Sammi & Eriko - EJG (long) Epilogue

 

Oh absolutely yes—back to the causeway. Back to the little apartment where the river wind always smells faintly of wet stone, incense drift, and somebody else’s dinner. Eriko and Sammi had fallen into that delicious post-drama rhythm: not peace exactly, but focus. Eriko sat cross-legged on a low cushion by the window with three books open like a tripod—one on late Byzantine statecraft, one on frontier polities, and one that was technically a pamphlet but had the attitude of a manifesto. She’d been staring at a line so hard it was starting to feel stared back at. Sammi, on the other hand, was in her softest shirt with her knees pulled up, reading an Eclair volume like it was a sacred text. Every so often she made a tiny noise—half delighted, half scandalized—then looked up and smiled at Eriko like: See? Humanity can be saved. It’s right here. “You’re doing it again,” Sammi said. “Doing what?” “That face.” Sammi held up her book as if it were evidence in court. “The one where you’re about to argue with a dead emperor.” Eriko didn’t blink. “He started it.” Sammi leaned over to squint at the page. “Okay. Sell it to me. What’s the thesis?” Eriko tapped the margin once, precise. “Was the Empire of Nicaea—by necessity, by continuity, by administrative habit—the seed crystal of the Ottoman state? Or is that an illusion produced by geography and our desire for tidy genealogies?” Sammi made a little circle in the air with her hand. “Mmm. You’re in your ‘continuities are seductive lies’ era.” Eriko allowed herself a rare micro-smile. “Continuities are often clerical lies.” Sammi laughed, and for a moment their apartment felt bright enough to be its own small republic. Meanwhile, down on the stones of the Su Causeway, Brother Wei was making history the way certain kinds of men do: through ledgers, leverage, and a calm face that could be mistaken for holiness. He had watched Xiangyun transform—not into a saint exactly, but into something the city could not stop talking about. The engineer had become a holy fool in the old sense: a public puzzle with an inward gravity. She walked the causeway as if it were a nave. She paused beneath lanterns like they were icons. She spoke too plainly for polite company and too reverently for the cynical. Song Hangzhou loved her for it. Feared her a little. And in the logic of cities, what cannot be dismissed must be housed. So Brother Wei went to the Thearch. Some said the Thearch was his younger brother. Some said that was slander. Brother Wei neither confirmed nor denied; he simply arrived with a bow that was both humble and irritatingly confident, and with documents that smelled faintly of sealing wax and inevitability. He did not ask for a temple. Temples were expensive and political. He asked for a shrine. “A small chapel,” he said gently, “like Saint Thomas above old London Bridge. A spiritual lantern over a river of commerce. The causeway already functions as a spine; let us give it a heart.” The Thearch, whose palace contained entire rooms devoted to saying “no” elegantly, stared a long time at the proposed budget. Brother Wei’s genius was that he did not flinch. “You want wine,” the Thearch said at last, voice dry. “For a bodhisattva who vows against intoxication.” “Not for the bodhisattva,” Brother Wei replied, serene as stone. “For the donors.” The Thearch made a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been sharpened into strategy. “And an annual stipend?” “A small one,” Brother Wei said, and slid the parchment forward as if it were a bowl being offered. “So the shrine never becomes desperate.” The Thearch looked at him, eyes narrowing—measuring the hidden costs, the hidden benefits, and the hidden stories a funded shrine could tell about the ruler who funded it. “A clerk,” the Thearch said. “Two,” Brother Wei corrected, softly. “A spiritual clerk for the scrolls, prayers, and offerings—so the shrine remains pure in its purpose. And a secular clerk for accounts—so the shrine remains pure in its reputation.” Thearch’s mouth twitched. “You are either holy or unbelievably practical.” “In a city like this,” Brother Wei said, “those are the same vocation.” In the end, the Thearch did what powerful men do when they cannot win a debate: he turned it into patronage. He agreed. And when Brother Wei bowed his thanks, the palace courtiers traded looks that said: Ah. He has a career at last. And the Thearch—who may or may not have been his younger brother—watched him go with an expression that said: He has a career at last… and so do I, because now his success is also mine. Within weeks, the causeway throbbed with carpentry. Pilings went in like punctuation marks. Beams rose. A narrow stairwell was framed, snug and vertical, like the beginning of a story. Brother Wei took to the construction site as if it were a monastery and a dockyard both. He wore robes that managed to look both humble and alarmingly organized. He accepted deliveries with the gravity of receiving relics. Food, wine, candles, robes, wood chips. The wood chips, notably, became a minor civic scandal. “What are the wood chips for?” a merchant demanded, nosy with the confidence of a man who had paid taxes once and never forgiven the world. Brother Wei answered without missing a beat. “For cleanliness. For winter traction. For the humility of remembering that even grand projects begin as shavings.” The merchant blinked, unsure whether he’d been instructed or insulted. Brother Wei smiled like a door closing gently. And the staffing—oh, the staffing became its own quiet ballet: A spiritual clerk, who kept the scrolls dry and the ritual calendar exact, and who wrote prayer slips with handwriting so beautiful people began commissioning them for weddings. A secular clerk, who could look at a donor’s smile and translate it into numbers. Young Wu, brother of Old Wu, as cook—wide-eyed, proud, and deeply stressed by the idea of feeding holiness on schedule. A laundress/charwoman, who treated incense ash as a personal enemy and declared war on dust like it was a demon. A housekeeper/porter/butler, who could carry a crate of candles with one arm while shooing away curious tourists with the other. Brother Wei, of course, sat in the center of this like the hub of a wheel—quiet, turning everything. And Xiangyun? Xiangyun began to linger at the edge of the site, watching. Not interfering. Not directing. Just… present, as if the shrine were being built around her gaze. People noticed that too. They began to say, fondly and nervously, that the causeway had acquired a new kind of weather: Xiangyun’s attention. That evening, back in the apartment, Sammi read the day’s gossip aloud like it was serialized fiction. “‘A chapel is rising above the water,’” she quoted, doing a dramatic voice. “‘Dedicated to Jizo-Eriko, avatar of Guanyin.’” Eriko’s head lifted so fast you could practically hear the page-turn of destiny. “…Dedicated to what.” Sammi’s grin was wickedly affectionate. “Baby. Congratulations. You’ve been canonized by municipal infrastructure.” Eriko stared at her books as if one of them had betrayed her personally. “I did not consent to becoming a bridge-saint.” Sammi scooted closer and kissed Eriko’s cheek—soft, quick, grounding. “You don’t have to ‘consent’ to symbolism. Symbolism consents to you.” Eriko exhaled, half laugh, half dread. “Brother Wei has built a shrine to me.” Sammi’s eyes gleamed. “Not to you.” Eriko looked at her. Sammi lowered her voice into something gentler. “To what you mean on that causeway. To the way you make people feel like they can be held without being owned.” Eriko went quiet then, because Sammi had a way of saying something simple that landed like a bell. Outside, the river moved under moonlight like silk being pulled through rings. And somewhere down the causeway, Brother Wei’s ledgers clicked shut for the night—another day of building a future that looked, from a distance, suspiciously like a miracle. The shrine opened the way new things open in Song Hangzhou: not with a single “grand unveiling,” but with a rumor that became a crowd. For three mornings in a row the causeway smelled like fresh-cut wood and hot wax. The carpenters’ mallets had gone quiet, replaced by softer sounds: cloth shifting, sandals on stone, the subtle clink of coins touching a donation bowl as if the donors were trying not to wake something sleeping. On the fourth morning, Brother Wei declared it “ready enough to be real.” And that was, for him, the highest form of readiness. The first ceremony The shrine sat above the river like a lantern someone had decided to anchor. It wasn’t huge—more a chapel than a temple—narrow and upright, with a steep little stairwell that made you feel you were climbing into a different kind of air. The causeway below kept being itself (fishmongers, poets, flirtations, deliveries) but the shrine’s door created a seam in the world. At dawn, the spiritual clerk unrolled the first scroll with hands that didn’t tremble, because trembling would have been disrespectful to both the text and the audience. The secular clerk stood off to the side with a ledger that looked innocent until you realized it was the spine of the entire project. Young Wu—poor, brave Young Wu—had produced a tray of buns that were meant to be “symbolic” but were, in practice, “comforting,” and thus far more effective. The charwoman had already made the entryway so clean it looked like it had never known feet. The porter/butler stood at the stair like a polite gate, guiding people up in a slow, steady ribbon. Brother Wei wore robes the color of river fog. He placed candles with the intimacy of someone arranging a family’s hair before a portrait. He sprinkled wood chips at the threshold—not superstition, he claimed, but traction and humility. “The shrine must never become slippery,” he murmured to no one in particular. “Not in winter, not in ethics.” Below the lintel, in the main chamber, the statue was unveiled: Jizo-Eriko—not a literal likeness, not a portrait, but a presence sculpted with deliberate ambiguity. The face was calm enough to make you feel seen, and the hands were positioned like they were holding something that wasn’t there—space, grief, a vow. And then the real miracle: the crowd didn’t laugh. They hushed. People who came to gawk found themselves offering silence by accident. Brother Wei’s voice, when he began, did not sound like a performance. It sounded like a man reading out the terms of a promise that the city had already signed without noticing. “On this causeway,” he said, “we live between waters—between what passes and what remains. We build, we sell, we quarrel, we forgive. Some of us are wounded in ways that don’t show. Some of us are brilliant in ways that confuse even ourselves.” A ripple went through the crowd—because everyone knew who he meant. Xiangyun stood at the base of the stairs, half in the morning shadow, half in the lamp-glow leaking down. She did not ascend. She did not kneel. She simply watched as if watching were a form of prayer she didn’t quite trust. Brother Wei continued. “Today, we give this causeway a lantern. Not to replace anyone’s path—only to light it.” The spiritual clerk rang a small bell. The sound was clean, almost shocking in the open air, like a drop of water falling into a metal bowl. People began offering things: coins, ribbons, little written wishes folded into squares. A mother pressed her child’s name into the donation bowl like she was hiding it somewhere safe. A merchant who usually argued about tax rates offered a candle and then looked embarrassed by his own sincerity. And then—inevitable as tide—someone called out from the crowd: “Does the bodhisattva bless lovers?” A laugh, but not cruel. Curious. Hopeful. Brother Wei didn’t smile, but his eyes softened. “Jizo walks with the lost,” he said. “If love makes you lost, then yes.” That did it. People loved a holy answer that sounded like it had met real life. More offerings. More murmurs. More stories. And at last, the thing that made it official: the secular clerk opened the ledger and began recording donations in a voice loud enough for the crowd to hear. Not because money mattered most—but because in Song Hangzhou, public accounting was the line between devotion and scam. Brother Wei understood the city the way a bridge understands a river: by accepting pressure and standing anyway. The visit Eriko and Sammi tried very hard not to go. Which meant, of course, they went. They approached at late afternoon, when the crowd had thinned to a steady trickle and the shrine looked less like an event and more like an organ—something newly installed that the city was still learning to breathe with. Sammi had that bright, conspiratorial energy of someone attending a party where she knows the host but the host doesn’t know she’s coming. Eriko walked with the contained dread of a philosopher about to meet her own metaphor. “I am not going in,” Eriko said. Sammi nodded gravely. “Of course not.” They went in. The stairwell smelled of wood and candle smoke and—faintly—food from the cook’s side door. Each step creaked like it was reminding them: You are inside a story now. At the top, the porter/butler gave a bow that was so well-trained it made Sammi immediately suspicious. “Welcome,” he said. “Are you—” “No,” Eriko said too fast, and then sighed, because she could hear herself. “Yes. I mean—” Sammi slid her hand into Eriko’s like it was the most normal thing in the world. “We’re just… visitors.” The porter’s eyes flicked to Eriko’s face, and something like recognition sparked and then politely extinguished itself. He stepped aside without comment, which was somehow worse than fanfare. Inside, the shrine was quieter than the world outside by a full octave. The light was warm and contained. A few people knelt in the corner. Someone had left a little paper crane. Someone else had left what looked like a spare button—an offering from a life that couldn’t afford jewels. Eriko saw the statue and stopped. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t not her either. It was what happens when a city takes a person and turns them into a symbol that can be carried by strangers. Sammi, surprisingly, didn’t make a joke. She just leaned into Eriko’s shoulder, gentle. Eriko whispered, “He’s built a narrative machine.” “Mhm,” Sammi whispered back. “And you’re the engine.” That should have made Eriko angry. Instead, it made her quiet, because she suddenly understood Brother Wei’s true genius: he wasn’t worshipping her. He was placing her in public—making it impossible for the causeway to pretend it didn’t already revolve around her gravity. A soft voice drifted from behind them. “You came.” Xiangyun stood in the doorway, not fully inside, as if the threshold had rules she was still negotiating. She looked exhausted and luminous in that “holy fool” way—like someone who’d been turned into a story against her will and was still learning how to inhabit it without disappearing. Sammi recovered first, because Sammi always recovered first. She gave Xiangyun a small smile that was careful, not teasing. “We wanted to see what Brother Wei did,” Sammi said. “It’s… a lot.” Xiangyun’s gaze went straight to the statue, then back to Eriko, as if comparing the two for alignment. Her voice softened. “It’s not you,” Xiangyun said, almost pleading. “But it is the way you look at the world. Like you’re holding something heavy for other people.” Eriko’s throat tightened at a place she did not like to admit existed. “Xiangyun,” she said carefully, “you don’t owe me—” “I know,” Xiangyun cut in, quick, almost panicked—then steadied herself. “I know. That’s why it’s confusing.” A pause. Then, unexpectedly, a laugh from the side—Brother Wei, emerging from behind a hanging curtain as if he’d been waiting for exactly this. He bowed to Sammi, bowed to Eriko, and then—impossibly—bowed to Xiangyun as well, as if Xiangyun were also a dignitary of this shrine. “You see?” Brother Wei said, softly triumphant. “The shrine is doing its job already. It has brought the living into the same room without them clawing each other’s eyes out.” Sammi narrowed her eyes. “Did you plan this?” Brother Wei’s smile was mild enough to be insulting. “I planned possibility. The rest is mercy.” Eriko stared at him. “You’ve turned the causeway into a liturgy.” Brother Wei spread his hands. “No. The causeway was already a liturgy. I merely added a refrain.” Then he stepped closer, lowering his voice so it felt like a confidence shared rather than a declaration. “Also,” he added, “there is the small matter of power.” Eriko’s eyes sharpened. “Of course there is.” Brother Wei nodded toward the window where the causeway stretched, busy as ever—boats sliding, people crossing, the city breathing. “The Thearch’s stipend is not charity,” he said. “It is a leash. If the shrine becomes beloved, it becomes a lever. If it becomes a lever, it becomes… contested.” Sammi’s grip tightened around Eriko’s fingers, a quiet signal: We’re in it now. Brother Wei continued, gentle as a knife. “And you, Eriko, have become something the city can rally around. Which means—whether you want it or not—you are now a place where politics will attempt to kneel.” Silence fell heavy. Even Xiangyun looked unsettled by that phrasing. Eriko exhaled slowly. Sammi, ever the counterweight, lifted her chin. “So what do we do?” Brother Wei’s eyes softened in a way that almost made him look human. “We make the shrine mean what it should mean,” he said. “Before someone else decides for us.” And then—because the universe enjoys timing—one of the kneeling visitors rose, approached the statue, and set down a folded slip of paper. Eriko caught a glimpse of the writing as it landed. It wasn’t a prayer for money. It wasn’t a prayer for revenge. It said, simply: Help me stop being afraid of the love I already have. Sammi saw it too. Her expression went tender and fierce at once, like a blade wrapped in velvet. She looked at Eriko and then—wordlessly—looked at Xiangyun. Xiangyun’s eyes glistened, not quite tears, but something close: the body admitting it’s been moved. Brother Wei watched all three of them like a man watching the first candle successfully catch. The shrine had opened. Now it wanted a story. If you’re game, next we can do: (1) the first “crisis” that tests the shrine’s meaning (a scandal, a fire, a political demand, a jealous patron), and (2) how Sammi and Eriko decide what the shrine’s actual vow will be—what it will protect, and what it will refuse. That night the shrine didn’t feel like a charming oddity anymore. It felt like a claim. The causeway was slick with river mist, lanterns wobbling in the wind like they were trying to make up their minds. Inside the shrine the candles held steady—warm, deliberate—while outside the city kept doing what it does best: turning meaning into leverage. Brother Wei was midway through evening prayers when the porter/butler appeared at the curtain, face tightened into that special expression of someone trying to be professional while sensing incoming disaster. “Brother Wei,” he murmured, “we have… guests.” “Devotees?” Brother Wei asked, serene. The porter swallowed. “Not exactly.” Crisis One: The Patron Who Wants a Claim Three men entered as if they owned the air. Their clothes were expensive in the subtle way—the kind that never admits it’s trying. Behind them came a woman with a careful smile and a seal-case tucked under her sleeve like a knife. “Reverend,” the woman said, voice honeyed with paperwork. “A blessing on this fine civic improvement.” Brother Wei bowed. “May your heart be light.” One of the men smiled like a lid closing. “We represent the Salt & Bridge Guild. And our patron.” The woman set a document on the offering table—right beside the candle rack, which was either an accident or an insult. “We’re delighted,” she said, “to offer additional funds. For expansion. For permanence. For prestige.” Brother Wei’s eyes flicked once to the secular clerk, who already had his quill poised like a duelist. “And,” the woman continued, “for a modest governance arrangement. A plaque, naturally. And an annual commemorative rite dedicated to our patron’s family line—” Eriko and Sammi were not there yet. This was still the shrine’s private hour, its soft breathing time. But the shrine had become a rumor, and rumors move faster than girlfriends. Brother Wei did not touch the document. He asked, mildly, “Your patron is devout?” The woman’s smile didn’t change, which was itself an answer. “He is civic-minded,” she said, as if that were the same thing. The man behind her leaned closer. “We’re told the… bodhisattva associated with this place is a great comfort to women.” Brother Wei’s gaze stayed gentle. “Bodhisattvas comfort whoever suffers.” “Mm,” the man said, and the sound landed like a coin on a table. “Then it will comfort our patron as well. He has suffered… public misunderstanding. It would be meaningful to him to be publicly associated with this shrine. It might even correct certain narratives.” Brother Wei understood immediately: they wanted the shrine to launder a reputation. They wanted holiness as a solvent. His expression remained calm, but his voice cooled by a degree. “This shrine is dedicated to Jizo, avatar of Guanyin,” he said. “Yes,” the woman replied briskly. “And our patron would like to ensure that dedication remains… properly interpreted.” The words were polite. The intention was not. Before Brother Wei could answer, the curtain moved again. Sammi stepped in first, cheeks flushed from climbing, eyes bright with that dangerous friendliness that could turn into a knife with no warning. Eriko followed—quiet, severe, with the kind of stillness that made people talk softer without understanding why. Xiangyun was behind them, hovering at the threshold like a question she wasn’t sure she had the right to ask. The Salt & Bridge Guild men looked annoyed—because they had come expecting clergy and ledgers, not witnesses. “Hi,” Sammi said cheerfully, the word almost offensive in the room’s tension. “Wow, this is… a vibe.” Eriko didn’t greet anyone. She looked at the document, then at Brother Wei, then at the woman with the seal-case. “What is this?” Eriko asked. The woman’s smile tightened. “A benefaction.” “A purchase,” Eriko corrected. One of the men chuckled. “Now, now. Let’s be practical. Shrines require upkeep. We are offering—” Eriko cut him off without raising her voice. “You are offering ownership. You are offering narrative control. You are offering to make this place serve your patron’s needs.” Sammi tilted her head, still smiling, and somehow it made the air sharper. “Is your patron the one who’s been accused of… how do I put this politely… treating women like props?” The man’s face darkened. “Careful.” Sammi kept the smile. “Oh, I’m being so careful.” Brother Wei chose that moment to speak, tone mild but unmovable. “This shrine cannot be bought,” he said. The woman’s seal-case shifted in her sleeve. “Everything can be bought. The question is price.” Eriko stepped forward, closer to the statue, and for a heartbeat the room felt like it tilted toward her. “No,” Eriko said, and it wasn’t an argument. It was a boundary. “Not everything.” The guild man exhaled sharply. “Do you even have authority here?” Brother Wei smiled, faintly. “Authority is a story people agree to believe.” Sammi’s eyes glinted. “And this one’s getting popular.” The woman’s voice sweetened, becoming more dangerous. “We can make it unpopular just as quickly. Permits. Inspections. Safety concerns. A shrine over a river is… precarious.” There it was: the threat dressed as bureaucracy. Xiangyun flinched, like she’d been struck. Not by fear for the shrine, exactly—by recognition. This was the language of systems. The language she’d lived inside as an engineer: We can make your world fail politely. Eriko looked at Xiangyun then, as if feeling her presence more than seeing her. And then Eriko did something that surprised even Sammi: She bowed—not to the guild, not to the threat, but to the statue. A gesture small enough to be missed, but it changed the room’s grammar. “I will not let you turn this into cover,” Eriko said softly. “For anyone.” Sammi slipped her hand into Eriko’s again, and then addressed the woman with seal-case like she was giving directions to a lost tourist. “You can take your contract,” Sammi said, “and you can go. Before you embarrass yourself.” The woman’s smile broke for the first time. “Who are you to—” Sammi’s voice got quiet, and in that quiet was something ancient and feral and bright. “I’m the girl who reads stories,” she said. “I can tell when someone is trying to rewrite one.” Brother Wei turned to his secular clerk. “Mark them,” he said gently. “As offering attempted and refused.” The quill scratched. The woman stared at the ledger as if it were a curse. The men backed up, stiff with rage. “Enjoy your precarious little chapel,” one of them spat. “We’ll see how long it stays standing.” They left. And the shrine remained standing. But now everyone knew it could be pushed. Crisis Two: The Night of Smoke Two nights later, the push came in a different form. Not paperwork. Smoke. Young Wu was the one who smelled it first. He woke like a startled animal, heart pounding, and ran barefoot down the corridor. The charwoman was already up—she slept lightly, as if dust might attack at any moment. When they flung open the outer door, the wind slapped smoke into their faces. A cluster of candles at the lower stairwell had been knocked over. A little ribbon offering had caught. Not a roaring fire—yet. But enough. Enough to become a story. “Water!” Young Wu yelled, voice cracking. The porter/butler was already hauling a bucket, and the secular clerk—normally a creature of ink—was throwing water with both hands like he wanted to drown the whole universe. Brother Wei arrived with his robe half on, eyes clear, and for a terrifying second he just stood there, taking in the scene with the stillness of someone reading an omen. Then he moved. Calmly. Efficiently. “Sand,” he ordered. “Not just water. Smother it.” The charwoman tore open a sack of wood chips—yes, those infamous wood chips—and dumped them with savage satisfaction. The chips caught the wax, soaked the flame, turned threat into damp, ugly mulch. It was over in minutes. But the causeway had already noticed. People gathered. Whispers swelled. “Arson.” “Accident.” “Guild retaliation.” “Xiangyun did it—she’s cursed—” That last one spread like rot, because some people love explanations that let them be cruel without feeling responsible. Xiangyun arrived breathless, hair messy, eyes wide, seeing the soot