D

Dani doesn't move from the counter. She's got her arms crossed, and the flatness in her voice is the kind that comes right before she says the thing nobody wants to hear. "You want to tell the world you're an elf, or you want to tell them you're the Violet Angel? Pick one, because you can't do both."

"I'm not picking." Aria stands up from the table, and the chair scrapes loud enough that Mike flinches. She doesn't apologize for the sound. "The whole point is they don't get to split me in half. Elf, angel, whatever word makes them feel better — it's the same woman either way, and I'm done letting them decide which half is allowed to exist."

Marcus turns his phone face-down on the table, deliberately, like a man laying down a card. "Okay. So walk me through it. Sunday, Soldier Field, what — you just show up? There's security, there's cameras, there's forty thousand people who paid to watch football, not a theology debate."

"I fly in. Halftime. Nobody's looking up." She can't keep the grin off her face, and she doesn't try. "I land at the fifty, I use Thaumaturgy so my voice carries to the cheap seats, and I say what I am. Not everything — I'm not handing them a spell list. Enough that they stop calling me a hoax and start calling me a neighbor. And I tell them I have limits. That I can't save everyone. That I'm still figuring out what I owe them."

"And then?" Mike's hand is still flat on the door. "You take questions? Because that's how press conferences work, Jason—" He stops. Swallows. "Aria."

"No questions." She says it clean, no hedge in it. "I say my piece, I wave, I'm gone before they can get a microphone to my face. That's the whole plan." The kitchen goes quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. Dani's arms are still crossed. Sera is watching her like she's already drafting the argument she's going to lose.

Dani lets the silence sit one second longer than it needs to, then pushes off the counter and starts a slow, deliberate clap. "Bravo. Truly. Standing ovation. 'I fly in, nobody's looking up, I say my piece, I wave, I'm gone.'" She does a little curtsy with it, one hand sweeping low, and her voice goes up an octave into a breathy imitation. "Shall I descend from the heavens at the fifty-yard line, dearest peasants, and bless you with my presence before I vanish like a dream?"

"That's not—"

"That's exactly what you just said." Dani crosses back to the table and taps one nail on the wood, once per word, like she's pinning a bug to a board. "You've got a whole speech planned. You've got a *wing reveal* planned. You've got a dramatic exit planned. Aria, you realize the Bears are gonna be down by two touchdowns at halftime and forty thousand drunk people are gonna be watching a purple elf princess drop out of the sky to tell them she can't save everyone? That's not a press conference. That's a *Disney movie*." She spreads her hands. "What's next, a musical number? Do the birds do your hair?"

Sera snorts into her wine and doesn't bother hiding it. Aria's ears go hot at the tips, which is a thing she still hasn't gotten used to — the way the embarrassment shows up in a place she can't cover with her hair. "I don't have a musical number."

"You *thought* about it. I can see it on your face. You were gonna do the little twirl." Dani points at her, grinning now, all teeth. "You do the twirl. Every time something works, you do the little bounce and the twirl and the—" she mimes it, hands fluttering up beside her own face like a startled bird, "—the *gasp*, and then you remember you're supposed to be a serious sorceress and you put your hands down. I've watched you do it four times. It's adorable. It's also *deeply* on brand for a woman who is about to fly into a football stadium like it's her personal stage."

Aria opens her mouth, closes it. Mike has his hand over his face. Marcus is very deliberately not laughing, which is its own kind of laughing. "Okay," she says, and her voice comes out a little smaller than she meant it to, "so maybe the plan is a *little* theatrical."

"A little." Dani rounds the table and stops right in front of her, close enough that Aria has to tilt her chin up to hold her eyes. "Babe. You resurrected a teenager in a *funeral home* and then flew out the window trailing light. You healed a whole ICU and posed for the security cameras. You are the single most dramatic person I have ever met, and I've been to *brunch*." She reaches up and tucks a strand of silver hair behind Aria's pointed ear — gentle, and the gentleness lands harder than the teasing did. "So if you're gonna do this, do it on purpose. Don't pretend you're being humble about it. You *love* the twirl. Own the twirl."

Aria holds Dani's eyes for one breath. Then she steps back — one pace, deliberate, the way you'd clear a stage — and lifts her chin.

"Fine." Her arms come out slow, not flailing, not the startled-bird thing Dani just mimed. Shoulders back. Wrists loose. She turns, and the smoky purple hem of the dress swings out a half-second behind her, catching the kitchen light, and she lets the turn carry her all the way around — toes pivoting on the tile, silver hair sweeping in a long arc that trails the motion like it's been waiting all night for permission. Her ears burn the whole way. She can feel them, hot and pointed and utterly visible, and she doesn't stop.

She lands the spin facing them and keeps her hands up, palms open, a grin splitting her face that she has absolutely no intention of hiding. "There. That's the twirl."

Dani cracks first — a real laugh, loud and ugly and delighted, doubling over with one hand on the table edge. Sera's next, wine sloshing as she sets the glass down too fast, and it's a snort before it's a laugh, which only makes it worse. Mike's is last and lowest, a single exhale through his nose that turns into a genuine chuckle he tries to bury in his palm and fails. Marcus just watches her, arms crossed, holding out — and then his mouth gives, small and grudging, the smile of a man who has decided the evidence is in.

"Okay," Dani says, straightening, still grinning. "Okay, that was actually good. I'll allow it."

