Sera's eyes are still on the sky above the fifty when Dani's thumb stops moving on her knuckle, and the small stillness of it is what makes her turn. The TV is muted now — someone at the network finally decided the empty Jumbotron didn't need a soundtrack — and the only sound in the apartment is the refrigerator cycling on in the kitchen and Pancake's tail thumping once against the rug. Dani is looking at her the way she looked at the screen when Aria came down out of the clouds: raw, unguarded, the smart mouth gone quiet. Sera opens her own mouth to say something and finds that the sentence she already said is still in the room, taking up all the air.

"She just swore to the whole world she'll never hurt anyone," Dani says, quiet, and her voice has the flatness of someone reading a fact off a page. "And then she flew away." She lets go of Sera's hand to reach for the remote, doesn't pick it up, puts her hand back down on the couch between them like she's not sure it's allowed. "What do we do now?" The question doesn't sound like it's asking for a plan. It sounds like it's asking whether there's a version of tonight where they get to sleep, or eat something, or stop standing in a Dani's living room watching a woman they love be a weather event over a football stadium. Sera looks at the muted screen — the booth camera still panning, the marching band in their little silver hats waiting for a cue that isn't coming — and understands that the honest answer is that she has no idea, and that Dani already knows that, and that the question was never really about Aria at all.

Sera turns the whole way around on the couch, knees folding under her, and looks at Dani instead of the screen. The words are still in the room — she can feel them the way you feel a chair you walked into in the dark, a bruise already forming somewhere she can't see. She said them out loud. To Dani. About Aria. And Dani heard her, and now Dani is sitting there with her hand on the cushion between them like an offering nobody's picked up yet.

"Okay," Sera says, and it comes out smaller than she meant it to. "I said a thing. I'm going to say a different thing now." She pulls her glasses off, folds them, sets them on the arm of the couch, and the apartment goes soft and blurry at the edges, which is somehow easier. "I don't know what we do. But I know I'm not doing it standing up in somebody else's living room pretending I didn't just say that." She reaches across the cushion and puts her hand over Dani's — palm down, fingers curled, not grabbing. Just there. "You don't have to say anything back. I just didn't want you to be the only one in this room who knows where I stand."

Dani looks down at the hand on top of hers for a long second. Then she turns her wrist over underneath it, laces her fingers through Sera's, and holds on. On the muted screen, the booth camera has finally given up on the sky and cut to a commercial — a truck, a dog, a family eating cereal — and the marching band is filing off the field in their little silver hats, done waiting. Pancake stands up on the rug, stretches front legs long, and walks over to sit on Sera's foot, which is his way of saying the room has been quiet long enough. Dani's phone buzzes on the coffee table, face-down, and neither of them moves to get it.

Dani's phone buzzes again on the coffee table, walks half an inch across the wood, and this time she lets go of Sera's hand to flip it face-up. A number she doesn't recognize. She sets it back down, screen glowing, and doesn't turn it over. "Three days," she says, to the phone, to the room, to nobody. "I met you three days ago. I met Aria two weeks ago at the Copper Kettle, and now I've got a girlfriend who's an elf on the national news and I'm sitting on my couch holding hands with her other girlfriend, and my cat is asleep on your foot, and I don't know how any of this happened." She laughs, once, no air behind it. "Sorry. That's not — I'm not doing a bit. I'm doing the opposite of a bit."

Sera doesn't move her foot out from under Pancake. She watches Dani's jaw work, the way her mouth opens and closes around something that keeps not coming out, and she waits, because she's a game designer and she knows a player stalling at a door when she sees one. "Say it," she says, quietly, and it isn't a dare.

Dani looks at the muted commercial — the truck, the dog, the family — and then at Sera, and her face does the thing it did at the screen when Aria came down out of the clouds. "She told me she loves me," Dani says. "Last night. In my bed. In Elvish first, and I didn't know what it meant, and then she said it in English so I'd have no excuse." She pulls her hand out of Sera's and folds both of them in her lap, like she's about to be graded. "And I didn't say it back. I held her. I let her fall asleep with it hanging there. Because I don't — I've never said that to anyone and meant it, and I wasn't going to say it just because the moment asked me to." She looks up. "So now you know where I stand, too. Which is nowhere yet. Which is the whole problem."