and immediately blaming herself the way holy fools do: by assuming the world’s ugliness must be their fault. Sammi got to her first. “Hey,” Sammi said, gentle but firm, and took Xiangyun’s wrists like anchoring her. “No. Don’t you dare.” Xiangyun’s voice shook. “They’ll say—” “They’ll say anything,” Sammi replied. “That’s their hobby. Yours is building things.” Eriko stood in the doorway, staring at the blackened patch of stair wood. Her face was unreadable, but her hands were clenched. Brother Wei watched the crowd gathering and understood: the shrine was now at its first real fork. If they responded like a private religious club, they’d get crushed. If they responded like a political faction, they’d get owned. They needed a third thing. They needed a vow. The Vow of the Shrine At dawn, Brother Wei rang the bell. Not the gentle bell used for prayer, but the louder one used for assembly—the sound that said: this concerns the whole causeway. People came half-dressed, curious, hungry for explanation. Merchants, laundresses, boatmen, scholars, lovers. Some came because they loved the shrine. Some came because they wanted to see it fail. Brother Wei stood at the threshold with soot on his sleeve like a stain the world had left on him. Behind him stood the staff, forming a small human wall: the spiritual clerk with a scroll the secular clerk with the ledger Young Wu with a bandaged hand the charwoman with ash on her cheek like war paint the porter/butler, posture perfect, jaw tight And beside them— Eriko and Sammi. And Xiangyun, trembling but present. Brother Wei raised his hand, and the crowd quieted. “We had a fire,” he said simply. “Small. Contained. A warning, perhaps.” Murmurs. A few sharp laughs. Brother Wei continued, voice steady. “Some will say it was an accident. Some will say it was an attack. Some will say it was a sign from heaven.” He glanced at the river. “Heaven is not as chatty as gossipers.” A nervous ripple of laughter. It helped. It always helped to mock the right thing. Then Eriko stepped forward. Not into the crowd, not above them—at level, as if refusing hierarchy by posture alone. “This shrine,” Eriko said, “will not be a tool.” The words were quiet, but they carried. “It will not be bought,” she continued. “It will not be used to cleanse reputations. It will not be used to punish women who are convenient scapegoats. It will not become a stage for men who think holiness is another kind of property.” A few people cheered. A few looked offended. Good. Sammi took a half-step forward too, eyes bright, voice warm in the way that made you feel included even while being warned. “And it won’t be a place where people get bullied into being ‘pure,’ either,” Sammi added. “This is a shrine on a bridge. People come here messy. People come here tired. People come here in love with the wrong person at the wrong time. People come here afraid.” She smiled at the crowd, and it was tender. “Good,” she said. “Come anyway.” The spiritual clerk unrolled the scroll. Brother Wei spoke the vow, line by line, and the clerk echoed it in a rhythm that made it feel older than the wood: “We keep a lantern for the lost.” “We shelter those made small by power.” “We refuse coins that demand a story.” “We keep the ledger open.” “We do not sell blessing.” “We do not traffic in shame.” “We will not name a scapegoat to soothe a crowd.” “We will not burn for anyone’s convenience.” Then—because Brother Wei understood symbolism the way engineers understand load-bearing beams—he nodded to the secular clerk. The ledger was lifted. Open. Public. And Brother Wei said, gently, “If you donate, you donate without conditions. If you cannot, you are still welcome. If you threaten us through permits or inspections, then do it in daylight where all can see.” The crowd went very quiet. Because that was a challenge to power in the only language power respected: visibility. Xiangyun, who had been shaking like a leaf, suddenly stepped forward. Her voice wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud—it was honest. “If this shrine falls,” she said, “I will help rebuild it. Not because I’m holy. Because I’m tired of watching strong people pretend they can’t be kind.” A pause. Someone in the crowd—an older woman with a market basket—raised her candle. Then another. Then another. A dozen flames lifted into the morning like a field of tiny, stubborn stars. And just like that, the shrine gained the thing no stipend could buy: a public. When the crowd finally dispersed, Sammi leaned against the doorframe, suddenly exhausted. Eriko touched the soot-blackened wood with her fingertips, as if reading it. Brother Wei exhaled. “Well,” Sammi said, voice shaky with adrenaline, “that was… a lot for breakfast.” Brother Wei gave her a small smile. “Power always wants to eat first.” Eriko turned to him, eyes sharp. “So what now?” Brother Wei’s gaze drifted down the causeway, where the city was already digesting the vow, deciding what it could get away with next. “Now,” he said softly, “we see who tries again. And in what form.” Sammi’s hand found Eriko’s. Xiangyun hovered near the threshold, looking at the statue like it was both comfort and responsibility. And the shrine—new, imperfect, contested—felt suddenly real in a way wood and candles alone could never accomplish.  After a morning like that, if they don’t go home and fall apart a little—what’s even the point of having an apartment with good light and a door that locks? They left the shrine the way you leave a storm cellar after the tornado passes: not running, not celebrating—just breathing like you’ve remembered what air is. The causeway below was already back to its everyday theater. Vendors calling. Boats thumping softly against moorings. People pretending they hadn’t just watched a vow get hammered into public space like a nail. Sammi kept hold of Eriko’s hand the whole way. Not performatively. Not to “prove” anything. Just… because she could feel Eriko’s pulse doing that controlled-fast thing it did when Eriko was trying very hard to be unshaken. Eriko didn’t speak until they were inside their apartment and the door clicked shut. That click was a small miracle. Sammi leaned back against the door for a second, eyes closed, like she needed the wood to tell her she was held. Eriko stood near the window, still in her shrine-body, which was different from home-body. At the shrine she had become all edges and vows and clarity. Here, in the apartment’s softer light, the edge wanted to turn into something else. Sammi exhaled, a long slow breath. “Well,” she said, voice dry. “Congratulations again. You’re now an infrastructure problem.” Eriko’s mouth twitched. “Don’t.” Sammi opened one eye. “Don’t… joke? Or don’t… say the truth?” Eriko turned, and Sammi’s joke died politely, because Eriko’s eyes were too bright—like glass that had been washed. “I didn’t ask for any of that,” Eriko said. “I know,” Sammi replied immediately, gentle as putting a blanket on someone. “You didn’t.” Eriko’s hand lifted, then dropped, like she’d almost reached for Sammi and decided not to burden her. Sammi crossed the room in two steps and took Eriko’s wrist—firm, affectionate. “Hey,” Sammi said. “Don’t do that thing where you carry it alone because you’re ‘being responsible.’ I’m literally your girlfriend. I’m on the team.” Eriko swallowed. It was small, but Sammi could always tell: Eriko was right at the ledge where she either stayed composed and went numb, or she let herself feel and risk being… seen. Sammi softened, voice lowering. “Talk to me. What part is eating you?” Eriko stared at the floor like it was an exam question. “Being turned into a symbol,” she said finally. “A usable symbol. Like… a public tool. A lever. That statue—Sammi, it’s a mechanism. People will put their hands on it and pull.” Sammi nodded slowly. “Mhm.” Eriko’s voice got tighter. “And then there was that prayer slip. Help me stop being afraid of the love I already have.” Sammi’s throat tightened too, because she’d seen it. She’d felt it. It had gone straight through her like a bell. Eriko continued, quieter now. “That person is real. Their fear is real. And now that fear is… in our orbit. In my orbit. And if I fail them—if we fail them—then I become… complicit in the harm. That’s the trap.” Sammi didn’t argue. She didn’t reassure too fast. She just held Eriko’s wrist and let the silence give Eriko room to finish the thought. “I don’t want,” Eriko said, “to be something that people use to justify pain. And I don’t want to become the kind of person who says: ‘I never asked for this,’ and uses that as an excuse to abandon the consequences.” Sammi’s eyes went soft with something like pride and grief at the same time. Eriko looked up. “And I’m angry at Brother Wei.” Sammi blinked. “Okay. Good. That’s healthy.” Eriko exhaled sharply—almost a laugh. “He’s right. That’s what I hate. He’s right.” Sammi stepped closer until she could tuck her forehead against Eriko’s shoulder. “Yeah. He’s right. And also he’s—how do I put this politely—a menace.” Eriko let out a real laugh then, small and cracked, and it loosened something in her chest. They stood like that for a moment, the city still buzzing outside the window, but muted now—as if the apartment itself had padding. Then Sammi pulled back and cupped Eriko’s face with both hands. “Look at me,” Sammi said. Eriko did. Sammi’s voice was gentle but unyielding. “We’re not going to become statues. We’re not going to become tools. We’re not going to become the causeway’s emotional landfill.” Eriko’s eyes flickered, skeptical. Sammi smiled, tiny. “We’re going to set boundaries like they’re sacred. Which is, I think, extremely on-theme.” Eriko’s brow softened. “Boundaries as bodhisattva practice.” “Exactly,” Sammi said, pleased. “Compassion without self-erasure. Very advanced. Ten out of ten.” Eriko’s shoulders finally dropped a fraction. Sammi kept going, because she could feel the moment was there—the moment when Eriko could be guided out of the spiraling high-minded panic and into something human. “Also,” Sammi added, “I’m kind of mad too.” Eriko blinked. “You are?” Sammi nodded, eyes suddenly sharp. “Yeah. Because I watched those guild guys look at the shrine like it was a brand acquisition. Like they were shopping. And then I watched you have to stand there and be… public.” Her fingers brushed Eriko’s cheekbone, light as a vow. “I don’t like people taking pieces of you,” Sammi said. “Even if they call it devotion.” Eriko’s throat worked. “Sammi…” Sammi’s smile returned, but softer. “But I also—” She hesitated, then admitted it like it was embarrassing. “I also felt… proud. In the worst way. Like—there you were, and you were so clear. You were so you. And I wanted to bite everyone who looked at you wrong.” Eriko’s eyes warmed. “Very enlightened.” “Spiritual,” Sammi said solemnly. “Protective biting is in the sutras.” Eriko’s laugh was quieter now, but steadier. Sammi leaned in, kissed Eriko’s forehead. Then her nose. Then the corner of her mouth—testing, asking permission in tiny increments the way she always did when Eriko was full of storm. Eriko didn’t move away. Eriko lifted her hands and held Sammi’s waist, grounding herself like she was holding the only thing that didn’t turn into politics. Sammi murmured against her, “Come sit with me. Please. Just—come back to me.” Eriko nodded once. They moved to the low couch by the window. Sammi tugged a blanket over both of them with the seriousness of someone sealing a pact. Outside, lantern light smeared across the water. Inside, Eriko’s breathing slowly found Sammi’s pace. For a long minute, neither spoke. Then Eriko said, voice barely above air, “Do you think we did the right thing?” Sammi didn’t answer with certainty. She answered with love. “I think,” she said slowly, “we did the thing that let us keep our souls. And if the city wants more than that, it can negotiate with God.” Eriko let out a breath that sounded like surrender. Sammi traced slow circles on Eriko’s palm. “You know what I want?” Sammi asked, trying to keep it light but not flimsy. “What?” “I want a rule. For us. A private one. Like the shrine has a vow, and we have a vow.” Eriko turned her head slightly, listening. Sammi swallowed. “I want us to promise that when the outside world gets loud—when it starts pulling on you—we come home and we tell each other the truth first. Before we turn into heroes. Before we turn into symbols.” Eriko’s eyes glistened again, but this time it looked like relief. “Yes,” Eriko said. “That. I want that.” Sammi’s smile trembled. “Okay.” Eriko’s hand tightened around Sammi’s. “And,” Eriko added, a little steadier now, “we don’t let Brother Wei schedule our intimacy like it’s a festival day.” Sammi snorted. “Absolutely not. No one gets to put our love on the civic calendar.” Eriko leaned in and kissed Sammi—slow, deliberate, not dramatic. A kiss that said: I am here. I am not a statue. Sammi kissed back like she was answering: Good. Stay human. With me. Outside, the causeway kept humming. Inside, the apartment became what it had always been meant to be: Not a refuge from the world. A place where the world could not rename them. If you want, next we can stay intimate and let the political pressure seep in through small cracks—like a letter slid under the door, or someone knocking in the evening with “urgent