Aria lowers her hands. The grin doesn't come down with them. "That's for the cameras," she says — quiet, but not soft. She finds Dani's eyes again, and holds them, and doesn't say anything else.

Mike drops his hand from his face and looks at her like she's just told him she's going to fight a bear with a spoon. "You're serious. You're actually serious." He starts pacing the strip of kitchen between the counter and the fridge, three steps and turn, three steps and turn, the way he does when he's debugging something that won't compile. "Aria, the Bears are playing the Packers. Green Bay. Do you have any idea what happens when you drop out of the sky over a Packers game? Half those people are drunk enough to try to tackle you. The other half brought guns."

"It's a home game," Marcus says, and there's a grim little smile on him now, the kind that means he's already run the numbers and hates every one of them. "That makes it worse. Soldier Field, Sunday, national broadcast. You know what's across the street from Soldier Field? The Field Museum. You know what's a ten-minute walk? The lake. You drop in on a stadium full of people who've been tailgating since eight in the morning, and the best case is you get swarmed. Worst case, somebody films you getting shot and now the Violet Angel bleeds on camera and every miracle you ever did becomes a parlor trick."

"So where would you put it?" Aria asks. She's not being sarcastic. She's actually asking, and that seems to throw him.

Marcus opens his mouth, closes it, and Mike beats him to it. "Notre Dame." He's stopped pacing. He's got both hands up like he's surrendering to his own idea. "Seriously. Think about it. Notre Dame Stadium. Catholic school, eighty thousand people, they already believe in angels. You show up there, you're not a freak, you're a *sign*. Somebody starts a rosary and it spreads through the whole damn place before security even figures out what's happening. You want a soft landing, that's the soft landing."

"You want me to do my big reveal at a *football game for Catholics*," Aria says slowly, and her ears have gone hot again, and she hates that she can feel them doing it. "That's your pitch. That's the pitch. 'Go where they already think you're real.'" She looks at Mike, and then at Marcus, and something in her chest that's been coiled tight all night finally starts to unclench. "You two are unbelievable. You've spent the whole night telling me this is insane, and your solution is *a different stadium*." She shakes her head, and a real laugh gets out of her before she can stop it. "Also, Mike. Buddy. I love you. But you're wrong about the math, and it's embarrassing."

"What math." Mike's eyes narrow. "What math, Jason — Aria. What math."

"Points." She holds up two fingers, then folds them down one at a time like she's counting for a child. "You think I'm running on fumes. You think I went into that hospital, spent everything I had, and I'm standing here with nothing left but a nice dress and a speech. That was *this morning*. I'm back up to forty." She lets that land, watches Marcus's face do the thing where the eyebrows go up and the mouth stays flat, and she keeps going before either of them can interrupt. "Dani came over early." She doesn't say anything else about it. She doesn't have to. The kitchen has a temperature, and it just changed.

Dani, still leaning against the table with her arms crossed, doesn't look at either of the men. She looks at Aria, and one corner of her mouth pulls up, slow and private, and she says to the room, flat, "She's got forty points and a plan with a twirl in it. I say let her fly."

Mike pushes off the door frame and grabs his keys off the hook by the fridge. "Okay. I'm gonna go."

Everyone turns. Marcus's eyebrows go up. Sera sets her glass down. Dani just watches him, arms loose at her sides now, reading him the way she reads everyone.

"Now?" Aria asks. "You just got here. You haven't even—"

"I've been here two hours and I've heard enough." Mike's jaw works. He's not looking at her, which is how she knows. He's looking at the counter, at his own hand closing around the keys. "You've got forty points and a plan with a twirl in it and a girlfriend who came over early to top you off twice before game night. Twice. You said it out loud. In front of me. My little—" He stops. His mouth opens, closes, opens again. "My little sister just told a room full of people she got refilled twice before dinner, and I'm supposed to sit here and roll dice and act like I don't have a nervous system."

Dani's grin comes back slow. "He said it. He actually said it."

"Don't." Mike points at her without looking. "Don't you dare."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to make a joke about load-bearing and I will throw up. For real. In Sera's sink. Which is—" he gestures vaguely at the kitchen, "—a nice sink. I don't want to do that to a nice sink." He finally looks at Aria, and there's something under the disgust, something softer and more tired. "You're happy. You're grinning like an idiot and your ears are doing the thing and you're the most you I've ever seen you, and I love you, and that's exactly why I have to leave before I think about the mechanics of it one more time."

Aria's ears go hot. She reaches up and touches one without meaning to, the way she still does when she catches them moving. "Mike."

"Nope." He's already moving, past Marcus, past the coat rack, keys rattling in his fist. "I'm gonna drive home, I'm gonna sit in my truck in the driveway for ten minutes, and then I'm gonna go inside and watch something violent on TV until my brain stops producing that sentence. You can text me the plan tomorrow. I'll help. I'll help with the stadium. I'll help with the speech. I'll help with whatever. But I am not staying for the part where the table starts asking follow-up questions."

He gets the door open. Cold air comes in off the hallway. For a second he stands in it, backlit, broad shoulders filling the frame, and Aria sees the twenty-eight-year-old who taught her to ride a bike, who drove four hours to pick her up when her car died outside Kankakee, who has spent every day since the woods showing up anyway, even when showing up meant looking at his brother's face and seeing a stranger's violet eyes look back.