"You want the whole thing," Dani says, and it isn't a question, so Sera doesn't answer it like one. Pancake shifts on her foot and she lets him, keeps her eyes on Sera's blurred face. "Fine. You asked. So — she came over, she interrogated my cat, which, by the way, is a thing she can do now, she can just talk to animals, and Pancake apparently thinks she's an idiot who never checks the bowl. Then we drank. Then she got drunk, and this is where it gets stupid, because I poured her a glass of water and she looked at it and made it into wine. Not — she didn't pour wine. She turned the water pink. Same trick as the stadium, except in my kitchen, except on purpose, and she laughed so hard she had to put her head on the table. So I couldn't give her water. It was wine. Every glass I poured was wine. I gave up and we drank the wine."

"And then she dragged me to the bedroom," Dani says, and her hands come out of her lap to gesture at the ceiling like the bedroom is up there somewhere, like she's presenting evidence. "Not dragged. She got this look and she took my hand and that was that. And somewhere in there — I swear to you I don't know when it happened, I don't know if she cast it or it just fell out of her — she started speaking French. In the middle of it. Into my skin. Because she said it was the language of love, which is the most ridiculous — she's got her mouth on my thigh and she's telling me French is the language of love, and I'm supposed to keep a straight face. I did not keep a straight face. And then it wasn't French anymore, it was the other one. The Elvish." She stops. Looks at Sera. "It came after. And when the spell wore off in the morning, the French was gone. The Elvish stayed. That's the part I can't figure out. Everything else she pulled out of thin air, and that one thing just — stayed."

Sera sits with it, Pancake warm on her foot, the muted cereal commercial looping its little family through their little morning for the fourth time. "She cast Tongues," she says, slowly, working it like a puzzle piece she doesn't like the shape of. "And the spell left. But the words didn't." She looks at Dani. "That's not how the spell works. That's not how any of it works. She's not playing the game anymore — she's writing it." She reaches for her glasses on the arm of the couch, doesn't put them on, just holds them. "

"And the thing is," Dani says, and she's not looking at Sera now, she's looking at the cereal family looping through their forever-morning, "she didn't even know what she was saying. The French, fine, that's a spell, that's a cheat code. But the Elvish — she said it like it was the only true thing in the room, and then in the morning she told me she didn't know what it meant until it was already out of her. She had to *work it out*. Like a receipt she found in her own pocket." She pulls her knees up onto the couch, wraps her arms around them, makes herself small in a way Sera has never seen her do. "You designed the game. You tell me. When a player rolls a nat twenty and the DM didn't plan for it — what is that? Is that luck? Or is that the character telling you who they are?"

Sera turns her glasses over in her hands, one temple, then the other. "It's the character telling you who they are," she says. "Every time. That's the whole — that's why I built it. The dice don't make you do things. They just take the lid off." She sets the glasses down on the cushion beside her thigh, unfolder, and doesn't put them on. "So she's not casting Elvish, Dani. She's *speaking* it. There's a difference, and the difference is the part that scares me, because it means the spell isn't doing it. She is."

Dani's phone lights up again on the coffee table — a different number now, or the same one, the screen doesn't say — and this time she picks it up, looks at it, and puts it face-down on the far side of the couch, out of reach, like she's grounding a teenager. "She's going to call me," she says. "She's somewhere over the lake right now with her cape on and her phone in — where does she even keep her phone? She built that outfit out of nothing. There's no pocket in nothing." She laughs, and this one has a little air behind it. "That's the question I should be asking the national news. Where does the elf keep her phone."

Pancake stands, stretches rear legs long this time, and relocates from Sera's foot to the middle cushion, equidistant, diplomatic. Sera watches him do it and understands she's been assigned a duty. She picks her glasses back up, puts them on, and the room snaps back into focus — Dani's freckles, the cereal family, the lamp she never turned on because the TV was light enough. "Okay,"

"Okay," Sera says, and she says it to the room this time, to the two of them and the cat and the looping cereal family. She picks the remote up off the cushion, mutes the commercial instead of the set, and the apartment goes properly quiet — just the fridge and Pancake and Dani breathing through her nose. She turns it over in her hands and looks at the black screen the way she looks at a bug report that doesn't reproduce. "Here's the thing I keep coming back to. The character sheet. My character sheet. The one I wrote."

Dani uncurls one knee, tips her head. "You wrote her languages."