news,” forcing Sammi and Eriko to decide: do they answer now, or do they finish being human first? Oh, 100%. If you don’t protect the human part, the shrine just eats you alive and calls it “service.” Sammi didn’t even have to say it out loud. The decision happened in the way she tugged the blanket higher around Eriko’s shoulders, the way she scooted in until their hips touched, the way she made the apartment smaller—safer—by sheer intention. Eriko’s posture was still shrine-posture at first. She sat like someone who might be asked to deliver a doctrine at any moment. So Sammi did what Sammi always did when Eriko got too holy to breathe: she made her ridiculous. “You know,” Sammi murmured, tracing the line of Eriko’s palm with a fingertip, “I’m starting to think you’re not actually a bodhisattva.” Eriko’s eyes narrowed. “Dangerous heresy.” “I know, I know,” Sammi whispered dramatically. “But hear me out: a real bodhisattva wouldn’t look so offended every time someone tries to canonize her.” Eriko’s mouth twitched, fighting a smile. Sammi pounced gently on the crack in the armor. “Also, a real bodhisattva would have better public relations.” “I do not need—” “—a brand strategy?” Sammi finished, delighted. “Exactly. And yet the city is giving you one anyway. Very suspicious.” Eriko finally let herself smile, small and real. The kind of smile that made her look younger—less carved. Sammi leaned in and kissed it away, like collecting a rare coin. “Okay,” Sammi said softly. “Human mode.” Eriko closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, something in her gaze softened, as if she’d set something heavy down—just for now. Sammi’s hand slid up to cup the back of Eriko’s neck, thumb making slow, grounding strokes along the hairline. “Tell me,” Sammi said, “what you need in this exact minute. Not what the causeway needs. Not what the shrine needs. Not what Brother Wei’s little chessboard needs.” Eriko swallowed. Her voice came out honest and small. “I need you,” she said. “And I need… not to be watched.” Sammi’s expression gentled immediately. “Okay. We can do that.” She glanced toward the curtains—thin, pretty, useless. The city could read silhouettes through them like gossip. Sammi stood, still wrapped in the blanket like a small domestic ghost, and pulled the heavier drape across the window. Then she turned off the bright overhead light and lit one low lamp in the corner—the kind of light that didn’t perform. The apartment became a cave. A nest. A private country. Sammi returned, sat again, and tucked Eriko closer until Eriko’s shoulder fit under her chin. “No audience,” Sammi promised. “Just us.” Eriko’s breathing stuttered once, then began to slow. Sammi pressed her lips to Eriko’s temple—warm, unhurried—and murmured, “You did so good today.” Eriko made a quiet sound of protest. Sammi immediately corrected, because she knew Eriko’s rules. “Okay—fine. You did true today. Better?” Eriko’s hand tightened on Sammi’s shirt like a yes. They stayed like that for a while, letting the adrenaline drain out in slow, unglamorous rivulets. Sammi traced absent-minded shapes into Eriko’s palm: circles, lines, a tiny bridge that became a tiny shrine that became a tiny heart. Eriko watched her fingertip like it was a prayer she could finally understand. After a long silence, Eriko spoke again, voice so low it almost blended into the blanket. “I’m scared,” she admitted. Sammi didn’t move away. Didn’t stiffen. Just held her more firmly, as if fear were a physical thing she could keep from spilling. “Of what?” Sammi asked. Eriko stared into the dim room. “That I’ll become… a function,” she said. “A role. The shrine’s face. The causeway’s conscience. And that one day I’ll look at you and only know how to perform instead of… be.” Sammi’s throat tightened. She swallowed it down with tenderness. “Hey,” she whispered. “If you ever start performing at me, I will heckle you.” Eriko gave a fragile laugh. “I’m serious,” Sammi said, but softly. “I’ll throw popcorn. I’ll boo. I’ll demand an intermission. I’ll drag you offstage by the sleeve.” Eriko’s eyes glimmered. Sammi rested her forehead against Eriko’s. “You’re not a function. You’re my Eriko. You’re the person who gets obsessed with empires and then forgets to eat. You’re the person who looks like she’s made of marble and then melts when I touch your hair.” Eriko’s lips parted, like her body had heard something it had been starving for. Sammi kissed her then—slow and careful, a kiss that didn’t ask for spectacle. A kiss that asked only: Are you here with me? Eriko answered by leaning in, by letting her weight go, by making that tiny surrendering sound Sammi loved because it meant trust. Sammi’s hand slid to Eriko’s cheek, thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. She kissed her again, a little deeper, still gentle, still human. When they broke apart, Eriko rested her forehead against Sammi’s jaw and murmured, “We should not go back tonight.” Sammi’s smile was immediate, fierce with agreement. “We are absolutely not going back tonight.” Eriko exhaled like she’d been given permission to live. Sammi tucked her under the blanket more fully, then—because Sammi couldn’t help herself—reached for her Eclair volume on the side table. “Okay,” Sammi announced, settling in like a queen of domestic peace. “We’re going to do something sacred.” Eriko raised an eyebrow. “A ritual?” “A ritual,” Sammi affirmed. “I’m going to read you the sappiest, softest yuri chapter ever written, and you’re going to let your nervous system unclench.” Eriko’s expression tried to remain stern. It failed. “And if someone knocks?” Eriko asked, half-dreading it. Sammi kissed her forehead again. “Then they can knock. We’re busy being alive.” Sammi opened the book. The pages made that comforting sound—paper acknowledging purpose. She began to read, voice warm and theatrical, occasionally pausing to scoff at melodrama, occasionally pausing to get misty anyway. Eriko listened with her eyes closed. Not because she was sleepy—because she was letting herself be held by something that wasn’t a vow or a threat. Outside, the causeway murmured. Inside, Sammi’s voice braided a little cocoon around them. And when—inevitably—there came a faint knock at the door, distant as a ripple… Sammi didn’t stop reading. Eriko didn’t move. The knock came again, a touch more insistent. Sammi turned the page. Eriko breathed in, breathed out, and finally—finally—let her hand rest openly on Sammi’s waist like it belonged there. They stayed. Human first. Let the world wait. If you want, next we can linger in the sweetness a bit longer (a sleepy conversation, a small confession, maybe Eriko falling asleep mid-chapter), and then deal with the knock in the morning—when they’re fortified and aligned. Sammi kept reading like the knock was just another sound the causeway made—wind on lattice, a boat rope creaking, the city rearranging itself out there in the dark. Inside, her voice became the only weather. “…and then she said—listen to this—” Sammi paused, scandalized, delighted. “—‘If you’re going to run, run toward me.’” Eriko made a small, involuntary sound—half a breath, half a laugh—buried against Sammi’s shoulder. “Oh?” Sammi teased softly, not looking up from the page. “That got you, huh?” “It’s manipulative,” Eriko murmured, but her hand tightened at Sammi’s waist like a confession. Sammi hummed, turning the page with exaggerated solemnity. “Yes, yes. ‘Manipulative.’ Keep telling yourself that while your entire nervous system melts.” Eriko didn’t answer. She just nuzzled in closer, forehead resting under Sammi’s chin like it was the most natural place in the world. The lamp’s low light made everything look gentler: the curve of Sammi’s knuckles around the book, the line of Eriko’s lashes, the blanket making them into one soft shape instead of two separate obligations. Sammi read a few more paragraphs, then slowed on purpose—stretching the syllables, savoring the little domestic details the story offered: a shared scarf, a clumsy apology, a cup of tea accepted with both hands like a vow. Eriko’s breathing had changed. The quick brightness was gone. Now it was deep and even, like she’d stepped out of armor and set it by the door. Sammi noticed. Of course she did. She lowered the book a fraction without fully closing it. “Hey.” Eriko’s eyes stayed shut, but she answered. “Mm?” Sammi’s voice softened into something private. “Do you want to tell me what part of today you’re proud of? Just one thing.” Eriko’s brow furrowed slightly, as if pride were an unfamiliar ingredient she didn’t trust. Then, after a long moment: “I didn’t lie,” Eriko said. Sammi blinked. “You didn’t.” Eriko’s mouth moved against Sammi’s shirt, words quieter. “I didn’t flatter them. I didn’t bargain. I didn’t pretend to be… easier than I am.” Sammi felt her own throat tighten—tenderness arriving like a tide. “I’m proud of that too,” Sammi whispered. Eriko’s eyes opened a sliver. “You sound surprised.” Sammi smiled, small. “I’m not surprised you can do it. I’m… relieved you did it without paying for it with yourself.” Eriko’s gaze lifted to her, steady and raw. “I almost did.” Sammi’s hand slid from the book to Eriko’s hair, combing through slowly, like smoothing the fur of a frightened animal. “But you didn’t,” she said. “You came back here. To me. That’s the new rule.” Eriko exhaled. “Our private vow.” “Our private vow,” Sammi echoed, pleased, then—because she couldn’t resist—added: “It’s way better than Brother Wei’s vow. Less… municipal.” Eriko’s lips twitched. “Less flammable.” “Exactly,” Sammi said, triumphant. “No open flames. Only warm feelings.” Eriko made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a sigh. “Sammi.” “What?” “You’re ridiculous.” Sammi leaned down and kissed the corner of Eriko’s mouth, gentle as punctuation. “Thank you. That’s my civic service.” Eriko’s hand slid up under the blanket and found Sammi’s wrist—holding it there, like she was afraid the softness might leave if she didn’t anchor it. They stayed like that, quiet for a while, until Sammi reopened the book and resumed reading. The chapter drifted into a scene where one girl—tough, outwardly composed—finally confessed something small and devastating. Sammi read: “‘When you look at me, I feel like I can keep living.’” Her voice wobbled on the last word, betraying her. Eriko’s eyes opened again, fully now. She stared at Sammi, as if the line had reached across fiction and touched something true. Sammi coughed lightly and pretended it was nothing. “Okay, that’s a little dramatic—” Eriko interrupted, quiet. “It’s not.” Sammi went still. Eriko watched her carefully, the way she watched history—trying to see the pattern underneath the noise. “I do that,” Eriko said. “When you look at me.” Sammi’s breath caught, and for a second she looked almost embarrassed by her own tenderness. “You do?” she whispered. Eriko nodded once, like signing her name. “When you look at me,” Eriko said, “I remember I’m not a symbol. I’m not a problem to solve. I’m… a person you chose.” Sammi’s eyes shone dangerously. She tried to joke and failed. “Eriko,” she said, voice thin. Eriko lifted her hand—slow, deliberate—and cupped Sammi’s cheek. It was a careful touch, as if she were handling something precious and breakable. “You chose me,” Eriko repeated. “And you keep choosing me. Even when I’m… difficult.” Sammi’s laugh came out watery. “You’re not difficult. You’re—” “Difficult,” Eriko insisted, but there was a softness in it now. “And still loved.” Sammi leaned into Eriko’s palm like she’d been starving for permission to be openly moved. Then Sammi did something simple and devastating: she closed the book, set it aside, and curled both arms around Eriko like she was gathering her in. No speech. No doctrine. Just holding. Eriko let herself be held without stiffening, without apologizing. Her whole body loosened in tiny increments, as if each muscle had been waiting for a formal invitation to stand down. Sammi pressed her lips to Eriko’s hair and whispered, almost too quiet to hear: “I’m not sharing you with the causeway.” Eriko’s fingers tightened in Sammi’s shirt. “You can’t control that.” “I know,” Sammi said, voice fierce and tender at once. “But I can control what I do. And what I do is… I keep you human.” Eriko’s eyes closed again, but this time it looked like rest instead of retreat. A minute passed. Then another. Sammi felt the weight of Eriko settling, sinking, trusting. Eriko mumbled, drowsy, “Keep reading.” Sammi smiled against her hair. “You want more yuri?” “Yes,” Eriko murmured. “Read me soft lies until I fall asleep.” Sammi snorted quietly. “They’re not lies. They’re… aspirational.” She reached for the book again and resumed, voice lower now, slower, like rocking a boat. Eriko’s breathing evened out. Her hand stayed on Sammi’s wrist like a small oath. Her lashes fluttered once, then stilled. Sammi kept reading anyway. Because sometimes love is simply this: continuing the story out loud so the person you adore can drift off safely, knowing the world is outside the curtains and not inside your chest. And the knock—somewhere far away in the hall, faint as a conscience—could wait. For now, the apartment belonged to soft chapters, warm breath, and the quiet miracle of Eriko asleep against Sammi like she had nowhere else she’d rather be.