"Sunday," he says. "Notre Dame or Soldier Field or whatever you land on. I'll be there." He doesn't say I'm proud of you. He doesn't have to. He pulls the door shut behind him and his footsteps go down the hall, unhurried, the gait of a man who has decided the only way through this is through it.

The kitchen is quiet for a beat. Then Dani turns to Aria, one hand pressed flat to her chest in mock solemnity, and says, "I have never been prouder of anything I've done in my life."

Marcus watches the door for a second after it closes, like he's waiting to see if Mike comes back for something he forgot. He doesn't. The hallway goes quiet, the footsteps fading toward the stairwell, and Marcus turns back to the kitchen with both hands still in his pockets and his eyebrows up somewhere near his hairline.

"So." He rocks back on his heels. "Should I be following him out? Because I've got a truck downstairs and I'm not too proud to use it." He glances at Sera, then at Aria, then at the space between them on the floor — the two feet of tile that has been doing a lot of quiet work all night. "You two are… a thing. Which I got. And you two—" a nod at Dani, "—are *definitely* a thing, and you don't keep any of the details private, which I have now learned the hard way, twice, in one evening. And Sera watches it happen like she's got a season pass." He pulls one hand out of his pocket and points loosely around the room, taking in all three of them. "So I'm just asking. Do I go get a drink somewhere and let you three sort out the choreography, or do I stay and keep getting the fireworks? Because I want the fireworks. I'm a simple man. But I also have *some* manners."

Dani answers before Aria can, and she doesn't even look up from the table — she's picking a stray die out of the bowl and rolling it between her fingers. "Manners. From the guy who called me a load-bearing girlfriend at a dinner table."

"That was a *compliment*—"

"It *was*." She sets the die down and finally looks at him, and there's nothing mean in it. "That's the problem. You meant it. Stay, Marcus. Nobody's kicking you out. She's not shy and I'm not shy and Sera—" she tips her head toward the other woman, "—Sera's a grown-up who can say what she wants. So ask her."

Sera has been leaning against the counter with her wine near her chin, and she doesn't flinch at being handed the question. She looks at Marcus, then at Aria, and something in her face settles — the small, private smile of a woman who has decided she is done being the one in the room who doesn't say the obvious thing out loud. "He can stay," she says. "We're not doing anything tonight that a witness would ruin. And I'd rather he hear it from us than piece it together from a lake photo and a die roll." She sets the glass down and pushes off the counter, crossing to Aria's side without any ceremony about it, and stops there — close, unhurried, her shoulder almost touching Aria's. "Sunday's the fireworks. Tonight we're just a table with too many people who know too much."

Marcus looks between the two of them, then at Dani, and something uncoils in his shoulders — the small relief of a man who has spent all night braced for a door to close in his face and just watched it stay open. "Okay," he says, and pulls his chair back out and sits down like he's decided this is his night after all. "Okay. Then I've got one more question, and it's a *real* one, and it's about the speech." He folds his arms on the table and looks straight at Aria. "You said you'd tell them you have limits. That you can't save everyone. That's the part I don't buy yet. Because the second you say 'I can't save everyone' to eighty thousand people, one of them is gonna stand up and ask you *why not* — and you're gonna have to answer that on live television, with your actual face, and there's no die roll for that one."

Aria nods, and the nod is the problem, because it agrees with him and she doesn't want to. She looks down at her own hands on the table — the long fingers, the manicured nails she still hasn't gotten used to, the faint luminous sheen of the skin — and she does the math the way she's been doing it since the hospital, the way she does it now every time someone says the word *help*.

"You're right," she says. "I have limits. I've been carrying the number around all week like it's a secret, and it's not. It's just arithmetic." She holds one hand up, palm flat, and starts folding fingers down the way she did for Mike, slow, like she's teaching a class nobody signed up for. "Raising the dead. I get one. One a day, sixteen points. That's it. Doesn't matter how many funerals I walk into, how many mothers grab my wrist — one."

Marcus's face goes still, which she's learning is what he does instead of flinching. Sera has stopped leaning on the counter. Dani is watching her with her head tipped, reading her the way she reads everyone, and Aria keeps going because stopping now would be worse.

"Major stuff — the kind of thing that kills you slow, or takes a limb off, or puts a kid on a ventilator — I can do nine of those a day. Five points each. Nine, if I'm full. Forty-five points is the ceiling, and I only hit that ceiling when Dani's had a very good morning, so most days the number is smaller than that." She folds two more fingers. "Flesh wounds. Lacerations. Broken bones. The everyday bloody stuff — fifteen of those a day. Three points apiece." She looks up at Marcus, and there's something almost apologetic in it, which is absurd, which she knows is absurd. "And if somebody wants a whole new body, permanent, no going back — that's two a day. Sixteen points each. Same well."

She lets her hands drop flat on the table and the die Marcus left there jumps a little. "So when I stand up in front of eighty thousand people and say I can't save everyone, I'm not being humble. I'm doing arithmetic out loud. Somebody's gonna ask me why not, and the answer is: because I'm a person with a spell list and a daily cap, and the cap is the whole point." She looks at the table, then at Marcus. "That's the speech. That's the part I couldn't figure out how to say until you made me say it."

Marcus is quiet for a beat. Then he reaches across the table and picks the die back up, rolls it once between his fingers, and sets it down on six. "Okay," he says. "Okay. That's an answer. I don't like it, but it's an answer." He looks at Sera, then at Dani, then back at Aria, and there's something in his face that's decided. "So we don't write a speech about what you can do. We write one about what you won't promise. That's the version that doesn't turn you into a vending machine."

