For the fifteenth time, she reached into her skirt pocket, felt the stiff, slick material of the ticket. No excuse to get back in the rowboat and return to shore. She was here. She was doing this.

The verdigris leviathan began to brake, screeching, and her reflection vanished along with the inverted sky.

7 ♢ - The Monolith Sky

Slate felt them before she saw them. Honest rock beneath her, and oddly, above her. Basalt rose from the once-volcanic landscape in a trio of spires, black needles piercing the low clouds. She couldn't read the workings in any detail, not at this speed and distance, but they felt right. Watchful, but comfortable. Probably someone like her had made them.

She turned to the window as the spires passed it, watched them appear and then disappear from her view with a smile. Good job, lads. Keep it up.

7 ♡ - The town you changed at on the way to Pride

Slate jolted out of sleep. Colored lights in the twilit distance, closing slowly. I know this place. Why?

"Boschen," the conductor's voice purred through the train, low, teasing, sweet like thick honey and rich with metallic reverberations. Slate had only seen her briefly when she got her ticket punched, and she'd never have guessed that the slight woman in the black and green train-official's cloak possessed such a voice. It was almost enough to sneak around Slate's usual tendency to be intimidated by the same people she was attracted to, for her to track down the conductor, and ask her what she was doing later, except that the answer was almost guaranteed to be a forced-polite "Working." and then where would that put Slate? Nowhere comfortable. Better not.

"Boschen," the voice repeated, "City of Lanterns. We will be holding in Boschen for two hours to take on a full load of fuel and coolant before crossing the badlands. If you have not chosen to take advantage of the train's dining car, or have taken advantage of it sufficiently that its delights now pall, Boschen's night market is an excellent opportunity to get something for dinner, perhaps something fried, and on a stick. Please do not linger past nineteen-thirty, however, or you will need to continue your journey on the next train… three days from now."

Dinner sounded good. Slate had a meal in her rucksack, maybe two if she stretched it. Nuts. Jerky. Dried fruit. Hard candy. Crackers, and a small pot of sweet pepper jelly. Nothing that wouldn't keep. Nothing fried on a stick, certainly.

Slate descended from the shadowy bulk of the train into the myriad hues of the City of Lanterns, the station itself lit in greens and purples and cheery pinks. She stopped at the ticket office to ask directions, found it empty, then caught the scent of hot fat and grilled chilis and green onions on the night breeze, and it all snapped back.

She'd been here before. After the Academy, a post-graduation trip, with Lem and Tomas and Zara and Blue and a few others. Some festival, an excuse to get far away from school and do… nothing any of them had been willing to voice. But once under the colored lights, they'd barely needed words. She'd hesitated, but then she'd found herself in a corner with tall, willowy, bespectacled Blue, and Blue had smiled at her, and somehow she'd pushed Blue up against the wall. "Do you want this," she'd whispered, and Blue had nodded so hard that it made her hair-buns wobble.

They'd paused only when clothes started coming off; on the way back to the apartment someone had rented, they'd passed Lem and Tomas doing much the same thing. They'd spent two awkward but inventive hours in bed. They'd come up for air and food and wandered to the night market. She'd found something warm and spicy and wonderfully cheesy in egg batter, and turned to share it with Blue, and found Blue's lips otherwise occupied. By Zara.

They were friends. They were all friends, dammit. But that was a hell of a time to find out that, when it came to sex instead of food, she really didn't like to share. She'd sulked for the rest of the week, been utterly miserable to be around, and she'd never come back to that stall.

The night market of Boschen had its own opinions, however, and she found herself lured to a stall casting yellow light into the night and wafting of the same smell of spices and cheese as all those years ago. She slid coin over the counter. She received a paper basket of fried cheese cubes. She took a bite. It was good, dammit. She took another. Fuck Blue anyway. Fuck Zara. Hope you're fucking happy together, or separately, or however that ended, because I thought you were both great, and you deserve to be happy, but also fuck you very much. She took another bite, with the sweet red dipping sauce. It was so good.

"Oh, hello," a familiar voice purred next to her. "You have good taste. I often come here during fueling stopovers."

"I haven't been here for years," Slate said, turning. "Too long, it seems." She eyed the conductor, who'd apparently left her official cloak on the train, and was wearing pinstriped trousers and a neat blouse splotched in oranges and yellows by Boschen's lanterns.

The conductor met her gaze, mouth neutral but eyes glittering in the lantern-light.

Slate considered making better memories of this place. "What are you doing after this?" she asked.

"Working," the conductor said, dimpling slightly. "But so kind of you to inquire."

7 ♠ - Floating

Slate felt queasy. The view out the window wasn't helping. Granite shouldn't have been doing that. Granite belonged on or under the ground, not floating free in boulder-sized chunks as if it were badlands dust.