"Common and Elvish," Sera says. "That's what's on the page. Right there under the stats, two lines, Common and Elvish, because every sorcerer in every campaign I've ever run gets the trade tongue and one other, and I picked Elvish because, well, she’s an elf." She sets the remote down. "And here's what I can't stop chewing on. In the game, Common *is* English. That's how I wrote it. Every NPC speaks Common, and Common is just — what we're speaking. So if English is Common, then Elvish is the *other* one, the one that was always sitting on her sheet, and she's been carrying it this whole time without knowing it. She didn't learn it. She didn't cast it. It was on the paper. It's the second language I gave her because it sounded pretty."

Dani is quiet for a second. "So when she said it in my bed —"

Dani doesn't finish it. She lets the sentence hang there, knee still up, and Sera watches her decide not to say the rest. The fridge cycles off. Somewhere down the block a car door slams and the sound arrives late through the closed window, the way it does in this apartment.

"So she didn't learn it," Dani says, finally, and it comes out flat, worked-over. "She woke up one morning and it was already in her mouth. Like the ears. Like the — the everything." She gestures at nothing, at the air where Aria keeps being. "You're telling me my girlfriend came with a manual and neither of us read the languages page."

"I'm telling you I wrote the page," Sera says. "I wrote the whole page. And every time she opens her mouth lately it's a sentence I didn't write." She pulls her knees up onto the cushion, mirroring Dani without meaning to, and stares at the black screen. "Common and Elvish. Two lines. It's the least interesting thing on the sheet — it's the thing you fill in and forget, it's the thing I put there because a sorcerer with only one language is a sorcerer who can't read the door she needs to open. And now it's the only line on the whole page that explains anything, and it explains the wrong thing, because it doesn't explain why she could *feel* it. It just means it was there to find."

Pancake stands up on the middle cushion, turns in a slow circle, and lies back down facing the muted screen, tail curled over his nose. Neither of them moves. Dani's phone stays face-down on the far end of the couch, dark, patient.

"Nothing else makes sense," Sera says, and it isn't to Dani, exactly. "The spell points don't. The wings don't. The fact that she can turn water into wine in your kitchen and heal a girl in an ICU and swear at a football stadium in a language I invented for a door in act three — none of it holds still long enough to be true. But that one line. Common and Elvish." She puts the glasses back on, and the room sharpens, and she looks at Dani with it. "That one I can trace. That one is mine. She found the second language I gave her because it was always on the paper, and the paper is real now, and I don't know whether that's the answer or just the one piece I can hold without it burning my hand."

Dani reaches across Sera for the remote, and this time she picks it up. The sports channel dies mid-pan, the marching band's silver hats gone to black, and she punches the input until the cable guide loads — a wall of channels, the little preview boxes cycling through their loops. "Local first," she says, thumbing down the list. "Then the networks. I want to see what they're saying before she lands." She finds the local affiliate and hits it, and the screen fills with a woman in a red coat standing in front of a wall of phones.

The reporter is doing the thing reporters do when they've been handed a miracle and a deadline at the same time: talking fast, pointing at the crowd behind her, the words coming out in a tumbling rhythm that Sera has to lean in for. "—unprecedented, and we want to be careful with our language here—" The chyron underneath says *ELF AT SOLDIER FIELD* and then, a second later, *WITNESSES DESCRIBE 'VIOLET ANGEL.'* Behind the reporter, a kid in a Bears jersey is holding up his phone to the camera, the screen showing the exact moment Aria came down out of the cloud deck, wings lit, cape snapping. "She turned my beer pink," the kid says, straight into the lens, and he sounds less like a witness than a man who's just won something. "I don't even like beer. I drank the whole thing."

Dani sits forward, elbows on her knees, and doesn't look away from the screen. The reporter cuts to a panel — a professor, a priest, a woman in a blazer who the chyron identifies as a FORMER DEFENSE ANALYST — and the professor is saying the word "hoax" while the priest is saying the word "angel" and the defense analyst is saying neither, just staring at the footage with her mouth set in a line that Sera recognizes, because it's the face of someone doing math. Dani's thumb finds the volume and turns it up.

The defense analyst is the first one to say anything that doesn't sound like a word pulled out of a hat. She leans toward her mic, taps the desk twice with one knuckle, and says, "I want to be very clear about what I'm looking at, because I've spent my whole career looking at footage, and this is not CGI. I've seen CGI. I've made CGI. The shadow she casts on the field — that's a real shadow, cast by a real light source, and it lands on the grass where it should land." She stops. Looks off-camera at someone Sera can't see. "The wings are the part I can't explain. But the shadow's real." The professor starts to say the word "hoax" again and the analyst just looks at him until he stops, and Sera feels something loosen in her chest that she didn't know was clenched.