Sera finally moves, coming around the table to stand behind Aria's chair, one hand settling on her shoulder — light, unhurried, the kind of touch that doesn't ask for anything. "Then we write it tonight," she says. "Before Sunday gets here and decides for us." Her thumb moves once against Aria's collarbone, and Aria's ears go hot, and she doesn't cover them. Not this time.

Marcus rolls the six again, just to hear it click, and then he looks up at Aria with the flat, unhurried patience of a man who has been waiting all night for the table to come back around to him. "Okay. Speech deferred. But you still owe me something, and I've been sitting on it since the funeral footage." He taps the die against the wood. "You told me you could do magic. Then you spent the whole night telling me what you can't do. Numbers. Caps. Arithmetic. So before we start writing press-conference lines, I want to see the thing that made me drive out here in the first place."

Aria's ears swivel before she does — the small betraying twitch — and she catches Sera's hand still resting on her shoulder, warm through the fabric. "You want a demo."

"I want the good stuff. Not the parlor tricks." Marcus leans back, chair creaking. "You did the dishes with your brain earlier. I saw it. Sink full of plates, and then no plates, and you didn't touch a sponge."

"That's Prestidigitation. That's—" she waves a hand, "—that's the free stuff. That's like asking a surgeon to prove herself by putting on a band-aid."

Sera's thumb moves once against her collarbone, and her voice comes low and easy, the way it does when she's already decided something and is just letting the room catch up. "Then show him the not-free stuff. Go up." She nods toward the ceiling, toward the flat gray dark above the building. "Roof access is at the end of the hall. I've got a key. Nobody's up there at midnight in November."

Dani is already standing, pulling her jacket off the back of the chair, and she doesn't ask permission, which Aria has learned is the fastest answer Dani ever gives. "I'm bringing the wine." She catches Aria's eye on the way past and something flickers there — not worry, exactly, more like the look of someone who has watched Aria do impossible things and has decided the only reasonable response is to be holding a drink when the next one happens. "You've got a spell you haven't tried yet. I can tell. You've got the face."

The roof is cold and flat and smells like tar and wet leaves, and Chicago opens up past the parapet in a smear of orange and white — the expressway, the lake gone black at the edge of it, a plane blinking its slow way south. Aria walks to the middle of the gravel and turns her face up, and she can feel the points sitting in her well like coins in a pocket, thirty of them, and the sky is enormous and empty and exactly the right size. "I've never cast this one," she says. "It's on the sheet. It's always been on the sheet. But the sheet's never had a real sky over it." She spreads her fingers at her side, feels the hair on her arms lift before anything happens, and grins at Marcus, quick and sharp. "Stand back. If I'm wrong about this, I'd rather not electrocute the one witness who likes me."

She doesn't shout it. That's the thing Marcus will remember later — she doesn't shout, doesn't brace, doesn't do the little wind-up. Her fingers just open at her side, slow, like she's letting go of something, and the air over the gravel changes. Marcus feels it first in his teeth. Then in the fine hairs on his forearms, lifting, every one of them standing up at once, and Sera's curls come alive around her face like she's just rubbed a balloon on her head, a whole cloud of auburn going sideways in the dark.

Then the sky opens. A bolt comes off Aria's palm — not down, not sideways, up — a white-hot column that tears off the roof and keeps going, two hundred feet, three, straight into the low November overcast until the belly of the clouds lights up from underneath like a struck lamp. The flash doesn't flicker. It holds, a full second of noon in the middle of midnight, and every rooftop and antenna and water tower between here and the lake throws a hard black shadow across the tar. Tendrils peel off the main shaft and crackle out sideways, forking, curling back on themselves, whipping across the sky the way a real bolt whips down — and the whole time it's silent, that impossible half-second of silence before thunder, except there is no thunder, there's only the smell of the air cooking, sharp and clean and wrong for a rooftop.

Dani's wine glass is against her chest and she hasn't noticed. Sera's hand has come off Aria's shoulder and is up at her own mouth. Marcus hasn't moved at all, which is its own kind of moving — he's gone perfectly still the way he went still over the die, except his eyes are the size of the die and there's a bolt of lightning standing out of a woman's hand in front of him and going up past where he can see the top of it. "That's—" he says, and stops, because there's no verb. "That's two hundred feet."

"Two-forty, I think." Aria's voice comes out almost normal, a little breathless, a little pleased, and she's watching the top of it with her chin tipped back, silver hair lifting around her ears in the static, one pointed ear flicking at a tendril that crackles past. "I did the math off the parapet. It's the first time it's ever had somewhere to go." She holds it another beat — longer than she needs to, and she knows it, and she doesn't care — and then she closes her hand, and the bolt pulls back into her fist like thread into a spool, the light collapsing down the column, the sky going dark again in a rush, and the thunder arrives at last, a low rolling crack that comes off the buildings and rolls out over the black lake and doesn't stop for a long time. A car alarm goes off somewhere six blocks over. A dog starts up two roofs away.

Marcus finally breathes. He looks at his own hands first, then at the roof, then at Aria, and something in his face has finished the argument it's been having with itself since the funeral footage. "Okay," he says. "Okay. I believe you. I believed you before, but now I believe you." He pulls his phone out of his pocket, thumb hovering over the screen, and then — deliberately, the same way he turned it face-down at the table — he puts it back. "I'm not filming that. I don't know why I'm not filming that. Some part of me is going to regret not filming that for the rest of my life."

