← Chapter 1 | Index | Chapter 3 →
The breakfast buffet was organized.
Mai stood at the entrance of the dining hall with her tablet in one hand and her critical analysis engaged, which was redundant because her critical analysis was always engaged, like a background program that never stopped running and occasionally produced notifications like the HVAC in the elevator is operating at 73% efficiency or your partner is counting exits again or the pastries have been arranged by color gradient.
That last one was new.
“Shammy.” Mai didn't look up from the buffet. “The pastries have been arranged by color gradient.”
“They're pretty!” Shammy was already three steps ahead, drawn toward the food with the gravitational certainty of someone whose metabolism apparently ran on atmospheric pressure and good intentions. “Look at this one. It's like a sunset. I want to eat a sunset.”
Mai considered this. Aesthetic design, she decided. Someone on the kitchen staff with a strong visual sense. Some hotels did that. She'd seen worse. “The gradient goes from light pastry at the left through medium croissants in the center to dark chocolate items on the right. It's precise. It's, ”
Wait.
The gradient was mirrored on the other side of the buffet, in the fruit arrangement. Which meant either the kitchen had two staff with matching strong visual senses, working in perfect coordination, or —
Mai stopped herself. She was on vacation. She was not going to analyze the breakfast buffet. The breakfast buffet had organized itself, or the kitchen staff had excellent aesthetic instincts, and either way, it was not an anomaly, it was breakfast.
She put the tablet away.
Took it out again.
Put it away.
The dining hall was large and bright and had the particular quality of coastal resorts that were designed by someone who had consulted a mood board extensively: white linens, blonde wood, windows that opened onto a view of the pool and the ocean beyond, and a ceiling fan that was spinning at approximately 42 RPM, which was efficient for air circulation without being,
No. Vacation. She was on vacation.
Mai took a plate and walked the length of the buffet. Methodical. Efficient. She noted the juice carafes, four, arranged from orange to grapefruit to cranberry to something green that claimed to be kiwi but probably wasn't, and the napkin dispensers, which were placed at ergonomic intervals, and the hot food station, where eggs were being prepared in real time by a chef whose mustache had the precise dimensions of someone who took breakfast seriously.
She took a croissant. Sat down at a table with a view of the pool, where Shammy was already floating like she'd been born in water and had only taken to land as a courtesy. Ace was sitting at the pool's edge, feet in the water, back ramrod straight, scanning the perimeter with the casual subtlety of a security camera that had been painted a cheerful color.
“You're not in the water,” Mai said, setting her plate down.
“I'm near the water,” Ace said. “Being near the water is vacation-adjacent.”
“Vacation-adjacent.”
“It's a spectrum.”
Mai sat. Picked at her croissant. Opened the spreadsheet on her tablet, which had a tab for “Vacation Day 1, Meals” and a sub-tab for “Unexpected Variables” that was currently empty. She closed the tablet. Opened it. Closed it again.
“The buffet is well-organized,” she said.
“You said.”
“The color gradient on the pastries is precise. Almost too precise.”
Ace's eyes flicked to her. That flat, dark look that meant she was tracking Mai's analysis the way she tracked threats, with respect and with the assumption that Mai had identified something worth paying attention to.
“Too precise how?”
“I don't know yet.” Mai picked up her croissant. Tore off a piece. Ate it. It was, objectively, an excellent croissant. Flaky. Butter-rich. The kind of pastry that suggested the kitchen staff understood their craft at a molecular level. “The arrangement could be aesthetic design. It could be a breakfast chef with strong opinions. Or, ”
“Or it could be something that's not a coincidence,” Ace finished.
“I'm not saying it's not a coincidence. I'm saying it's a precise coincidence. And precise coincidences, ”
“, are worth tracking,” Ace said, and the corner of her mouth moved in what might have been amusement or might have been the particular expression she made when Mai was right, which was a different expression from the one she made when Mai was right and she didn't want to admit it, and Mai had cataloged both.
The juice carafe at the far end of the buffet moved.
Not fell. Not was knocked. Moved. Shifted. Picked itself up by approximately three centimeters and set itself down four centimeters to the left, in the precise position that completed the color gradient symmetry with the napkin dispenser on the opposite end.
Mai watched this happen.
“Did you see that?” Ace asked.
“I saw it.”
From the pool, Shammy called out: “The water felt that. Whatever it was.”