Dani is already thumbing down the guide, hunting. She skips past the networks — they're still doing the panel, still splitting the screen between the priest and the professor like those are the only two ways to read a woman coming out of the clouds — and lands on a channel Sera doesn't recognize, some local feed out of the south suburbs, where a woman in a headscarf is standing in her own kitchen holding up a phone with the footage paused on Aria's face. "My son was in that hospital," she says, and her voice doesn't shake, which is somehow worse. "The girl on the ventilator, the twelve-year-old — that's my neighbor's daughter. I know that girl. I saw her in a bed with tubes in her and now I see her in her front yard on a bike. So you can call it a hoax, but I'd like you to come here and tell her mother that, and I'd like to watch you do it." The anchor, off-camera, says something Sera can't hear, and the woman shakes her head. "No, I don't have a question. That was my statement." The feed cuts to a reporter standing outside a hospital in a different county, where a line of people has formed along the sidewalk, holding signs that mostly just say *THANK YOU* in marker, one of them with a crude crayon drawing of a winged figure that Sera recognizes instantly — a kid's drawing, the same hand that made Lily's frame.

Sera leans toward the screen, elbows on her knees, and reads the signs the way she reads user tests — looking for the pattern under the noise. One says *SHE SAID HER NAME*, one says *THANK YOU ARIA MITHLASS*, and a third, held by a man in a Cubs cap, just says *I SAW IT*. Dani's thumb finds the volume and eases it up, and the reporter's voice fills the apartment: "...witnesses on the north side reporting the same thing, a woman matching the description seen flying low over the lakefront trail, no confirmation from—" Dani flips to the next channel before he finishes.

It's a morning show this time, two hosts on a couch set, and the woman is mid-sentence with her hand flat on the desk like she's swearing something in. "—and I'll say the unpopular thing on live television, which is that I don't care whether she's an elf or an angel or a magician. I care that a twelve-year-old is breathing. I care that a nineteen-year-old got up off a table at his own viewing. I don't have a theology for that. I don't need one." The man beside her starts the word "but" and she talks over him, and Sera catches Dani's mouth doing something it hasn't done since the commercial — curving. "There it is," Dani says, quiet, and taps the remote against her knee once. "Somebody with a job and a spine."

She keeps hunting. A call-in show out of Indianapolis — a man whose voice sounds like it's coming through a landline, saying he drove two hours to the hospital just to look at the girl's bike in the yard, that he doesn't know why, that he just needed to see it with his own eyes. A feed out of Milwaukee where a firefighter in a station kitchen says the wings looked like something out of his grandmother's church and he means that as a compliment and he won't apologize for it. Sera watches the guide scroll and realizes her own breathing has evened out, that the clenched thing in her chest has gone slack, that she is looking at a country not agreeing on what happened but agreeing on the shape of it — a woman came down, and something got better, and it was on camera.

Dani keeps scrolling, past the network panels and the call-in shows, thumb working the guide like she's flipping through a case file, and then she stops on C-SPAN. Sera almost laughs — out of every channel in the lineup, of course it's the one that looks like a DMV waiting room, the one where the only thing on screen is a man at a podium reading a statement he did not write. The chyron at the bottom says *WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING — LIVE*, and the press secretary, a woman in a navy blazer with her hair pulled back so tight it looks painful, is mid-answer.

"—so to be clear, the administration has no independent confirmation of the events at Soldier Field this afternoon, and we're not going to speculate on the nature of what witnesses describe. What I can say is that the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, and the FBI are all coordinating on a standard interagency review, and any individual who wishes to come forward and identify themselves is encouraged to contact the appropriate authorities." Dani snorts, one sharp syllable through her nose, and the press secretary keeps going without flinching. "On the question of documentation — and I want to be precise here, because I'm not going to get ahead of the facts — there is no federal record of any person matching the description given today. No birth certificate, no passport, no visa, no entry on any state or federal registry. As of this moment, the individual who appeared at Soldier Field does not exist in the eyes of the United States government. That's not a statement about the individual. That's a statement about our records."