Sera has crossed to Aria without any hurry, curls still standing half up, and she reaches out and touches Aria's wrist where the bolt came from — just her fingertips on the inside of it, checking, the way you'd check a stove. The skin is warm. Nothing else. "You're not even tired," she says, and it's not quite a question.

"Nope." Aria flexes the hand, opens it, closes it, and the grin that comes up is the one Dani called on earlier — the real one, the twirl one, and she doesn't put it away. "Five points. I've got twenty-five left and a whole sky over my head." She looks at Marcus, and then past him at the city, and the plane blinking its slow way south has a competitor now, a thin unanswered thread of light still hanging where the bolt used to be, fading, and she watches it go. "So. Speech writing. You want to start it here, or do you want to see what else the sheet's got on it?"

"Both," Marcus says, and he's already grinning, which is new. "I want the speech, and I want the other thing. In what order is up to you." He pulls his phone out, glances at it, and shoves it back in his pocket like it just insulted him. "Not filming. Still not filming. Ask me again in five minutes."

Aria walks to the parapet and puts her hands on the cold concrete, and the city does what it always does at midnight in November — spreads out flat and orange and indifferent, the expressway a wet line, the lake a black nothing past it. She picks her spot the way she picked the spot in the ICU: up and out at forty-five degrees, high enough that nobody on the street is looking, low enough that the buildings still frame it. Then she raises her right hand straight up, closes her fist hard, and points one finger at the sky.

She doesn't get to watch it bloom. That's the part nobody tells you. The casting is a sentence spoken in a language that lives under her ribs, and then the sentence is over, and the sky at the end of her finger is a white-orange sun with a sound in it, a low percussive *whump* that hits the roof a half-beat before the light does. Then the heat comes off it in a wall. It rolls down across the parapet and takes the breath out of everyone's mouth at once — hot and dry and enormous, the way an oven feels when you open it, the way August feels when it decides to make a point. Dani's wine sloshes over the rim of her glass and she doesn't notice. Sera's curls, already standing, flatten back against her skull in the gust. Marcus takes a step back before he knows he's doing it, and his hand comes up to his face, and he holds it there a second too long, like he's checking whether the skin is still his.

Then it's gone. The fireball doesn't travel, doesn't streak, doesn't arc — it just exists, whole and enormous, some hundred and twenty feet over the rooftops, a ball of flame the size of a house that flares and then folds in on itself and dies, shedding orange motes down toward the parking lot like a firework that got bored of the ceremony. The light bleeds off the water towers and the antennas and the wet tar and then it's dark again, darker than before, the way rooms always feel darker after a flashbulb. Somewhere south, a car alarm finishes its argument and gives up. The smell that stays is not smoke. It's the clean, burnt-air smell of a match just struck, and it hangs over the roof for a long moment before the wind off the lake takes it.

Marcus lowers his hand. He looks at Aria, then at the empty air where the thing was, then back at Aria, and he opens his mouth and closes it and opens it again. "That was the size of a *building*," he says, and his voice is not steady, and he doesn't seem to care. "You pointed at nothing and the sky caught fire. You didn't have to aim. You didn't have to—" He stops. He looks at his own hand, the one he used to shield his face, and turns it over. "It was hot. I felt it on my *face*."

"Five points," Aria says, and she flexes the hand she threw it with, and there's something in her voice that's half apology and half the twirl-grin coming back. "One every six seconds if I wanted to keep going. I don't." She looks at the empty patch of sky, then back down at the three of them on the gravel — Sera with her curls wrecked, Dani with wine on her wrist, Marcus still holding his hand out like he's waiting for it to finish telling him something. "That's the part I don't have a speech for yet. Not the healing. Not the resurrection. The part where I can do *that* and choose not to, every day, on purpose, and nobody watching will ever know how close it was." She turns from the parapet and walks back toward them, and her ears are up and her face is open and she isn't hiding any of it.

"I want to see the thing that made me drive out here in the first place." Marcus has the die out again, rolling it across his knuckles, and he's grinning now — the grin of a man who has decided the impossible is just another guest at the table. "You did the dishes with your brain. That was cute. Show me the not-cute one."

Aria's ears tip forward. She looks at Sera, then at the parapet, then at her own hands — thirty points sitting in the well like coins, and a whole Chicago sky to spend them on. "Okay," she says. "But I'm going to need plates." She turns and heads for the roof door before anyone can ask why, and comes back ninety seconds later with a stack of Sera's good stoneware, four of them, white and heavy and cold. Sera makes a noise like she's been stabbed. "I'll buy you new ones," Aria says, already handing one to Marcus, one to Dani, one to Sera, keeping the fourth. "I'll buy you twelve. Promise. Throw it straight up, as high as you can, and don't aim."

Marcus goes first because Marcus always goes first — a grunted, shoulder-driven heave that sends his plate spinning up into the dark, wobbling off-center, already a bad throw. Dani's is cleaner, a wrist-flick that takes hers up and out toward the lake, a long slow arc. Sera throws hers like she's ringing a bell, straight overhead, and then it's Aria's turn and she doesn't throw hers at all — she just opens her fingers and lets the fourth plate drift up off her palm on nothing, rising slow and even, and the three of them are still staring at that when she drops both hands, fingers spread, and the roof goes violet.