Mai stood up. Walked to the buffet. The juice carafes were now arranged in a perfect arc, the four containers positioned at mathematically precise intervals that created a visual effect like, like a waveform. Like a frequency distribution. Like something that had been organized by a mind that thought in patterns the way Mai thought in patterns.
“The pastries,” she said, and looked at the pastry display.
The pastries had rearranged themselves.
Not dramatically. Not obviously. But the croissants had shifted so their curves all pointed the same direction, and the fruit tarts had rotated so their decorative patterns formed a spiral, and the chocolate items at the dark end of the gradient had been stacked into a small but structurally precise pyramid.
This was not how breakfast had been arranged when Mai had walked the buffet five minutes ago.
“Okay,” Mai said, and her voice had shifted into the register she used for anomalies, which was the same register she used for interesting problems, which was the same register she used for breakfast buffets that had reorganized themselves into geometric patterns. “This is either an extremely dedicated breakfast chef or, ”
The napkins folded themselves into origami cranes.
All of them. Every napkin on the buffet, approximately forty-seven napkins (Mai counted, because Mai counted), folded themselves into cranes at the same time, with the synchronized precision of a choreographed routine. The folds happened in sequence, left corner, right corner, center crease, wing adjustment, and when they were done, forty-seven napkin cranes sat on the buffet, arranged in a pattern that, if Mai was reading it correctly, spelled out the word welcome in a font she didn't recognize.
“Huh,” Shammy said, pulling herself out of the pool. Water cascaded off her in a way that was probably physics and definitely not, because the water seemed to take an extra half-second before letting go of her skin, like it was reluctant to leave. “That's friendly.”
“Friendly,” Mai repeated.
“The napkins said welcome! That's very hospitable.”
“Napkins don't say things, Shammy.”
“These ones did.” Shammy was already walking toward the buffet, leaving wet footprints on the tile, and she was smiling the way she smiled when something unexpected happened, which was the same way other people smiled when they received a gift, which was with her whole face and also the air around her, which was currently doing something that might have been a small updraft of excitement. “Look at this. The origami is really good. The wing angles are consistent.”
“The wing angles are consistent,” Mai echoed, because this was the part where she was supposed to be alarmed, and she was, she was definitely alarmed, but she was also fascinated, and the fascination was winning, which was always the problem with anomalies and also with croissants and also with Ace, who had first appeared in her life as a data point that didn't fit any of her models and had proceeded to not fit any of her models ever since.
Ace was on her feet. Not by the pool anymore. Standing between Mai and the buffet with her hand on her katana hilt, which was her version of assessing a situation, which was also her version of being protective, which was also, Mai had long ago realized, her version of saying I'm here and I'm not going to let anything happen to you without using any of those words.
“It's reorganizing,” Mai said. Her tablet was out. New tab: Anomaly 1, Breakfast Buffet. She was already noting the time, the location, the nature of the rearrangement, the pattern type (geometric, escalating, non-hostile). “The buffet is reorganizing itself. The pastries, the juice, the napkins. They're following a pattern. Look at the spiral on the tarts, it's a Fibonacci sequence.”
“A Fibonacci sequence,” Ace said flatly.
“The golden ratio. It's a mathematical pattern found in, ”
“I know what it is, Mai. I'm, this is breakfast.”
“Breakfast is being organized by something with an appreciation for mathematical aesthetics.” Mai was walking along the buffet now, noting the changes. The cereal bowls had aligned themselves. The fruit had sorted by color, not the rough color sorting of a human, but the precise spectral arrangement of something that understood the electromagnetic spectrum. The toast rack had positioned itself at a 23.4-degree angle relative to the cereal, which was the axial tilt of the Earth, and that was either coincidence or a very specific sense of humor.
“Mai.” Ace's voice, from behind her. Low. The voice she used when she was about to say something Mai didn't want to hear. “This is our first morning. Our first morning of vacation. In a place with zero recorded anomalies.”
“I'm aware.”
“Zero recorded.”
“I'm tracking the discrepancy, yes.”
“And your response to a self-organizing breakfast buffet is to analyze it.”
“Yes.” Mai looked up from her tablet. “Because that's what I do. I analyze. That's, ” She stopped. The spreadsheet was open. She was on vacation. Her first morning. And she was already categorizing anomalous napkin behavior.
The pastry pyramid had added a new layer.
“Shammy,” Mai said. “You said the air has layers.”