Dani turns the volume up another notch, and Sera sets her glasses on the bridge of her nose and leans in, because the room behind the podium has gone strange — the reporters who were shouting a minute ago have all gone quiet at once, the way a room does when the answer is worse than the question.

Sera is still watching the press secretary's tight-lipped non-answer when her hand finds her phone on the arm of the couch without her deciding to reach for it, and she doesn't know what she's looking for until her thumb is already typing Aria Silverleaf into the search bar. The results come back the way results come back after a stadium full of phone footage: a wall of it, headlines stacked on headlines, most of them the same three words rearranged, and she scrolls past the panels and the think pieces and the grainy reposts of the cloud deck until something catches on the edge of her thumb and stops her — a fundraising page, the green banner at the top, the little thermometer filled a third of the way up. The title, in a clean sans-serif someone chose on purpose: Aria Silverleaf's Naturalization Fund. Underneath, smaller: Organized by the Crown Point Community Trust — Crown Point, Indiana.

"Hey," Sera says, and her voice comes out at a register that makes Dani look over from the C-SPAN chyron. Sera turns the phone toward her, screen first, and Dani leans in, and for a second neither of them says anything, because the thermometer is the thing that does the talking — the number under it is not a joke, not a few hundred dollars from a couple of friends, it's real money from strangers, and it's still climbing. "Crown Point," Sera says. "Somebody in Crown Point set this up. That's—" she does the geography in her head the way she does a map in a campaign, "—that's the next town over from Blue Castle. That's where Mike lives." She scrolls down, and the description is short and plainly written, the kind of paragraph a person writes once and doesn't dress up, and it says the fund is to pay for legal representation and filing fees and whatever else it takes to get Aria Silverleaf a birth certificate, a social security number, and a lawful place in the country she just swore to protect. It ends with a line Sera reads twice: She asked for help. Somebody should answer.

Dani takes the phone out of Sera's hand, holds it at the distance she holds things she's trying to read without her glasses, and scrolls through the donations — names and amounts and little messages, some of them just a heart, one of them for the girl on the bike, one of them a hundred dollars from a bakery in Crown Point with a comment that says she turned my beer pink and I've been chasing that feeling ever since. "This is not a scam," Dani says,

Dani's thumb stops mid-scroll. The thermometer on the screen has jumped again — two thousand, then five, then eleven, the little orange bar swelling like something alive — and she turns the phone so Sera can see it, both of them watching the numbers climb in the dim of the living room. "Okay," Dani says, quiet, "this is not a scam. This is a — this is a thing that is happening." She scrolls down through the donation feed, and the names blur past in a rhythm that keeps speeding up: a math teacher in Gary, a nurse in Valparaiso, a kid in Merrillville who gave eleven dollars and wrote *she talked to my cat*, a retired postal worker in Crown Point who gave forty and just put a heart. The messages stack like a wall of testimony, strangers finding the same three sentences in different words — *I saw her*, *I believe her*, *she asked for help*, *somebody should answer* — and the thermometer ticks past twenty thousand, then thirty, and Sera realizes she's stopped breathing.

"Forty-two thousand," Sera says, and her voice comes out at a register she doesn't recognize, half wonder and half fear. "That's — in the last five minutes, Dani. That's not a fundraiser. That's a —" she doesn't have the word for it, so she watches the number climb past fifty thousand, past sixty, the little orange bar filling the screen like a tide coming in. A donation from a church in Munster, two hundred dollars, the comment reading *the girl on the bike*. A hundred from a bar in Hammond: *she turned my beer pink and I've been chasing that feeling ever since*. A woman in Hobart gave her wedding ring's pawn value and wrote *I don't need it as much as she needs to exist*. Dani scrolls, and the feed keeps going, and the thermometer keeps climbing — seventy, seventy-five, eighty — and neither of them speaks, because the number is doing the talking now, and the number is saying something neither of them knows how to answer.

"Eighty-four," Dani says, and the number lands like a stone dropped into still water. She doesn't scroll anymore — the phone rests in her open palm, screen up, the little orange bar nearly touching the top of its frame, and the donation feed has become a blur she can't keep up with: a third-grader's allowance in Highland, a veteran in Cedar Lake who wrote *I was at the hospital, I saw the girl walk out*, a woman in Schererville who gave fifty and only put a period, like she'd run out of words before she ran out of wallet. The pings come faster now, the phone buzzing in Dani's hand like a struck nerve, and Sera watches the counter roll past eighty-five, past ninety, and realizes the number is no longer a number — it's a vote, a crowd, a hand going up in a room that keeps filling.