Four bolts leave her palms at once — no wind-up, no shout, just a sound like a canvas sail tearing, and the air in front of her fills with four streaks of light the color of her eyes. Marcus's plate shatters first, a clean white burst two hundred feet up. Then Dani's, out over the parking lot, the impact punching it sideways into a shower of gravel-sized chips. Then Sera's, dead overhead, the shards raining back down onto the tar with a sound like a handful of thrown coins. And the fourth — Aria's own, drifting slow on nothing — takes the bolt dead center and comes apart last and quietest, high enough that the pieces catch the city glow on the way down and wink out one by one. Four plates. Four bolts. One motion.

Marcus is flat against the parapet with his mouth open and his phone in his hand and he doesn't even notice he's got it out. "That's five," he says, and his voice cracks on it. "That's five. You can do five. Why did you only do four?"

"Because we only had four plates." Aria rolls her right shoulder like she's shaken something off it, and the violet light is still draining out of her fingertips, slow, like embers. "I could've done five if you'd had a fifth. Or hit the same plate five times. Or hit five of you, from here, and you'd never see it coming and there's no die roll for that one either." She says it flat and lets it sit, and watches the sentence land — watches Marcus's grin go careful, watches Sera's hand come off her own mouth and settle on the parapet, watches Dani take a slow sip of the wine she finally remembered she was holding. "Twenty points left," Aria says. "Speech on Sunday. You want to help me write it, or do you want to stand there with your phone out?"

Marcus doesn't put the phone away. He holds it up between two fingers like it's a dead thing he's been asked to identify, and he keeps looking at it, and he keeps not turning it on. "So let me get this straight. Healing Hands — the thing that pulls a kid off a ventilator — costs you three points. Four plates up there cost you nothing. You can throw eldritch blasts at the sky for free, forever, until the sun burns out, but you can only un-die a person nine times before lunch." He turns the phone over, screen down, and sets it on the parapet like he's folding a bad hand. "What kind of game balances it that way? Who sits down and says, yes, unlimited artillery, but cap the mercy?"

"Gary Gygax, apparently." Aria picks up the wine Dani set down and drinks from the bottle, because the glass is still in Dani's hand and it's midnight and she's earned it. "It's not a balance thing. It's a genre thing. The whole book is about people who solve problems by hitting them. There's a spell in there that calls down a meteor storm — a *storm*, Marcus, hundreds of them, a mile wide if I want it. Sixteen points. Same well as the fireballs and lightning bolts. And the healing? The healing's an afterthought. A footnote. Half the tables I ever played at didn't even have a cleric, because why bring a medic when you could bring another sword." She hands the bottle back to Dani and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist. "I built a sorceress because sorceresses get to be *loud*. Nobody ever min-maxed a character to be gentle. That's the whole joke. I got handed the fantasy, and the fantasy is a *weapons platform* that happens to know first aid."

Dani laughs — a real one, loud enough to bounce off the parapet — and it's the first sound on this roof all night that isn't thunder or breaking ceramic. "You're telling me the universe gave you the power to raise the dead as a *side effect*." She takes the bottle back and drinks, and when she lowers it her face has gone thoughtful in the orange city-glow, the way it does right before she says the thing nobody's been saying. "That's backwards. That's the whole thing backwards. You should be a healer with a gun, not a gun that knows CPR." She looks at Sera, then at Aria, and her mouth does something wry and private. "You know what that means, right? Whatever's running the show — the dice, the sheet, the whatever — it didn't build you to save people. It built you to *win*. The saving's just what you chose to do with the ammo."

The sentence sits on the roof and doesn't blow away. Aria looks at the empty patch of sky where the fireball was, and then at her own right hand, and something in her chest goes quiet and cold and clear all at once, the way it did in the ICU when she stood at the foot of a bed and did the arithmetic of who got to live. "Then I'm the worst thing that could've happened to this world," she says, and it comes out flat, no drama in it, just the fact of it. "A person with unlimited firepower and a conscience is still a person with unlimited firepower. The conscience is the *variable*. The firepower is the constant." She flexes the hand. "Twenty points left. I'm gonna spend them on the speech, not on anything that burns. That's the whole promise. That's the thing I can actually control."

Sera has been quiet since the plates — leaning on the parapet with her curls settling back down around her face, watching Aria the way she watches a line of code that's finally compiling. Now she pushes off the concrete and crosses the gravel, and she doesn't touch Aria's shoulder this time; she takes the hand instead, the right one, the one that threw the bolts, and turns it over and looks at the palm like there's a receipt printed there. "Then write it down," she says. "The promise. Tonight, before you sleep, on paper, and we all sign it, and if you break it we get to be furious with you. That's the deal." She folds Aria's fingers closed around nothing and lets go. "You don't get to be the only one holding the pen on your own rules. That's how you end up a vending machine with wings."

Aria looks at her closed hand, then at Sera, and the corner of her mouth pulls sideways. "You want me to sign a contract with my own girlfriend as the witness. On a rooftop. At midnight. In November." She tucks the hand into her jacket pocket, where the wind can't get at it. "That's the most terrifying thing anyone's said to me all week, and I raised a dead kid on Tuesday."

"Good." Sera's already moving toward the roof door, gravel grinding under her boots, curls flattened down around her ears now that the static's gone. "Paper's in the kitchen. Marcus, you're the notary. Dani, you're the one who makes her actually do it instead of talking about doing it for three hours."

"I charge by the hour," Dani says, and follows, wine bottle swinging at her side like a lantern. "For emotional labor. You'll get an invoice."