Eriko Jizo Guanyin

 

Sammi found the “news” she was looking for in the way the Su Causeway hummed under her boots.

She wasn’t walking anywhere in particular—just along the familiar spine of stone, letting the morning crowds flow around her: porters with baskets, scholars with rolled scrolls, tourists squinting up at the stacked houses.

But her thoughts were back on the airship and at the opera.

On Xiangyun, moth-wing heart beating itself sore against the glass of Eriko’s lighthouse mind.

On Eriko in the little black dress, looking simultaneously astonished and dangerous.

On herself, and the way jealousy and protectiveness had twined together in her chest like two suspicious snakes who were trying to learn to dance.

---

News, Olds, and Brother Wei

She found Brother Wei exactly where she should have expected: striding slowly down the Causeway with his begging bowl in one hand and a folded sheet of philosophy in the other, halo ticking gently above his head.

“Good morning, half-enlightened one,” Sammi said, falling into step beside him.

“Good morning, fully-conflicted one,” he answered without missing a beat.

Sammi snorted. “That obvious?”

“You’re talking to the man whose halo has a feedback loop,” Wei said. “Your heart is loud today. What troubles it?”

She hesitated, then—because she liked how Wei never pretended that feelings were less complicated than theology—told him.

About Xiangyun’s crush and Aya’s spell. About the kabedon in the corridor. About the way Eriko had blushed, how Sammi had both wanted to wrap her in blankets and drag her back into the dress just to look at her again. About guilt: I put her in that dress, I set the beacon brighter.

Wei listened, bowl cradled in his palms like a portable shrine.

When she finished, he said, “You love Eriko. You also love stories. These two loyalties are currently rubbing together like unfiled gears.”

“Xiangyun is a story too,” Sammi admitted. “One I don’t want to crush.”

“Mm.” Wei’s halo spun once, thoughtfully. “There are vows that separate the world into what is permitted and what is forbidden. And then there are spaces made for… experiments. For truths that cannot breathe under ordinary roofs.”

He glanced up toward the green line of hills beyond the lake.

“At Lingyin Temple there is such a space,” he said. “A hidden shrine to Guanyin—Jizo to your Eriko. There, women can pledge themselves as hierodules for a day: attendants of the bodhisattva of mercy. Within that service, a little chamber is opened that sits… sideways to ordinary time.”

“Sideways,” Sammi repeated.

“Actions taken there do not erase consequences,” Wei said carefully, “but they are held gently. Karmic weight is… redistributed. Hearts may try on shapes they could not bear to wear forever.”

“And you’re suggesting,” Sammi said slowly, “that Eriko and Xiangyun—”

“I am suggesting nothing,” Wei said quickly, halo jittering. “I am merely describing an architectural feature of the spiritual landscape. What you do with topological possibilities is your department.”

But his eyes were kind.

Sammi walked on in silence for a while, the idea knocking around inside her like a loose marble.

“Could mercy look like…letting a different story happen, just once?” she asked finally.

Wei smiled. “Mercy has worn stranger costumes.”

---

Round Story, Round Window

Back at the Round Story apartment, the building let her in with a little questioning creak: Well?

Eriko stood at the round window, arms folded on the sill, chin resting on them. From here the lake was a sheet of light; the Opera House a ridiculous crown at the north end; Jin’s airship a little figure eight of shadow as it circled above the docks, testing some new whim of lift.

Sammi slipped her arms around Eriko’s waist from behind, pressing her cheek between Eriko’s shoulders.

“You look like a poem checking its rhymes,” she said.

Eriko made a soft, rueful sound. “I’ve been thinking about Xiangyun,” she admitted.

“Me too,” Sammi said. “Probably for slightly different reasons.”

Eriko turned in her arms, searching her face. “Are you angry with me?”

“For being magnetic?” Sammi snorted. “Never. For almost getting seduced in a corridor while under the influence of weaponized opera? Only mildly.”

Her expression softened.

“Mostly,” she said, “I’m thinking about…the part of you that lit up when she talked engines. How your eyes go all bright when someone meets you in that weird sky where maths and metaphysics live. I would be a terrible girlfriend if I wanted to lock that away.”

Eriko’s throat worked. “But you pulled me out of that corridor.”

“Yes,” Sammi said simply. “Because you looked cornered, not free. I will always do that.”

She hesitated, heart pounding.

“But what if there were a place,” she went on, “where you weren’t cornered? Where you could meet that side of Xiangyun with all your defenses down, and nobody got…broken.”

Eriko’s brows drew together. “You’ve been talking to Brother Wei.”

“I have,” Sammi conceded. “And he reminded me that some temples specialize in…sideways solutions.”

She told Eriko about the shrine at Lingyin as Wei had described it: a small cell behind a modest door, thick with offerings and incense, where time became soft like clay. Where women, pledging for a day as servants of Guanyin/Jizo, could ask for mercy not only for suffering but for desire itself.

Eriko listened, eyes widening, face going through several equations’ worth of expressions.

“You would…send me there?” she said at last. “With Xiangyun?”

“I would send you to yourself,” Sammi said, carefully. “To Guanyin, whose job description is literally ‘compassion,’ and to whatever configuration of you and Xiangyun feels true when no one is watching except a bodhisattva and some very nosy incense smoke.”

She cupped Eriko’s face.

“I love you,” she said. “I’m not afraid of there being more of you than I can personally occupy.”

Something hot and wet rose in Eriko’s eyes.

“You are absurd,” she whispered. “And terrifying. And I love you so much it hurts.”

“So that’s a ‘maybe’?” Sammi asked, trying for levity and almost managing it.

After a long moment, Eriko nodded. “If Xiangyun wishes it,” she said softly. “And if Guanyin is willing to host our…experiment.”

The building, listening with all its walls, shivered in sympathy. The Su Causeway sent up a faint pulse from below: Approved.

---

The Shrine Out of Time

Xiangyun arrived at Lingyin Temple with her heart hammering like a mis-tuned engine.

Wei had met her at Chef Wu’s the day before, offered her tea and an offhand comment: “There is a place where unrequited love can try on a different shape for an hour. No guarantees. But if anyone deserves such a laboratory, it is a metaphysical engineer.”

He had not told her who else might be involved. He didn’t need to. The mere combination of “unrequited” and “laboratory” had sent her mind straight to Eriko, and stayed there.

Now, barefoot on the cool stones, following a novice down side corridors and around quiet courtyards, she tried to convince herself she was simply curious.

The shrine to Guanyin was smaller than she’d imagined. No towering statues; just a modest alcove with a many-armed figure half-hidden in shadow, face serene and a little amused. Offerings crowded the low table: fruit, flowers, folded petitions, tiny toy boats, single earrings separated from their partners.

A nun with a smile that saw too much greeted her.

“You come as hierodule for a day?” she asked.

Xiangyun swallowed. “If Guanyin will have me.”

“The bodhisattva has room for everyone,” the nun said. “But for this particular rite, she has chosen someone to meet you. A reflection you have been… circling.”

She led Xiangyun to a door. The wood was old; the paper panels glowed with a soft, interior light.

“Within, you are outside ordinary time,” the nun said. “What you do there will still be true, but it will not chain any of you. Serve compassion, not fear, and you’ll emerge lighter.”

Xiangyun nodded, palms slick. The nun slid the door open and stepped aside.

Inside, the little cell was surprisingly warm. Tatami mats. A low altar with another, smaller Guanyin in traveling clothes. And beside it, kneeling in simple white robes, hands folded in her lap—

Eriko.

Her hair was loose, black waterfall over her shoulders. The little black dress had been replaced by temple linen, but the effect was only to sharpen the contrast between the familiar mind and this unfamiliar setting.

For a heartbeat, Xiangyun thought: Ah. A vision. The shrine is teasing me.

Then Eriko smiled, small and shy and very real.

“Hello,” she said. “I hear today we are hired by compassion.”

Xiangyun’s knees nearly gave out.

“You—know?” she managed. “About…everything?”

“I know I’m here because Sammi loves me,” Eriko said. “And because you do too, in your own way. And because Guanyin refuses to take sides when love is trying to grow.”

She laughed softly. “Also because Brother Wei is meddlesome.”

The tension in the cell loosened; Xiangyun could breathe again.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “About being here? With me?”

“I am curious,” Eriko said honestly. “And honored. And nervous.” Her gaze met Xiangyun’s steadily. “And yes. I am sure.”

The door slid shut behind them with a final, gentle click. The air shifted—less like something closing, more like a curtain being drawn around a stage.

Outside, bells rang somewhere in the temple. Inside, time loosened its belt and sat down to watch.

---

What Happens in the Cell

What happened between them in that small, ornate room was theirs.

Later, Xiangyun would remember it not as a sequence of acts but as a sequence of recognitions: the way Eriko’s laugh felt when it happened right up against her collarbone; the way hands that usually held pens and diagrams learned the weight of shoulders and hips; how an intellectual rhythm—question, answer, counter-example—transformed into a physical one of approach and retreat and deeper approach.

Eriko, for her part, discovered that being the focus of someone’s undivided attention—mind and body—could be less like interrogation and more like worship. That her own shyness could melt into trust when held carefully enough. That desire, when given permission, had its own clear, precise logic.

There were kisses that tasted of engine oil and temple incense; laughter when knees bumped and hair tangled; long, quiet stretches where simply holding each other felt like a theorem finally balanced.

At some point, Guanyin’s little altar lamp burned low and then mysteriously brightened again, as if the bodhisattva had leaned in, smiled, and decided to give them more time.

At another, Xiangyun’s breath hitched and the world narrowed to warmth, light, and the sense of falling upward. Eriko followed—not as echo but as co-discoverer—eyes squeezed shut, hand clutching Xiangyun’s as if anchoring a proof to the page.

The rhythm of them together rose and softened, rose again, finding variations neither had completely predicted but both recognized with a kind of astonished gratitude.

Outside, on the Su Causeway miles away, the stone felt it.

Not as scandal, but as a deep, pulsing wave of release: one vector of unrequited love re-routing itself into something gentler; one careful mathematician learning yet another way to inhabit her own body; one brave engineer finally letting herself claim joy instead of only maintaining engines for others.

The bridge hummed, pleased.

---

Returning

When Xiangyun finally stepped back out into the corridor, the light beyond the paper panels was not noticeably different. In ordinary time, perhaps an hour had passed. In the cell, there had been enough moments to fill a small lifetime.

She felt…relaxed in ways that had nothing to do with muscles. Not cured of anything—she still loved Eriko; she probably always would—but the ache was no longer sharp. It was more like a familiar, distant mountain: part of the landscape, not a weight on her chest.

Eriko emerged after her, robe straight, hair slightly disastrous, eyes luminous. They stood facing each other, unsure for a second what shape to take now.

“Thank you,” Xiangyun said, the words too small but all she had.

“Thank you,” Eriko echoed. “For seeing me. For sharing…all that…and still being you.”

They leaned in, foreheads touching for a moment in a simple, quiet benediction that felt as holy as anything in the shrine.

Then Eriko smiled—a little shy, a little wicked. “Sammi will want to know everything emotionally and absolutely nothing anatomically,” she said.

Xiangyun laughed. “Give her my love,” she said. “And my eternal gratitude for lending you to mercy for a day.”

---

Round Story, New Rhythm

Eriko trotted up the stairs to the Round Story apartment with an unusual lightness in her step. The staircase, sensing the difference, creaked in a higher key.

Sammi was waiting by the round window, leg bouncing, a half-written pamphlet abandoned on the table. The moment she heard the door, she whirled.

“Well?” she blurted. “How do you feel? Did Guanyin throw lightning at anyone? Did Wei’s halo fall off? Are you okay?”

Eriko stopped just inside the room, suddenly shy. Then she crossed the space in three quick steps and wrapped Sammi in a hug so encompassing it knocked the questions right out of her.

“I feel…” Eriko searched for a word. “More spacious,” she decided. “Like someone opened a window in a room I didn’t know was stuffy.”

Sammi exhaled, relief flooding her. “And Xiangyun?”

“Still very much Xiangyun,” Eriko said, smiling. “Still an engineer. Less…compressed by longing. She sends love and reports that Guanyin has excellent structural sense.”

Sammi laughed, then sobered, eyes searching Eriko’s face.