“I said the air has layers,” Shammy confirmed. She was standing by the buffet, examining a napkin crane with the expression of someone who had been given a present and wasn't sure if it was a present or a warning. “Ocean layer, hotel layer, something-else layer. The something-else layer is, ” She held the napkin crane up to her ear, which was a thing she did sometimes, listening to things that weren't making sound, or were making sound at frequencies that only she and possibly three species of whale could detect. “The something-else layer is very interested in breakfast.”
“Interested how?”
“Like it's trying to be helpful.” Shammy set the crane down. It folded itself into a slightly different crane, this one with its wings spread wider, as if it were trying to show her something. “See? Helpful. It organized the breakfast because it thought we'd like the pattern. It made the napkins say welcome because that's polite. It's, it's like a host. A really, really precise host.”
“A host,” Ace said.
“A host who thinks in Fibonacci sequences,” Mai said, because she couldn't help herself, because the pattern was there and she could see it and when she could see a pattern she had to name it, that was how she worked, that was who she was, and if the breakfast buffet was going to reorganize itself according to mathematical principles then she was going to figure out which principles and why.
The chef at the omelet station looked over. His mustache twitched. He went back to making eggs with the calm focus of someone who worked at a resort called Where Nothing Happens and had clearly, at some point in his career, decided that if the breakfast reorganized itself then the breakfast reorganized itself, and his job was still to make the eggs.
Carlos appeared. The concierge materialized in that way he had, which was either very good customer service timing or something else, standing at the edge of the buffet with his hands clasped and his smile in place. The smile that said I have seen things and I have chosen to interpret them optimistically.
“Good morning! I trust you slept well?” Carlos gestured at the buffet, at the origami cranes, at the gently glowing juice carafes, at the Fibonacci spiral of pastries, with the easy confidence of a man showing off a well-decorated living room. “The kitchen has been quite creative this morning.”
“Creative,” Ace said. Her hand was on her katana hilt. She was standing between Carlos and Mai, which was either protective positioning or where she happened to be standing, and it was both because Ace didn't do “just happened to be standing” anywhere.
“Our breakfast presentation is one of the resort's signature features,” Carlos continued. “Guests often comment on the, ah, attention to detail.”
“The napkins folded themselves into cranes,” Mai said.
“We use only the finest linen.” Carlos's smile didn't waver. “You'll find the thread count significantly above industry standard.”
“They folded,” Ace said. “By themselves. We were watching.”
“The thread count does allow for remarkable structural integrity.” His smile was a very well-maintained thing. It had probably been trained on exactly this. Mai thought, briefly, about whether she should be impressed or alarmed by that, and did not reach a conclusion.
“They spelled 'welcome,'” Ace said. Not a question. A statement. The kind of flat statement that was also a question, and also a threat assessment, and also a request for clarification, all in four syllables.
“In several languages, yes! The resort prides itself on hospitality.” Carlos beamed. “Will there be anything else? I can arrange a cabana by the pool. The morning light is excellent.”
He left. His footsteps were oddly muffled against the tile floor. Or maybe that was the acoustics of a large dining hall. Or maybe that was something else.
“I don't trust that man's smile,” Ace said.
“Nobody trusts that man's smile,” Shammy said. “His smile is too good at being a smile. It's like a smile that took a class in being a smile and graduated with honors.”
“Shammy.”
“What? It is. It's a very competent smile. I respect the craftsmanship.”
They sat down to eat. This was, after all, still breakfast. The croissants were flaky. The eggs were precisely seasoned. The fruit was arranged in a spectrum that was almost certainly not how fruit was arranged anywhere else on the planet. Mai ate methodically. Ace ate in small, quick bites between perimeter scans. Shammy ate like someone who had discovered that food existed and was enthusiastic about this development.
The napkin crane in the center of their table ruffled its paper wings. Not from the breeze. The air in the dining hall was still. It ruffled them the way a bird ruffles its feathers when it's pleased about something.
Ace stared at it.
“I think it likes that we're eating,” Shammy said, and bit into a croissant.
“Great,” Ace said. “The hotel is watching us have breakfast.”
“The hotel is serving us breakfast,” Shammy corrected, through a mouthful of pastry. “There's a difference. One is surveillance. The other is hospitality. This feels like hospitality. Surveilly hospitality, but still.”
“The glow on the juice carafes is pulsing in sync with Shammy's breathing,” Mai observed. She'd been watching. Of course she'd been watching. “Approximately 0.3 seconds behind. Like it's matching her rhythm.”