Marcus stays at the parapet a second longer than the others. He picks his phone up off the concrete, turns it over once in his palm, and then — deliberately, the way he does everything — he holds it out over the edge of the roof, thumb on the screen. Aria watches him from the doorway and doesn't say anything, because there's nothing to say that wouldn't be a vote, and this isn't hers to vote on. He looks at the phone. He looks at the empty sky. Then he pockets it and walks inside, and the roof door bangs shut behind him, and the bolt of light that lit up the underside of the clouds is just a memory the city's going to argue about on the news tomorrow morning.

The kitchen is warm and smells like the wine and the cold that came in on everybody's jackets. Sera pulls a legal pad out of a drawer — actual paper, the yellow kind, with a grocery list still on the top sheet — and tears the list off and hands Aria a pen that says Property of Laurent Dev on the barrel. Aria sits down at the table where she rolled dice two hours ago and writes, in handwriting that's still Jason's even though the hand isn't, I will not use magic to hurt anyone except in defense of a life. I will not promise what I can't do. I will say my limitd out loud, every time, even when it makes me look small. She reads it back once, and then she signs it, and the pen feels heavier in her fingers than it has any right to.

Marcus signs first, because he's the notary, and his signature is a flat scrawl that takes up a third of the page. Dani signs under his, small and neat, and adds witness, load-bearing in parentheses. Sera signs last, and when she's done she folds the page in half and hands it to Aria without ceremony, and Aria tucks it into the inner pocket of her jacket, over her heart, where the character sheet used to live. "Twenty points," Sera says, and turns off the kitchen light. "Speech on Sunday. Sleep first."

Marcus doesn't move toward the door with the others. He stays at the table, one hand flat on the yellow legal pad where his signature is still wet, and he watches Aria tuck the folded page into her jacket like she's holstering something. "One more thing," he says, and his voice has gone flat and careful, the way it went when he turned his phone face-down. "Before anybody sleeps. You said it up there and I want you to say it again, here, in the kitchen, with all of us standing in it."

Aria stops with her hand still inside her jacket. "Say what."

"Meteor Swarm." He says it the way you'd say a diagnosis. "You said there's a spell in that book that calls down a meteor storm. Hundreds of them. A mile wide if you want it. Sixteen points, same well as everything else." He leans forward, both palms on the table now, and the chair creaks back under him. "I want to know if that's real. Not a thing on a sheet. Not a line you read off a card. I want to know if you can actually do it — right now, tonight, if you felt like it — and I've been sitting here for two hours watching you throw lightning at the clouds, so don't you dare tell me it's just flavor text."

The kitchen goes very quiet. Sera's hand is still on the light switch and she hasn't flipped it. Dani has stopped with the wine bottle halfway to her mouth, and she looks at Aria the way she looked at her on the roof — reading her, not the question. Aria pulls her hand out of her jacket and sets it on the table, and she doesn't answer right away, because Marcus asked it straight and he deserves it straight, and the straight answer is the one she's been carrying around all week without ever once saying it out loud.

"It's real," she says. "Sixteen points. I point at a patch of sky, or a field, or a parking lot, or a county, and I decide how wide, and then it's not one fireball. It's hundreds. One every five square feet, all the way across. It doesn't streak in from space — it just arrives, already falling, already burning, and it keeps arriving until the whole area is nothing but holes and fire and things that used to be standing." She looks at her own hand on the table and then at Marcus. "I've got twenty points left. So yes. I could do it tonight, and I'd still have four left over for whatever I wanted to do after. That's the honest answer. That's the whole honest answer."

Marcus doesn't say anything for a second. He looks at the folded page in her jacket, then at the legal pad, then back at her, and something behind his eyes does the arithmetic he's been doing all night and finally lands on the number he doesn't like. "A mile," he says, quiet. "You could wipe a town off the map and walk away with change in your pocket, and the same spell list that gives you that is the one that caps how many kids you can pull off a ventilator." He straightens up and runs both hands through his hair, and his voice comes out dry and almost amused, the way it did over the die. "Whoever wrote that book, Aria — I hope they're real, because when you meet them, I want to be in the room. I've got some questions about their priorities."

Sera finally flips the switch. The kitchen goes dark except for the hall light bleeding in from the doorway, and in the half-dark her voice comes low and even, no drama in it. "Twenty points," she says again, and it's not a question this time. "Write it down tomorrow. Meteor Swarm goes on the same page as the promise. If you ever cast that one, we all know first." She's already moving down the hall toward the bedroom, and Aria follows, and behind her Marcus picks up his keys and finally heads for the door.

Marcus has his keys out and his hand on the door when Aria says it, quiet, to nobody in particular, the way you say a thing you've been holding all night. "It's a war spell."

He stops. Keys dangling. The hall light cuts a stripe across the kitchen floor and Sera's shadow pauses at the end of it, one hand on the bedroom door. "What is."

"Meteor Swarm." Aria's still at the table, jacket on, the folded page over her heart, and she's looking at her own hands the way she looked at them on the roof — like they belong to someone with a better plan. "I've been thinking about it since you asked. What it's for. And it's not for here. It's not for a stadium or a parking lot or anything I'd ever actually want to point at." She turns her hand over. "It's for a battlefield. It's for a line of men coming across a field, and you're the only thing standing between them and a village, and you don't have to aim, you don't have to be brave, you just have to *decide*. Hundreds of impacts, every five square feet, and then the field is a different field. That's what it was written for. Somebody sat down and wrote a spell that exists to end a battle by itself."