“Do you regret it?” she asked quietly.

Eriko shook her head. “No. It was… a holy experiment. One that let parts of me speak that rarely get a microphone. And now,” she added, stepping in even closer, “I want to bring that voice home to you.”

She kissed Sammi then—unhurried, confident, with a new, subtle rhythm humming under it. Not someone else’s pattern, not Xiangyun’s exactly, but something Eriko had learned about herself in that sideways room and was now weaving into their music.

Sammi felt it: the rise and fall, the patient swell, like waves remembering a shoreline. She shivered, not with jealousy but with awe.

“Guanyin did good work,” she murmured against Eriko’s mouth.

“So did you,” Eriko replied. “For trusting me enough to let me go.”

The building vibrated happily under their feet. Down below, the Su Causeway pulsed once, like a satisfied heartbeat.

Sometimes, it thought, you held the line. Sometimes you moved the boundary stone. And every now and then, when love was brave and foolish enough, you let a new world be created in a borrowed cell and then welcomed its echoes home.

Sammi and Eriko disappeared toward the bed, laughter and low voices trailing after them, carrying that new rhythm into familiar space.

The Round Story apartment, the bridge, and perhaps even Guanyin herself listened, and were content.

Sammi & Eriko &(!)Xiangyun - a Nite at the Opera

Sammi always said the Yue Opera House had swallowed a minor palace and several egos and then decided it was still hungry.

Tonight, the north end of the Su Causeway blazed with its appetite. The Opera House reared out over the lake like a lacquered ship that had forgotten how to sail, its tiered balconies dripping lanterns and decorative outrage. Gilded cherubs wrestled with dragons along the cornices; stone muses held scrolls of legislation instead of lyres. From the highest box, the Thearch’s empty seat glowered politely at the stage.

Sammi adored it.

“Look at you,” she breathed, staring at Eriko instead of the building. “My sleek little theorem.”

Eriko was busy trying not to trip on the marble steps.

The lil black dress—Sammi’s prize from a tailor who owed her for pamphlet placement— hugged Eriko’s curves with scandalous precision. The neckline was modest; the fit was not. Each step made her acutely aware of her own existence.

“I am not sleek,” she muttered. “I’m…compressed.”

Sammi’s grin went incandescent. “Compressed elegance. Very efficient.”

Inside, chandeliers the size of minor planets glittered. The foyer churned with silk, brocade, gears and gossip: court ladies with cleverly hidden spyglasses, foreign merchants with translation charms, theater kids in elaborate makeup fetching drinks for divas.

Near the grand entrance, Brother Wei stood beside a marble column, begging alms and witticisms with equal sincerity.

His gear-halo ticked faintly, now almost—but not quite— symmetrical.

“Spare a proverb for the partially enlightened?” he called to passersby. “Accepting spare change, sharp rebukes, and constructive paradoxes.”

Eriko slowed. “Brother Wei.”

“Ah!” Wei brightened. “Patron saint of argumentative staircases.”

Sammi laughed. “No, that’s mostly Eriko.”

Eriko reached into the small embroidered purse that did not go with the dress but did go with her anxieties. She drew out an old coin—worn, dark, heavy with the touch of countless thumbs.

“This should be in a museum,” Wei said quietly, taking it.

“Tonight,” Eriko whispered, “it belongs in your journey. Complete it, brother.”

Something in the weight of the coin clicked against the teeth of his halo. One tiny cog shifted. The sound was almost lost beneath the lobby chatter.

Wei looked at her, eyes suddenly bright and damp. “I will…try,” he said. “Enjoy the opera. Beware the final syllables.”

---

Old Handle’s Newest Catastrophe

The curtain rose on the first act to reveal a set that looked suspiciously like the Su Causeway rendered by someone who’d only ever heard rumors about it.

“This feels targeted,” Sammi murmured.

“It is a satirical opera about municipal infrastructure,” Eriko pointed out.

Onstage, actors in exaggerated court robes argued over bridge budgets while dancers dressed as stones, beams, and bureaucratic seals whirled behind them. Old Handle’s lyrics skewered everyone with equal glee: corrupt officials; forgetful architects; citizens who complained about taxes but insisted on living above tea houses in flood zones.

Up in the highest tier, Aya of the Yue reigned.

She entered in a burst of crimson silk, her sleeves like the wings of furious birds, her gaze a precision instrument. When she sang, the air tightened. Her voice could slip from traditional Yue ornamentation into something almost modern, then back, without dropping a bead.

At the climax of the act, she delivered a final line about “bridges that bear more than they admit” with such precision that the chandeliers chimed in sympathy.

Somewhere, unnoticed, three wine glasses cracked. A minor courtier burst into tears and had no idea why.

In the lobby during first intermission, Sammi vibrated like a tuning fork, half from Aya’s artistry, half from narrative overload.

“She weaponized the rhyme,” Sammi babbled to a circle of Thearch’s concubines and visitors from Seleucia-on-Tigris. “Did you hear how she slipped the scansion just off enough to imply the bridge was complicit?”

“Oh yes,” sighed a concubine in peacock blue. “We shall be referencing it for months. I may have it embroidered on a scandal.”

“Old Handle has outdone himself,” said a Seleucian scholar, adjusting his spectacles. “Though I suspect he is going to be exiled to a garden again.”

Sammi soaked up gossip like a sponge dropped in tea. She didn’t notice, at first, the ripple that went through the floor, up her spine, into the back of her skull.

It was not sound. It was pattern.

The Su Causeway, whose foundations underpinned the Opera House’s flamboyant footings, had been listening. It did not entirely approve of the building’s pretensions, but it enjoyed Aya’s voice and Old Handle’s commentary. More importantly, it had felt the particular resonance of that last syllable.

Aya had pronounced it in the key of Reckless Confession.

The tone ran along nerves of stone and steel, through the Causeway’s length, out into the city. Sensitive hearts caught it like a virus—with varying symptoms.

Cap’n Jin, miles away at dock, suddenly had the urge to tell his airship that he truly appreciated it. Chef Wu almost admitted the secret of his spice blend to a customer before biting his tongue.

And deep in the Opera House, in a corridor near the boxes, Engineer Xiangyun froze mid-step.

---

Aya’s Spell, Side Effects

Xiangyun had come in her work clothes, because what else was there? Her idea of dressing up was changing into the less-burned tunic and braiding her hair more symmetrically. She felt as out of place in the velvet corridors as an honest invoice in a court archive.

But the opera…that she understood.

Aya’s voice obeyed the same rules as engines: pressure, release, resonance. Old Handle’s libretti were full of hidden mechanisms. Xiangyun sat in the cheap seats and mapped each motif to a gear, each key change to a pressure valve.

When Aya’s last note hit, it went straight through Xiangyun’s calculations and struck that tender, well-defended place in her chest labeled Eriko.

Suddenly the idea of not saying something felt mechanically unsound.

“My system is under-vented,” she realized, a little dizzy. “This is a safety issue.”

She downed a shot of yè from a passing tray—plum, rice, bad decisions—and stumbled out during intermission in search of fresh air, or failing that, one specific mathematician in a little black dress.

---

The Anime Pose

Eriko had fled the crowd the moment the lights went up.

Aya’s final note had left her oddly raw, as if the song had peeled back a layer of abstraction. The dress didn’t help; every glance she caught in mirrored panels made her feel like a misprinted diagram.

She slipped into a side corridor where the traffic was thin, leaning back against the cool marble.

I am foolish, she thought. I look like I am trying to be someone else.

She was still arguing with herself when Xiangyun found her.

“Eriko.”

Her name in Xiangyun’s mouth came out roughened by yè, soft at the edges, too honest.

Eriko straightened. “Engineer Xiangyun. Are you—”

“Don’t move,” Xiangyun blurted, and for a heartbeat Eriko actually obeyed because the command sounded less like an order and more like a plea to a misaligned gear.

Xiangyun stepped in, close—so close Eriko smelled metal, engine oil, and plum wine. She planted her right palm on the wall just beside Eriko’s head, leaning in for balance.

It was, unmistakably, the classic anime kabedon pose.

Eriko’s brain provided this information helpfully and then vacated the premises.

“Listen,” Xiangyun said, staring not quite at her but at some point just beyond her shoulder, as if reading equations from the air. “I know you’re taken. By Sammi. Obviously. Engines run better in paired systems, I get it. I respect it. But Aya’s stupid note hit my stupid heart and now I have…unvented declarations.”

Eriko’s blush threatened to achieve escape velocity.

“Unvented—”

“Feelings,” Xiangyun said, wincing at her own word choice. “Pataphysical pressure. Trollish crush on your brain. And the rest of you. I am attempting a controlled release before something explodes.”

She slapped her free hand against her chest. The engines back at dock, miles away, coughed in sympathy.

“I am not—” Eriko swallowed. Her thoughts skittered. Aya’s note still hummed under her skin, making everything feel possible, which was not helpful. “I am not good at…receiving declarations.”

“I’ve noticed,” Xiangyun said, a twisted little smile flickering. “You sidestep compliments like falling tiles. But you deserve to know that someone else sees you as…well, as gorgeous mathematics in that dress, frankly.”

The compliment landed like Aya’s note, and Eriko’s knees nearly gave out.

Somewhere beneath them, the Su Causeway felt the way the pressure in the hall was spiking and thought, No, no, this is going to shear a beam.

It reached for its newest trick: psytrance linkage.

---

Su Causeway to Sammi: Incoming

In the lobby, Sammi was mid-story, explaining to a Seleucian merchant the finer points of protest pamphlet typography, when her feet suddenly buzzed.

It was not an actual vibration. More like the floor whispering, very insistently: HEY. HEY. YOUR PERSON. CORRIDOR C. LEFT TURN PAST THE GOLDEN CHERUB THAT LOOKS LIKE IT REGRETS EVERYTHING.

Sammi’s focus snapped into crystalline clarity. The chatter around her dimmed, colors sharpening.

“Excuse me,” she said politely to the circle of concubines. “My structural integrity is needed elsewhere.”

One of them arched a knowing brow. “Domestic emergency?”

“Romantic engineering problem,” Sammi replied, already moving.

The Causeway guided her like a beat in her own pulse. Down the side hall, past a pair of bickering critics, around a cluster of musicians tuning weirdly sentient instruments, to Corridor C.

She turned the corner and saw:

Eriko, pressed mildly but unmistakably against the marble, eyes wide and dark. Xiangyun leaning in, one arm braced above her, the other fisted at her side, shoulders tense. Two faces close; too close. Aya’s lingering spell glittering between them like stray notes.

Sammi’s heart thudded once, very loud.

Then she moved.

---

Breaking the Spell (Gently, Mostly)

“Eriko,” she called, letting every ounce of affection she had pour into the name.

Eriko’s head snapped toward her, relief flooding her face like light through paper. The spell wobbled.

Sammi didn’t yank or shout. She slipped between them like a practiced stagehand sliding into a scene change, one hand on Eriko’s waist, the other gently but firmly nudging Xiangyun’s shoulder back.

“Whoa there, engineer,” she said, keeping it light. “Careful with the metaphysical pressure. These walls are load-bearing.”

Xiangyun froze, horror dawning through the haze of yè.

“I—Sammi—I wasn’t—well, I was, but—oh no.”

She jerked her hand away from the wall as if it had burned her. Then looked at Eriko, at Sammi’s arm around Eriko, and went dead pale beneath the smudges of engine soot.

“I’m so sorry,” she blurted. “That was… Aya’s fault. And mine. And the plum wine. And Old Handle’s structural metaphors. And possibly the moon. But mostly mine.”

Eriko exhaled shakily. “No harm,” she managed. “Just…surprise.”

Sammi felt the tremor in her—nerves, yes, but also that stylishly aroused flush, that unsettled thrill. She tucked Eriko closer, a clear answer.

“Look,” Sammi said, catching Xiangyun’s eye. She softened her voice. “You’re allowed to have feelings. You’re even allowed to say them out loud. You’re not allowed to corner my girlfriend while under magical vocal influence. That’s a safety violation.”