Shammy looked down at herself, then at the juice. “Huh. It does that. The water in the pool does it too. I think things, I don't know, want to be in time with me. Like how a metronome works. I'm the click and they're the pendulum.”
“That's not how metronomes work,” Mai said.
“You know what I mean.”
Ace reached across the table and took Mai's hand. Took it. No announcement. Her fingers found Mai's and held on, firm, steady, the grip of someone who needed an anchor and trusted this one. Mai's thumb traced a small circle on Ace's knuckle. Automatic. Responsive. The way their hands always found each other, a closed loop that didn't require thought.
“We're going to be fine,” Ace said. Not a guess. A declaration. The kind of thing she said when she'd decided something and reality was going to have to get in line.
“I know,” Mai said.
Shammy reached over and put her hand on top of both of theirs. Her palm was cool and damp from the pool. Her fingers were long enough to cover both their hands at once. The napkin crane on the table settled its wings and sat perfectly still, as if it had been given permission to rest.
“Okay,” Mai said, and she was already creating a new tab in the spreadsheet, this one titled Anomaly Classification, Buffet Behavior, and she was typing fast because the pattern was forming in her mind like a crystallizing solution, clear and sharp and inevitable. “The anomaly is localized to the buffet area. It's non-hostile. It's organized according to mathematical principles, specifically the golden ratio and spectral color arrangement. It appears to respond to aesthetic logic rather than random displacement. This suggests, ”
“That something in this hotel is tidying up,” Shammy said helpfully.
“, that whatever is causing this has intelligence,” Mai continued, because Shammy's summary was not wrong but was also not sufficient, “or at least pattern-recognition capability. And it's trying to communicate through organization. The napkins said welcome. The pastries formed a Fibonacci spiral. It's not rearranging, it's signaling.”
Ace was quiet for a moment. Then: “We've been here twelve hours.”
“Fourteen,” Mai corrected, because she was precise about time the way she was precise about everything.
“And in fourteen hours, we've had one anomalous event.”
“One event. Multiple manifestations. The buffet, the napkins, the, is the juice doing something?”
The juice carafes had begun to glow. Softly. A pale, warm light, like bioluminescence, like the inside of a shell found on a beach at dusk. Not threatening. Not strange, even. Beautiful, if you were the kind of person who found beauty in anomalies, which Mai was, which was one of the reasons she'd chosen this life, which was one of the reasons she was standing in a breakfast buffet at seven in the morning on the first day of her vacation cataloging the behavior of self-organizing pastries.
“It's beautiful,” Shammy said softly. The air around her shifted. A small thing. The warmth in the room increased by a degree, maybe two. “It's not trying to hurt us. It's trying to say hello.”
“We don't know what it's trying to do,” Ace said, and her voice was level and flat and the voice she used when she was assessing threat levels, which was the voice she used for everything because everything was a threat until proven otherwise, and Mai loved her, she loved Ace so much, but god, sometimes she wanted to shake her, sometimes she wanted to say not everything is a threat, not everything needs to be assessed, sometimes a pastry pyramid is a pastry pyramid trying to say good morning.
But that wasn't fair. Ace's hypervigilance had saved them more times than Mai could count. It was who she was. Like Mai's analysis was who she was. Like Shammy's atmospheric sensitivity was who she was.
They were all, Mai thought, exactly as broken as they needed to be for the work they did. The question was whether they could be anything else when the work wasn't there.
“It's trying to say hello,” Mai said, and she was surprised to hear herself say it, because she hadn't meant to agree with Shammy, she'd meant to stay in analysis mode, but the juice was glowing and the napkins were cranes and the pastries were spiraling and the pattern was so beautiful, so precise, so clearly the work of something that thought the way she thought, in patterns and sequences and elegant arrangements of data, and she understood it, she understood the impulse to organize, to arrange, to make things make sense, and maybe that was the point,
“Or,” she amended, looking at her tablet, looking at the pattern, looking at the Fibonacci sequence in the tarts and the spectral arrangement in the fruit and the 23.4-degree tilt of the toast rack, “it's trying to show us something. The pattern isn't merely aesthetic. It's directional. The spiral points, ” She followed the Fibonacci arrangement with her finger. “, toward the hotel basement. The kitchen. The, ”
“The foundation,” Shammy said quietly.
Mai looked at her.