Dani's the one who moves first. She sets the wine bottle on the counter with a click that sounds too loud in the dark, and she crosses to the table and sits down across from Aria like she's settling in for a long one. "Say the rest of it."

"The rest of it is that it's real. It's not flavor text, it's not a card, it's mine. Sixteen points and a mile of sky and I could put a whole conflict on pause before the second mortar ever gets fired." Aria looks up, and there's no grin on her face now, nothing of the twirl in it. "So the question isn't whether I *can*. I can. The question is whether I'm supposed to — whether the woman who can't heal more than nine people a day is the same woman who could fly to Ukraine or Sudan or wherever the next one starts and just *end it*, one field at a time, and then fly home and eat breakfast and never tell anyone where the crater came from." She flexes her fingers flat on the table. "That's what I've been sitting here not saying. That's the thing that keeps me up. Not the healing. The healing's easy. The healing's the part I want. The war spell is the part I *have*."

Sera has come back down the hall without a sound, and she's standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and her jaw set in a way Aria has learned to read. "You're not Captain America," she says. "You're not a soldier. You're a person who got handed a weapon she didn't ask for and is doing the math on whether the world would be better if she used it. That's not the same thing, and you don't get to pretend it is just because the math is clean."

"I know." Aria stands up, and the chair scrapes again, and this time she doesn't flinch at the sound either. She walks to the window over the sink and looks out at the wet street, the streetlight, the empty November dark, and her reflection floats in the glass in front of her — silver hair, violet eyes, a face that's hers and Jason's and neither. "But here's the thing I can't stop turning over. Somewhere tonight there's a mother in a war zone who's going to lose a kid to a shell she never saw coming, and I'm standing in a warm kitchen in Chicago with the exact spell that could stop the shell, and I'm choosing not to use it. Every night. On purpose. Because I'm scared of what happens after." She watches her own reflection say it. "That's the arithmetic I can't make come out right. Nine kids off a ventilator and a thousand kids in a war I could've ended before lunch, and I'm the one deciding which number gets to be real."

Marcus is the one who answers her, and he doesn't do it from the doorway or with his keys in his hand. He comes back to the table, sits down like he's got nowhere to be, and folds his arms on the legal pad. "Full Captain America," he says, tasting it. "You mean the shield in the chest thing. You mean you fly in, you pick a side, and you just — what, you land in the middle of a firefight and the firefight stops because you're standing there."

"It wouldn't stop." Aria turns from the window and leans her hip against the sink, arms crossed, and the reflection in the glass keeps watching her even after she's stopped looking at it. "That's the part people get wrong about the whole idea. Nobody lays down their guns because a woman with wings shows up. First mortar team that sees me puts a round through my chest and then I'm a body in a field and the war goes on without me. So no — if I did it, if I actually went, it wouldn't be a speech. It would be one minute of me doing something nobody has a counter for, and then it's over, and then I'm the story they tell their kids about the day the sky opened." She rubs the heel of her hand against her sternum, where the folded page sits. "That's what I keep coming back to. Not whether I could. Whether I'd be any *use* — whether a person who's never been shot at, never been in a war, never even been in a fistfight, has any business deciding which field gets to be a different field."

"So you're saying the honest version is you don't know if you'd have the stomach for it." Dani's got her chin on her fist, wine bottle untouched beside her, and she's not being gentle about it. "You're not asking us if it's right. You're asking us if you could actually do it without throwing up on your own feet."

"Yeah." Aria looks at her, and the word comes out without any of the shine she usually puts on top of things. "I killed a deer once. Not with magic — with a truck, on Route 9, when I was nineteen. I pulled over and I stood on the shoulder for twenty minutes with my hands shaking and I couldn't even look at it. That's the whole sum total of my violence résumé. And now I'm sitting here doing arithmetic about how many *people* I could put in a field if I had to, and the number doesn't have a ceiling on it. That's the part that scares me. Not the spell. The me that's doing the math."

Sera hasn't moved out of the doorway. She's got her arms crossed and her glasses pushed up into her hair and she's looking at Aria the way she looks at a bug she can't reproduce — patient, but not going anywhere. "You keep saying 'if I had to,'" she says. "Like it's a thing that happens to you. It's not. You'd have to *choose* it, every single time, and you'd have to choose it knowing you can't put it back. That's the whole difference between you and a soldier, and it's the reason you're still standing in my kitchen instead of in a crater somewhere. Soldiers get orders. You don't. So the real question isn't whether you'd have the stomach. It's whether you're willing to be the person who has to decide alone, forever, with nobody to blame it on."

Marcus is quiet for a second, then he taps the legal pad once with two fingers. "Which is why the page exists," he says. "And why I'm about to say something I'm gonna hate myself for in the morning." He looks up at Aria and there's no joke in his face, just the flat engineer thing. "Don't answer it tonight. Don't answer it Sunday. Don't answer it at the press conference either — that's the trap, the first reporter who asks you about the war is gonna hand you a microphone and a reason, and if you take it you're a weapons program with a face. Put it on the page with the rest of it. 'If I ever fly to a war, I tell them first.' Not us. Them. The people you'd be doing it to." He stands up and finally, actually, gets his keys in his hand. "That's the only version of Captain America I'd back. The one who shows up and says what she is before she does anything."