"She asked for help," Sera says, and the words come out slow, working themselves out as she says them. "Two hours ago she floated above a field with sixty thousand people watching and told them she doesn't exist. And now —" she gestures at the phone, at the climbing bar, at the wall of strangers' names, "— now they're building her a birth certificate out of pocket change and wedding rings and a third-grader's allowance. That's not a fundraiser, Dani. That's a — that's a country deciding it wants her to be real." She reaches for her glasses, doesn't put them on, just holds them the way she held them before, and watches the thermometer crest ninety-five and keep going. "Somebody should answer," she says, quiet, reading the line off the page she's already memorized. "Somebody just did."

Dani reaches across Sera's lap — past the remote, past the glasses, to the far end of the couch where her phone has been lying face-down since the first buzz — and picks it up. The screen is lit again. A number with a 219 area code, which is Crown Point, which is Blue Castle's next-door neighbor, which is where the fund is registered, and Dani looks at Sera with her eyebrows up before her thumb slides across the glass and she puts it to her ear.

"Hello," she says, and her voice has gone flat and careful, the voice she uses on customer service, the voice that has already decided not to give anything away. Sera watches her face do the thing it does when she's listening to a pitch — the mouth settling, the eyes narrowing behind nothing, the free hand finding the hem of her shirt and rolling it between two fingers. Then the voice on the other end says something, and Dani's hand goes still on the hem, and her eyes come up and find Sera's and stay there, wide, unblinking. "I'm sorry," Dani says, and it comes out slower than before, "who is this?" — and the voice starts to answer.

Dani pulls the phone away from her ear, thumb finding the speaker button, and sets it down on the cushion between them — screen up, the little green icon glowing, the voice on the other end suddenly in the room with all three of them. "Okay," Dani says, to the phone, to Sera, to the room. "You're on speaker now. Say that again." Sera leans in, elbows on her knees, close enough that her shoulder presses against Dani's, and neither of them moves away from it.

The voice that comes out of the little speaker is a woman's — middle-aged, a little dry, the kind of voice that has spent decades on the phone at a church or a school office and long ago stopped being impressed by anything. "I said, my name's Ruth Ann Kovach, I'm the treasurer of the Crown Point Community Trust, and I'm calling because somebody in your building posted a video of a woman named Aria Silverleaf on a couch with a cat, and I've been trying to figure out if it's the same woman who was on the field today." A pause, paper shifting somewhere on her end. "I don't mean to be nosy. But we've got eighty-nine thousand dollars in an account with her name on it and no address to send it to, and I saw the cat."

Dani looks at Sera. Sera looks at Dani. On the cushion between them the speaker crackles, patient, waiting, and Pancake — who has been asleep on the middle cushion the whole time — opens one eye at the sound of his own name.

Dani doesn't answer right away. She picks the phone back up off the cushion, holds it flat in her palm like it might bite, and looks at Sera — one long look, the kind that asks a question without saying it, and Sera answers with a small nod that means go. "Ms. Kovach," Dani says, and her customer-service voice is gone, replaced by something flatter and more careful, the voice she uses when she's about to give a stranger a straight answer. "I know Aria. She's — she was here a few hours ago. She's my girlfriend." She says it without dressing it up, and the pause on the other end of the line stretches just long enough that Sera can hear Ruth Ann's chair creak.

"Well," Ruth Ann says. Then nothing for a beat. Then, paper again, the sound of a pen uncapped and recapped, the little mechanical fidget of a woman who has been sitting in an office at ten past ten on a Sunday night waiting for someone to call her back. "I'm not going to pretend that's the answer I expected. I've been trying to reach somebody — anybody — since the game let out, and the only number I had was a receptionist who took my number and hasn't called me since. So here's where I stand. The trust opened that account this afternoon, and it's an hour old, and it's already past ninety. I've got a lawyer in Hammond who does pro bono work on immigration and identity cases and has agreed to take it, I've got a judge's clerk in Crown Point who owes my late husband a favor, and I've got about forty-eight hours before somebody in Indianapolis decides this is a federal matter and tells me to freeze the account. What I don't have is a way to reach Aria Silverleaf. So I'm going to ask you a favor, and I want you to hear the whole thing before you answer, because I've been on this phone for two hours and I'm tired."