Shammy's hair was shifting. The silver-white strands moved in a wind that wasn't blowing, and her eyes had that look they got when she was listening to something no one else could hear, and her hand was in her pocket, where Mai knew she kept the smooth stones she'd been collecting from the beach since they'd arrived, and Shammy was looking at the ground, at the floor, at the foundation of the building, at something underneath all of this that was trying very hard to say hello.
“The foundation,” Shammy repeated, and her voice was the soft voice, the careful voice, the voice she used when she was holding something fragile and didn't want to break it. “There's something under us, Mai. Something old. And I think, ” She paused. The air shifted again. Warm and then cool and then warm again, like a pulse. “I think it's been waiting for us.”
The juice carafes pulsed. The napkins adjusted their wings. The pastries added another layer to the pyramid.
And Mai, who had come to this resort to stop analyzing things, opened a new tab in her spreadsheet and began to type.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of pattern and observation.
Mai sat by the pool with her tablet and her spreadsheet and her color-coded system of tabs, one for each anomaly manifestation, one for timing data, one for the geometric pattern she was reverse-engineering from the pastry arrangement, one for Shammy's atmospheric readings, which were more reliable than any sensor Mai had ever used and considerably easier to read than the scientific literature on anomalous field theory, which was written by people who had clearly never experienced an anomaly and were guessing based on data that was, in Mai's professional opinion, approximately 40% guesswork.
The anomaly, she was calling it Anomaly 1, Provisional Classification: Non-Hostile Organizing Intelligence, which was a lot of words for “something in this hotel thinks breakfast should be beautiful”, had settled down after the initial display. The napkins remained cranes. The pastries remained in their spiral. The juice carafes continued to glow, but softly, like nightlights, like the hotel was trying to make them feel at home.
Which was either sweet or suspicious, and Mai had a tab for both interpretations.
“You've been on that tablet for two hours,” Ace said, dropping onto the lounge chair beside her. Her hair was wet from the pool. There was a small smear of sunscreen near her left ear that she clearly didn't know about. Mai spent a moment deciding whether to mention it, decided not to, thought about it again, decided not to again. Her shadow was lying flat on the concrete, still, and Mai had noticed, had she mentioned she had a tab for this too, that Ace's shadow was behaving differently here than at home. More settled. Less pressed to the floor. As if even her shadow was trying to relax.
“I'm analyzing data,” Mai said.
“You're analyzing breakfast.”
“Breakfast is data. Everything is data. You are data.” She looked at Ace. “Very compact data. Approximately 120 centimeters of data arranged in a highly efficient threat-response configuration.”
“Did you just call me short and dangerous?”
“I called you compact and efficient. The danger is implied.”
Ace's mouth did the thing. The thing that was almost a smile but wasn't quite, because Ace didn't smile at jokes, she smiled at Mai, and only when she thought Mai wasn't looking, which she always was because Mai was always looking, because that was who she was, and right now, looking at Ace sitting by the pool with her wet hair and her flat shadow and her hand drifting to her katana hilt every three minutes, Mai felt the particular kind of fondness that came from loving someone who was very good at what they did and very bad at stopping.
Which, she realized, was also true of herself.
“Hey,” Mai said. “I'm going to figure this out.”
“I know you are.”
“And then we're going to have a vacation.”
Ace looked at her. That look again. The one that said I hear you and I want to believe you but I also just counted the exits in this pool area and there are four, including the service gate behind the cabanas, and I'm not going to apologize for that because it's who I am.
“We're going to have a vacation,” Mai repeated, and she meant it, she genuinely meant it, she was going to categorize this anomaly and then she was going to close her spreadsheet and then she was going to lie on a beach and not analyze anything for at least three consecutive hours, which, for her, qualified as relaxation.
“Okay,” Ace said.
“Okay,” Mai said.
Shammy surfaced from the pool like a creature emerging from its natural habitat, which, in a sense, she was, and shook water from her hair in a way that created a small localized precipitation event, and said, “The water says it's going to be a beautiful day,” and then, because Shammy was Shammy, she added, “and also that there's a very smooth stone by the shallow end that I'm going to keep.”
“Another stone?” Ace said. “You have fourteen in your pockets already.”
“Twelve,” Shammy corrected, pulling herself onto the pool edge. The water let go of her reluctantly, trailing off her skin in slow spirals. “I gave two to the hotel.”
“You gave two stones to the hotel.”
“I put them in the lobby planter. The something-else layer liked them. The fern perked up.”