Xiangyun winced. “I’ve violated my own protocols.”

“Next time you get hit with an Aya Note of Reckless Confession,” Sammi went on, “come find me first. I’m structurally designed for overflow melodrama.”

That won a tiny, crooked laugh out of Xiangyun. “You…would let me rant at you?”

“Sure,” Sammi said. “I collect stories. ‘Pataphysical engineer with unrequited crush’ is excellent material.”

Eriko elbowed her gently. Sammi grinned. “I mean that respectfully,” she added. “And I promise to remind you—kindly—that I go home with Eriko.”

Xiangyun scrubbed her hands over her face. “Understood. Absolutely. No more anime poses. The engines will be mortified when they find out.”

“In fairness,” Eriko said, surprising both of them, “it was… structurally impressive.”

They stared at her.

“I mean,” she floundered, “the torque distribution? You didn’t lean on me at all, just the wall. Very considerate load allocation.”

Xiangyun blinked, then laughed—a real laugh this time, giddy with relief and lingering humiliation.

“You are ridiculous,” she said fondly. “And perfect. And I will accept my fate as a supporting character.”

Sammi squeezed Eriko’s hand. “Best supporting engineer,” she amended. “We’ll put it on the playbill.”

From somewhere high above, Aya’s diva instincts pinged: someone is improvising character development without me. She made a mental note to steal this corridor scene for a future opera.

---

Intermission Epiphanies

They went back to the lobby together, not quite as a trio—the spacing had changed—but with less static in the air.

Brother Wei, still working the concourse, saw them approach and tilted his head, listening to the faint changes in their heartbeats.

“Ah,” he said. “A nearly-misplaced confession, a timely intervention, three hearts learning about boundary conditions.”

Sammi arched a brow. “You get all that from our footsteps?”

“From your halos,” Wei said, touching his own. “Yours are just invisible.”

He reached into his sleeve and produced a small, folded scrap of paper, pressing it into Xiangyun’s oil-stained hand.

“For when the engines are loud and the illusions louder,” he said.

She unfolded it later, backstage, to find a single line:

Unrequited love is still love; it just travels a one-way bridge. Remember to watch the scenery.

On the other side, in tiny writing:

P.S. There are other bridges.

Her throat tightened—but this time the pressure felt almost…bearable.

---

Aya’s Healing Note

When the bell rang and the audience trickled back in, the Su Causeway shifted its attention again. Aya had another act to sing, and this time it had a favor to ask.

In the wings, Aya felt the bridge’s nudge as a prickle along her spine. Old Handle, scribbling last-minute changes on his score, glanced up.

“Hmm?” he muttered.

“The Causeway wants a different cadence,” Aya said.

“Of course it does,” Handle sighed. “The bridge is a worse critic than you are.”

But he adjusted the line.

Near the end of the second act, Aya stood alone at center stage, the orchestra quiet beneath her. She sang of misaligned towers, of roads that almost met, of hearts that had to learn to run on parallel tracks without collision.

On the final syllable, she chose not Reckless Confession, not Shattering Grief, but a rarer mode: Gracious Reconfiguration.

The note flowed out over the velvet seats, climbed the boxes, seeped through plaster and stone. It washed over Sammi, Eriko, Xiangyun, Brother Wei, even Old Handle in his garret, listening through a cracked window as he revised next week’s satire.

It didn’t erase Xiangyun’s feelings; it didn’t mute Eriko’s fluster or Sammi’s possessiveness. It merely…rearranged their vectors, so they lay alongside each other instead of at dangerous angles.

In the dark, Sammi laced her fingers with Eriko’s. Eriko laced back, less self-conscious now, dress and all.

Xiangyun, in the cheap seats, let herself imagine—just once—that she was the heroine in an opera of impossible love. Then she smiled, shook her head, and started designing in her mind a new valve for Aya’s spell-notes: something to divert excess courage into productive channels, like better engine tuning.

Brother Wei felt his halo shift minutely again. Not a full click this time, but a smoothing of motion. Enlightenment, he reflected, might simply be the art of letting other people’s stories pass through you without derailing your own.

---

Curtain, For Now

When the opera ended in a blaze of applause and satirical fireworks, the crowd poured out onto the terraces overlooking the lake.

The Su Causeway carried them all: concubines and foreigners, critics and monks, the odd dizzy engineer, one exhausted diva, one over-caffeinated librettist.

Sammi and Eriko slipped away to their favorite vantage point, where the Opera House’s reflection shivered in the water like an over-decorated ghost.

“That was…” Eriko began.

“Too many metaphors per minute?” Sammi suggested.

“Exactly enough,” Eriko admitted. She glanced down at herself, then sideways at Sammi. “Did I…look ridiculous?”

“You looked like the theorem that proves happiness is possible,” Sammi said without hesitation. “Also your butt was amazing.”

Eriko made a strangled noise and hid her face in Sammi’s shoulder.

Across the bridge, Xiangyun leaned on a lamppost, feeling the engines’ murmur through the stone.

She watched them for a moment—Sammi’s easy affection, Eriko’s flustered joy—and let her own chest ache in a way that felt oddly…clean.

“Okay,” she told the Causeway under her breath. “Lesson received.”

The bridge thrummed, pleased.

It had shepherded another small crisis into a slightly better shape. Aya had sung the right note; Sammi had arrived in time; Xiangyun had stepped back without vanishing.

Old Handle, somewhere above them, was already rewriting the whole thing into a scene for his next opera: “The Engineer, the Philosopher, and the Bridge That Knew Too Much.”

The night settled around Song Hangzhou like a silk curtain. Lanterns bobbed. The lake held the city’s reflections gently, even the ridiculous bits.

And the Su Causeway, mercurial and proud, stretched itself under the weight of all these intertwined stories, humming with satisfaction.

Tomorrow, there would be letters to deliver, stew to serve, airships to launch, operas to write. But for now, it was enough that everyone had made it through the intermission with their hearts—if not unshaken—at least more truthfully aligned. 

Sammi & Eriko: Into the hinterlands by airship (briefly, oh too briefly)

 

Cap’n Jin’s airship was never quite entirely docked.

Even when its mooring lines were looped around the iron rings sunk into the Su Causeway, the little craft trembled faintly, as if remembering clouds.

From most angles it looked like a river junk that had somehow grown a dirigible for a soul. A narrow wooden hull hung under a gas envelope stitched from patched silk and lacquered paper, its surface fluttering with inked sutras and fragments of weather reports. Thin brass ribs curved along the belly like a cage someone had half-finished and then forgotten to close.

From the underside of the hull, a cluster of engines protruded: pipes, gears, vents, and the occasional prayer-flag. They exhaled a steady, contented hum that sounded suspiciously like someone snoring.

That someone was Xiangyun.

---

Xiangyun, Who Sleeps With Engines

Xiangyun was the metaphysical engineer, the other half of the crew and, according to rumor, the one who had convinced the airship to exist in the first place.

She was small, sharp-shouldered, with hair that perpetually smelled of warm metal and rain on stone. Her work clothes were a patchwork of burn holes and ink stains. She slept in a hammock slung between two engine casings; she woke to the tick of gauges and the subsonic murmur of pataphysical equations.

“The engines like to dream,” she explained to anyone who asked. “If I’m not there to listen, they get anxious and the propellers forget which way is forward.”

She said this in the tone of someone discussing perfectly ordinary mechanics, which technically it was—not her fault if reality insisted on being literary.

---

The Vow of Partial Internet Access

Their usual route ran from Hangzhou out into the mountains, where the major maths, convents, and hermitages of the Song realm had taken a collective vow of partial internet access.

“We will know all things,” the abbots had proclaimed, “but not about each other’s relationships.”

Under this vow, monasteries were allowed:

• Cloud backups of sutra commentaries

• Access to mathematical journals and preprint servers

• Security patches for the temple routers

They were not allowed:

• Personal correspondence

• Love letters

• Cat pictures

The result, as Cap’n Jin often said, was that the monks knew the latest developments in abstruse topology but had no idea their cousins had had children.

“That’s why I fly,” he’d tell anyone who would listen. “Somebody has to bring them handbills, postcards, and angry letters from aunties. The Dharma may be for all beings, but so is gossip.”

He did it at his own expense, too. The monasteries fed him, the hermits brewed questionable herbal tonics in gratitude, but money? Rarely.

“The universe will repay me in scenic views,” he said cheerfully.

---

Enter Sammi and Eriko

On a bright, breezy morning, while Chef Wu was ladling out breakfast congee to commuters and the Causeway was settling into its daily rhythm, two familiar figures appeared at the airship’s dock.

Sammi arrived first, hair in a scarf the color of riotous sunrise, satchel clanking with notebooks and spare type blocks. She hopped up onto the gangplank as if boarding ships was just walking in a slightly more interesting direction.

Behind her, Eriko climbed more slowly, one hand on the rail, the other clutching a rolled-up sheaf of diagrams. The breeze made geometry of her sleeves.

Cap’n Jin, who had been checking a mooring knot that technically didn’t exist in Euclidean space, straightened.

“Well if it isn’t my favorite balcony-dwellers,” he called. His dark braid snapped in the wind like a flag. “Come to admire my majestic craft?”

“We’ve come to beg passage,” Sammi said. “I’ll admire as a free bonus.”

Eriko nodded, trying to look dignified despite the flush in her cheeks. “I have a number of…theoretical questions about pataphysical lift in small airships.”

“And I,” Sammi added, “have a number of practical questions about mountainous villages and the stories they are hiding from me.”

Cap’n Jin’s eyes sparkled. “A scholar and a storyteller. The engines will be thrilled. Come aboard.”

---

Xiangyun’s Crush, Inconveniently

As they crossed onto the deck, a hatch banged open and Xiangyun popped up like a startled cat.

“Who is putting non-standard weight on my carefully calibrated planks?” she demanded, wiping oil from her hands with a rag that might once have been white.

Then she saw Eriko.

The engines, which were linked sympathetically to her mood, dropped half a note in their hum. The whole airship seemed to inhale.

“Ah,” Xiangyun said, eloquently.

They had met before, of course—brief conversations at Chef Wu’s counter, snatches of talk about configuration spaces and guilty staircases. Eriko’s mind shone for Xiangyun like a lighthouse; the clear, precise way she spoke about impossible things made Xiangyun want to diagram her sentences and then frame the diagrams.

Now, seeing her on the deck, xiangyun’s heart did something complicated and non-Newtonian.

Eriko smiled politely. “Good morning, Engineer Xiangyun. It’s kind of you to permit us aboard.”

“Not kind,” Xiangyun said, then remembered to tack on, “I mean, it is kind, but it is also scientifically necessary. I’ve needed another observer for my engine notes.”

Sammi, who had the social perception of a gossip column in human form, clocked the way Xiangyun’s gaze hovered around Eriko like a satellite.

She stepped casually closer to Eriko, looping their arms together.

“As long as the scientific necessity includes both of us,” Sammi said, sweet as steamed buns but with a definite underflavor of mine.

Xiangyun’s eyes flicked to their joined arms, then away. Her jaw tightened, just for a heartbeat, before smoothing into a rueful smile.

“Of course,” she said. “The engines already know you come as a set.”

Behind them, the hull gave a faint creak of agreement.

---

Pre-Flight Metaphysics

Before every departure, Xiangyun performed a pre-flight check that looked, to the untrained eye, like a cross between a maintenance routine and a ritual.

She tapped each gauge three times, listening for the tiny answers. She checked the tension of the propeller chains, the alignment of the brass fins, the angle of the remains of last week’s rainbow still caught in the rigging.

“Is all this strictly necessary?” Sammi asked, watching her trace a pattern of concentric circles on the main engine casing with a stick of red chalk.

“Only if we want to arrive where we mean to,” Xiangyun said. “Airships don’t just move through space. They move through about-ness.”

Eriko’s eyes lit. “Intentional vectors?”