"The train will be stopping temporarily due to adverse weather conditions," the conductor announced. "This is not a station stop. Please do not attempt to disembark."

Adverse weather conditions. Right. She supposed you could call it that. She could feel the floating rock that had snapped the track fencing and strayed into the train's path. Out here in the badlands, a spot in the world worn thin by some ancient catastrophe, the usual rules about gravity and solidity and (allegedly) time didn't always apply, and the unpredictability of weather was as good an analogy as any.

You could fix this easily, a tiny metaphorical voice whispered. Slam that unruly stone back into its natural place for decades. But that would leave you low for an emergency, so you hoard your power tight to yourself, so you won't. A pity. If only there was a way to source more…

"Shut up," she told herself. There absolutely was a way to source more, or there could be, but she didn't want to think about it. And anyway, it wasn't happening on this train. That possibility wouldn't open up until she disembarked at the end of her journey.

She rummaged in her rucksack for a piece of candied ginger, shoved it in her mouth, and closed her eyes, hoping that the nausea would go away.

3 ♣ - Vibrant Graffiti

Slate woke to an untimely darkness. Surely it was't night yet; she couldn't have been out that long. She took out her watch, opened the cover with a practiced flick of her wrist, pushed a fraction of a fraction of her will into it, watched the dim uniform red glow of the circular face resolve into bright orange spiderwebs of meaning: about 1135. Almost as far from solar night as it was possible to be.

She supposed that on some level she should be tantalized by the possibilities of the badlands. A monumental insult to physics, and isn't that what magecraft was meant for? But it was all so… undirected. Whatever had happened here wasn't running according to any plan, as far as Slate could tell, and she deeply wanted to be through it and done with it and back out where things like day and night worked properly.

The train's internal and running lights came on, illuminating the skeleton of a town outside the windows: low brick structures, mostly, the same tawny color as the dust. She hadn't thought there were any towns out here. Maybe she'd missed them on previous trips. Maybe the boundary had shifted.

The train passed a wall angled more or less the same as the track. There was a message on it, in hungry letters of green fire — she could feel their pull on everyone in the train, something along the lines of her watch, certainly constructed, certainly intentional — WE LOVED HER.

We loved her?

Slate blinked. The train rolled on. She looked back, but the letters were already fading behind her.

Maybe WE LIVED HERE. Someone with a little power, defying the badlands long enough to score an epitaph in magical fire over the darkness-blighted ruins of the town where they came from. That would make more sense. Had to be that.

5 ♣ - Scrap Yard

Sparks and smoke in the distance. A noise audible over the ever-present thrum of the locomotive, a boom, repeated, with steady cadence. And suddenly, visible from the track, wooden stakes, linked next to next to next by faded yellow cord. A border of the badlands. This one wasn't meant to keep anything in or out, least of all noise. Just a marker of where not to step past if you weren't warded and prepared.

Slate raised her eyes from the border fencing to see a train, not dissimilar to the one she was on, disappearing into the maw of some giant machine in steady bites. Boom, boom, boom.

K ♡ - The place you said goodbye

"Verbena Riverport. Verbena Riverport. Welcome, gentlepersons, to the domed jewel of the Upper Red River. Those of you who will be leaving us at this juncture to continue your journey aboard a river steamer may consult with the station information desk for docking schedules. For everyone else, we will be holding for ninety minutes to refresh wards depleted in the badlands and load some local treats for the dining car. Once again, Verbena Riverport."

Slate stared into a wall of water. Verbena from the outside resembled nothing less than an onrushing wave, so high that she couldn't see the top from the train window, and it didn't stop feeling like it was going to crush her and suck her under just because she knew the trick. She winced, but with an almighty splash, they were through, water running down the sides of the train in great sheets, already slowing down for the station stop.

The tremendous dome of magically suspended water that enclosed the city of Verbena took the brunt of the pitiless noon sunlight, converting it into the equivalent of a pleasant slightly overcast afternoon in the capital. The sky shimmered as if seen from below the surface of a calm lake. Slate thought it funny how the weight of so many tons of water overhead felt like nothing once you were inside it, especially next to the pressure of the desert sun outside the dome. Better living through large-scale magecraft.

She found a diner not far from the station. Only once the waiter took her order did she realize, memory seizing on the black and white floor tiles and the cherry-red walls, that she'd been here before. (There was no ceiling. Why bother, in Verbena?)

A bit of fanfic for the Discworld, specifically the witch books, and even more specifically, the Tiffany Aching books. Consider a slightly bitter trans girl indie game dev. She spends a lot of her nights enraptured in weird dreams. Some mornings, she remembers them. Some days, she turns them into game ideas. Once in a while, she sells one. This morning, she's contacted by two witches from another world, which is once again about to have some weird dreams of its own, come circle time.