Mai looked up from her tablet. “You fed the anomaly stones.”
“I shared stones with the building's foundation. There's a difference.”
“There really isn't,” Ace said. But she was fighting a smile. The almost-smile that crept up on her when Shammy did something absurd and also, somehow, exactly the right thing. Because Shammy's instincts were like Ace's exit-counting and Mai's pattern-recognition: automatic, constant, and usually right. If Shammy said the building liked the stones, the building probably liked the stones.
“The fern perked up,” Mai repeated slowly. She added something to the spreadsheet.
“You're adding 'fern' to the anomaly tab, aren't you,” Ace said.
“I'm adding 'botanical response to mineral offering' to the environmental interaction log. It's a separate tab.”
“How many tabs do you have?”
“Seventeen. But three are formatting templates.”
Shammy lay back on the warm concrete, one arm behind her head, her hair spreading around her like a silver-blue halo that was, in direct sunlight, honestly a bit much. She closed her eyes. “The building is humming,” she said. “Very low. Below hearing range for you two. It's content. Like a cat that's found a warm spot.”
“The building is purring,” Ace said.
“The building is resonating contentedly.” Shammy's voice was drowsy, sun-warm. “Big difference.”
“Is there? Is there a difference?”
“Shh. I'm communing with the architecture.”
She held up the stone. It was, by all objective measures, a rock. Smooth, dark, approximately the size of her palm. Unremarkable.
But Mai, who had been trained to notice patterns, noticed that the stone's surface had a faint pattern of concentric circles, like the Fibonacci spiral in the pastries, like the arrangement of the napkin cranes, like the mathematical precision of the breakfast buffet that had reorganized itself while they were watching.
She said nothing. She added a tab to the spreadsheet: Provisional Note, Stones.
The morning continued. The sun climbed. The pool sparkled. Somewhere in the hotel, the breakfast buffet was rearranging itself back to its original configuration, napkins flat, pastries in rows, juice carafes in a straight line, as if nothing had happened.
But Mai had the data. Mai always had the data.
And the data was beginning to suggest that zero recorded anomalies was about as reliable as a breakfast buffet that folded itself into cranes.
Lunch arrived without incident. Or rather, lunch arrived with the kind of incident that was becoming normal: their table had been set with three place settings, each one calibrated to the exact height of the person who would sit there. Ace's chair was slightly lower. Shammy's napkin was larger, as if the hotel had intuited that a standard napkin would be insufficient for someone whose presence occupied the atmospheric equivalent of two standard adults.
Mai's napkin had been folded into a tiny spreadsheet.
“That's not even possible,” Mai said, staring at it. The paper cells were perfectly aligned. There were even miniature data entries, too small to read without magnification, in columns that appeared to be labeled with headers.
“I think the hotel has a crush on you,” Shammy said, eating something that might have been a fish taco but was probably an anomaly expressing itself through Mexican cuisine.
“The hotel does not have a crush on me.”
“The hotel made you a spreadsheet out of a napkin, Mai. That's not normal hospitality. That's flirting.”
Ace snorted. Actually snorted. The sound was so unexpected that both Mai and Shammy turned to look at her, and Ace's face did the thing where it was trying very hard to be stoic but the corners of her mouth had other ideas. At the next table, a man with sunburned shoulders glanced over from his fish taco and then looked immediately back at it, with the practiced incuriosity of someone who had been on at least two cruises and knew when not to engage.
“It's not funny,” Mai said.
“It's a little funny,” Ace said.
“The hotel is flirting with me via origami data visualization, and you think that's funny.”
“I think,” Ace said, and she reached over and straightened Mai's tiny paper spreadsheet with one finger, gentle, precise, “that you've finally met something that communicates the way you do, and you don't know what to do with it.”
Mai opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the napkin. Looked at Ace. Looked at Shammy, who was grinning with her entire face and also the air around her, which was doing something that felt like amusement.
“I'm going to eat my lunch,” Mai said. “And I'm not going to analyze the napkin.”
She analyzed the napkin. But only a little.
← Chapter 1 | Index | Chapter 3 →—
© 2025-2026. “World of Ace, Mai and Shammy” and all original characters, settings, story elements, and concepts are the intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.
Non-commercial fan works are allowed with attribution.
Commercial use, redistribution, or adaptation requires explicit permission from the author.
Contact: editor at publication-x.com
Check out our SubscribeStar page at https://subscribestar.adult/konrad-k