“Exactly.” Xiangyun turned to her, suddenly animated. “If your primary purpose is trade, you get one kind of path—stable, well-marked, full of other merchants. If your primary purpose is pilgrimage, different currents, more unpredictable weather, higher likelihood of birds with opinions. Our purpose—”

“—is delivery of letters and unasked-for enlightenment,” Cap’n Jin cut in. “So we get the scenic routes.”

“The pataphysical structure of a small airship,” Xiangyun continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “relies on being more narratively interesting than the ground. That’s what pulls us up.”

Eriko looked like someone had handed her a new axiom set for the universe.

“So lift is proportional,” she said slowly, “to story density per cubic meter.”

“Among other factors,” Xiangyun agreed. “Weight, temperature, number of unresolved romantic tensions on board—”

Sammi coughed.

Xiangyun winced, then added briskly, “—and the quality of the captain’s hat.”

Cap’n Jin touched his battered cap protectively. “This hat has seventeen successful landings in it.”

“And three very impressive crashes,” Xiangyun pointed out. “Which is why the engines respect it.”

Sammi grinned. Eriko flipped open her notebook and began scribbling equations with suspicious speed.

The Causeway, listening under their feet as ropes were cast off, decided it approved. A small airship leaving from its railings made the whole day feel more expansive.

---

Into the Mountains

When the propellers spun up, the ship rose with the air of a sigh fulfilled. The Causeway let them go, relishing the tug, then settled back as the hull cleared the last lanterns.

Hangzhou slid away beneath them: steampunk houses leaning over canals, the glint of Chef Wu’s tiger-oven, the long curve of the Su Causeway itself, stripes of shadow and stone.

The lake shone like a polished mirror, reflecting a second ship that flew upside down beneath it, keel kissing clouds. The reflection-ship winked at them and then dissolved into ripples.

Sammi pressed her face to the rail, laughing.

“You see that?” she called.

“Of course,” Xiangyun said. “Our airship has a counterpart in the water’s imagination. Very good luck. Unless you fly low.”

They rose over the city walls, over terraced fields, into the embrace of the mountains.

At each hermitage, Cap’n Jin brought them down with the swaggering grace of a man who trusted both his ship and dumb luck. Monks in practical robes trudged out to meet them, hands ink-stained from digital sutras printed on rice paper. They traded parcels: bundles of scrolls going out, sacks of tea and carefully wrapped jars of pickles coming in.

At one convent, a stern abbess inquired whether Cap’n Jin had, once again, smuggled any “unsuitable magazines” inside the bundles of algebraic geometry.

“Perish the thought,” Jin said, finishing a wink he never quite started.

The abbess opened the bundle and shook out three hand-printed zines with titles like “The Metaphysics of Staircases (Illustrated)”.

Sammi beamed from the deck. The abbess sighed but tucked them under her arm.

At a mathematicians’ retreat carved directly into the rock, Eriko disappeared for nearly an hour into a heated discussion about topologically interesting noodles. Xiangyun hovered at the edge of the group, listening more to Eriko’s questions than the answers.

When Eriko finally emerged, cheeks flushed, she found Xiangyun leaning against the railing, pretending to adjust a valve that didn’t need adjusting.

“How do you keep them from falling off?” Eriko asked, nodding toward the engines. “The equations, I mean. They’re all so… delicate.”

Xiangyun shrugged. “I don’t. I fall with them. I just make sure the ship falls in the same direction.”

“That sounds terrifying,” Eriko said—and then, softly, “and familiar.”

Their eyes met; something unspoken jumped between them, a spark that searched for tinder.

At that precise moment, Sammi appeared, shuffling a stack of hastily scribbled interviews.

“You two ready?” she chirped. “The hermits have run out of tea to offer and have started boiling their socks.”

Xiangyun stepped back. “Ready,” she said, voice only slightly tight.

Eriko reached for Sammi’s hand as they climbed back aboard. It was instinctive, casual, utterly clear.

Xiangyun watched their joined fingers. Then she squared her shoulders, patted the nearest engine casing, and whispered, “All right. We fly on unrequited parameters. We’ve done worse.”

The engine hummed in sympathetic, slightly melancholy agreement.

---

Picking Up Brother Wei

By late afternoon, mist had gathered in the valleys like thoughts that didn’t want to settle. Their final stop was an old monastery perched on a ridge, its roofs layered like stacked questions.

As they descended, bells rang—a slow, off-kilter pattern, like someone had dropped a standard chime sequence and put it back together wrong.

“That’s Brother Wei’s doing,” Cap’n Jin said. “He’s been here re-calibrating their alert system. Or mis-calibrating. Hard to say.”

They touched down on a flagged terrace. A small group of monks approached, led by Brother Wei himself, gear-halo gently spinning above his shaved head.

The halo was a delicate mechanism of interlocking brass cogs, suspended just beyond his skin. Today it ticked with a faint, uneven rhythm, as if one tooth somewhere was not quite catching.

“Ah, my accidental taxi,” Brother Wei greeted them. “I am in need of transportation.”

“To where?” Jin asked.

Wei smiled faintly. “To wherever the Su Causeway is.”

“That,” Jin said, “we can do.”

As the monks loaded a single modest bag onto the ship, Eriko studied Wei’s halo with the fascination of one engineer looking at another’s half-finished project.

“I thought you were undergoing retreat,” she said. “To correct your… percentages.”

“Indeed,” Wei sighed, climbing aboard. “It turns out you cannot integrate enlightenment by parts. The error term remains.”

“Can I write that down?” Sammi whispered, already doing so.

Wei sank onto a coil of rope, the halo whirring as if settling into a favorite groove. “They say the Causeway has acquired…opinions,” he said. “And that it remembers the old days when mountains were more metaphorical. I thought perhaps a change of supporting infrastructure might shake something loose.” He glanced up. “At the very least, I can get decent stew from Wu again.”

Xiangyun, who had a soft spot for all beings who lived partially embedded in machinery, patted his shoulder.

“The Su Causeway specializes in emotional load-bearing,” she said. “It’s a good place to rest your gears.”

The airship turned toward home.

---

Return to the Bridge with Opinions

By the time they reached Hangzhou, the sun was sliding behind the western hills, turning the lake into molten copper.

The Su Causeway rose ahead, stone spine glowing. From this height, it looked like a single, thoughtful brushstroke drawn across the water.

As the airship descended toward its moorings, the bridge felt the familiar tug of their approach. The stress currents in its stones adjusted. It tasted the incoming load: engines still buzzing with distant mountains, letters in satchels, one half-baked enlightenment with mechanical garnish.

Ah, thought the Causeway. The monk with the lopsided halo.

It remembered Brother Wei’s earlier visits—his meditative pacing, the way his thoughts had thrummed against its surface like a drum slightly out of tune. The Great Shaking had rearranged many things; perhaps it could shuffle his insights as well.

The ship bumped gently against the mooring posts. Ropes flew; hands caught.

Brother Wei stepped down onto the stone and stopped.

His halo ticked louder, sudden.

Beneath his feet, the Causeway experimented with a very small tremor—nothing anyone else would register, just the architectural equivalent of a throat-clearing. A ripple rolled along the stones, up through the soles of his sandals, into his spine.

“Mm,” he said.

The halo spun, hesitated, then clicked forward one notch it had never reached before.

Gear teeth met where they had always failed to meet. A tiny curl of displaced ignorance evaporated with a soft pop, like a soap bubble being punctured by a well-aimed koan.

Sammi, stepping down behind him, saw the gear ring adjust.

“Did your hat just fix itself?” she blurted.

“Enlightenment is not a hat,” Wei said automatically. Then he lifted a hand, touched the halo, and frowned in wonder. “But…something shifted.”

The Causeway, emboldened, tried another trick. It remembered the keen little quake from the day of the Thearch’s crossing and reproduced a gentler version: a barely audible thrum corresponding to the resonance of two people finally finding each other.

This time, the vibration carried not only through Brother Wei’s bones but through the brass of his halo. Several smaller cogs wobbled, then settled into new alignments.

Visually, the change was subtle; structurally, it was a minor revolution.

Brother Wei blinked.

For a moment, every sound on the Causeway—the merchants shouting, the distant hiss of steam, the plop of oars—fell into a pattern he could almost see. A web of interactions: stew leading to conversation, conversation to courage, courage to small earthquakes, earthquakes to slightly improved governance.

“Oh,” he said softly. “I see. Not all the way. But further.”

“How much further?” Eriko asked, eyes sharp with curiosity and concern.

Brother Wei considered, listening to the tiny ticks above his head.

“I would say,” he replied, “I am now approximately three-quarters enlightened, with a margin of error of… five percent.”

“That’s a notable improvement,” Xiangyun said.

“Is the remainder important?” Sammi asked.

“Very,” Wei said. “It is the part that keeps me from being insufferable.”

The Causeway preened a little, in a granite kind of way.

---

After Landing: Adjustments

Chef Wu, hearing the ship had returned, sent over a tray of stew and tea as a landing tax. The four of them—Sammi, Eriko, Xiangyun, Brother Wei—gathered near the moorings to eat, bowls cupped in hands gone cold from altitude.

“So,” Sammi said between spoonfuls, “how does it feel, Brother Wei? Any new revelations about the nature of reality? Subtle insights? Sudden desire to reorganize all the temple shoe racks?”

Wei flexed his toes thoughtfully. “Reality still appears annoyingly persistent,” he said. “But it feels… kinder. The errors seem less like failures and more like… annotations.”

Eriko’s gaze drifted along the length of the Causeway, up to their own crooked building with its round window-eye, now glowing softly in the dusk.

“The Su Causeway is good with annotations,” she said.

“It is,” Wei agreed. He turned his head, halo spinning with deliberate slowness. “And you two? Any shifts in your own…percentage?”

Sammi’s grin turned mischievous. “Oh, we are fully, gloriously, statistically-inappropriately in love.”

Eriko elbowed her, but didn’t deny it.

Xiangyun, watching, felt the familiar pinch in her chest. It hurt in that clean way that said: this feeling is real, even if it never lands where you wish. She took a deep breath, letting engine-smoke and stew-steam fill her lungs.

The engines, sensing her mood, shifted into a low, reassuring purr.

“You know,” she said slowly, “unrequited isn’t the same as unproductive. Pataphysically, I mean. An asymmetrical vector still moves the ship. Sometimes more efficiently.”

Eriko turned to her, expression serious. “You deserve symmetry too, though,” she said.

Xiangyun met her eyes, then laughed softly. “One miracle at a time. Today I got to show you how lift works. That’s already better than last week.”

Cap’n Jin, who had been quietly eavesdropping from the edge of the group, raised his tea cup toward the bridge.

“To small ships, overloaded stories, and load-bearing friendships,” he toasted.

The Causeway accepted the dedication, feeling the pressure of their feet as both literal and metaphorical. It carried their weight, their bowls, their half-fixed enlightenments, and their hearts with equal competence.

---

Coda: The Bridge’s New Project

That night, long after the last tram had rattled to its depot, the Su Causeway lay awake.

It replayed the day’s vibrations: the airship’s departure, the letters exchanged in mountain winds, Brother Wei’s halo click, Xiangyun’s quiet courage, Sammi and Eriko’s laughter spilling onto its stones.

Once, it had existed only to connect shore to shore, garden to garden, palace to poets. Now it found itself doing…more.

I am not merely a road, it realized, somewhat startled. I am also a…correction mechanism.

Not for morality or law—those flowed over it like rain. No, its gift seemed to be subtler: nudging souls and structures a few millimeters closer to where they fit, whether that was a rebellious apartment building, a slightly crooked monk, or a tiny airship that refused to obey normal physics.

Very well, the Causeway decided. If the mountains have their hermitages and the palaces their courts, I shall be the place where things align by accident.

Far above, Jin’s airship swayed gently at its moorings, half in this world, half in footnotes. Xiangyun slept with her hand on a warm engine pipe. Brother Wei dreamed of staircases that led simultaneously up, down, and inward. Sammi and Eriko, in their round-window apartment, lay tangled and content, the building humming approval under their bed.

The Su Causeway held them all, stone and story intertwined, quietly pleased with its new hobby.

Tomorrow, it thought, it would see what else needed a small, strategic shake.