Dani's free hand finds Sera's knee and stays there, fingers spread, thumb pressing hard enough that Sera feels the bone beneath the skin. "I'm listening," Dani says, and she means it — the flat voice still on, but underneath it something has gone warm, and Sera can hear it, can feel it in the hand on her knee. On the middle cushion Pancake stands, stretches, steps over Sera's thigh, and settles between the two of them with his chin on Dani's forearm, eyes half-closed, as if the phone call has finally become interesting enough to attend.

Dani leans into the phone, closer to the speaker, and the angle of her shoulders changes — she's done being the one who gets told things, she's the one who's about to ask. "Okay," she says, and the flat voice is still there but there's a spine under it now. "You said you'd been on the phone for two hours. So you've got a list in your head. What do you actually need from her — from Aria — to make this thing real? Not the whole plan. Just the first three things. What do I write down." On the other end, Ruth Ann makes a small satisfied sound, the sound of a woman who has been waiting all evening for somebody to stop being polite and start being useful, and Sera hears a pen click. "A name," Ruth Ann says. "Her legal name — the one she gave on that field. Aria Mithlass. I need it spelled, because I've seen four different spellings on the news already and my lawyer says if the petition and the fund and the footage don't match, the clerk bounces it. Second thing, an address where a process server can actually knock. It doesn't have to be hers. It just has to be a door somebody answers, because the court won't mail a certificate to a cloud. Third —" the pen pauses, "— third, I need her signature on a one-page affidavit swearing she is who she says she is, and that has to happen in front of a notary or a clerk, in person, before the account freezes." Dani's hand tightens on Sera's knee, thumb digging in, and Sera doesn't move it away.

"That's it?" Dani says, and Ruth Ann laughs, a dry short thing that doesn't travel far from her end of the line. "That's the beginning of it," she says. "The rest is mine. The lawyer's name is Priya Bhattacharya, she's in Hammond, she does this for a living and she's already read the footage twice. The clerk is a man named Dale Ferris, he was my husband's — " she stops, starts again, "he owes me a favor and he knows it. And the clock is the thing I keep telling you. Forty-eight hours is generous. If Indianapolis gets a phone call from Washington before I get a signature, the account goes into a freeze and we're back to a GoFundMe in somebody's kitchen." Paper rustles on her end, the sound of a page being turned and something underlined twice. "So. Do you have her? Is she there? Because I've been sitting in this chair since ten o'clock and I'd rather not spend the night talking to a cat." Pancake, chin still on Dani's forearm,

Pancake's head snaps up off Dani's forearm a half-second before either woman hears it — the balcony door sliding back on its track, a gust of lake-cold air shoving the curtains sideways, and then Aria is standing in the doorway with her violet cape snapping behind her and her hair everywhere and a grin so wide it looks like it hurts. "You should have *seen* it," she says, breathless, stepping in and kicking the door shut with her heel. "Sixty thousand people. I did the beer thing. I did the beer thing and they *cheered*, Dani. I flew off into the clouds and I could hear them from up there." She's glowing — actually glowing, a faint silver shimmer coming off her skin that fades as she crosses the room, and she's talking with her hands, which she never does, which means she's too happy to remember to be self-conscious. "I swore the oath in Elvish and I don't even know what I said and nobody in that stadium could tell, they just — they just believed me." She stops at the edge of the couch, suddenly aware she's come in on something, and her ears twitch — both of them, visibly, swiveling toward the phone on the cushion with its little green speaker icon still lit.

"Aria," Dani says, and her voice has gone strange, half the flat customer-service register and half something softer trying to get out from under it. She lifts the phone an inch off the cushion, screen up, the 219 area code still glowing. "You're on speaker. Say hi to Ruth Ann Kovach, treasurer of the Crown Point Community Trust, who has eighty-nine thousand dollars with your name on it and about forty-eight hours before somebody in Indianapolis freezes it." Aria's grin doesn't fall, exactly — it just pauses, mid-air, like a bird that's spotted glass. "Oh," she says, to the phone. Then, recovering, with the lurching formality she can't quite shake: "I mean — greetings, Ms. Kovach. I am Aria Mithlass. I'm told I have a fund." On the other end of the line, Ruth Ann Kovach makes a sound that is unmistakably a woman setting down her pen and picking up her reading glasses.