## Chapter 352 — Something With No Use

On Monday morning, 2 August, Isha carried both first-aid cards to work.

The older basic-life-support card lived in the front pocket of her employment folder. The new First Aid Provider card sat behind it, its edges still too clean. She had also brought the certificate because Ishikawa had asked for a copy for the operator's training records, though the original would come home again.

The climbing centre had already opened when she arrived. Rental shoes were lined beneath the counter in pairs that would stop being paired by lunchtime, and the first beginner booking was filling in the waiver on a tablet. Ishikawa took the certificate between checking the morning staffing sheet and answering a question about a school-group booking later in the month.

“Congratulations again,” she said. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll copy this before somebody puts chalk on it.”

Isha left the documents with her and went to change. The engagement ring came off after she washed her hands and went into its small case inside the locked staff bag. By the time she returned to the floor, two children had already exchanged rental shoes because each believed the other pair looked faster.

The certificate reappeared just before lunch. Ishikawa handed the original back with a photocopy clipped beneath the centre's training record. On the staff-room noticeboard, a laminated emergency sheet listed the employees who held current response qualifications. Isha's name had been added beside the longer first-aid course as well as basic life support.

There were now three names on that part of Monday's rota instead of two.

“That changes less than I expected,” Isha said.

Ishikawa looked at the board. “Good. If one certificate changes the whole centre, the centre has a problem.” She tapped the line beneath Isha's name. “It means we know who has had the training when we divide jobs in an incident. It also means I can stop asking you whether you have completed the course.”

Isha accepted both benefits. The next booking arrived before there was anything else to say about them.

Her afternoon contained no injury beyond a boy rubbing a sore patch on his heel after choosing shoes too small because he disliked the colour of the correct pair. His mother changed them after Isha showed where the heel was moving. A university student forgot the final step of the harness check and corrected it when prompted. Near four, one of the auto-belay units was closed for a routine inspection, forcing three customers to choose another wall.

The new card remained in Isha's wallet through all of it.

At the end of the shift, Ishikawa asked her to initial the monthly first-aid-kit check beside another staff member. The seals were intact, the listed items were present and two cold packs were due for replacement before the end of the year. Isha signed the line, put the ring back on after washing away the chalk and went home carrying the same work bag she had brought that morning.

Thomas was at the dining table when she arrived, his laptop open beside a page covered in four columns from the university's arrival pilot. He closed the screen after she set her bag down.

“How much authority did the certificate grant you?” he asked.

“Enough to count triangular bandages.” Isha took the new card from her wallet and placed it beside his hand. “My name is now on the trained-response list. There were already other names.”

Thomas read the card again even though he had seen it the previous night. “That seems appropriately unheroic.”

“I also found two cold packs that will expire in December.”

“Your rise continues.”

Isha took the card back and kissed him before the conversation could improve upon itself. The qualification joined the older certificate in the employment folder after dinner. The next time she went to work, she did not carry the original with her.

---

The question of what kind of wedding they wanted waited until Wednesday evening.

Neither of them had scheduled a wedding discussion. Thomas had come home with a paper bag containing peaches that were ripe enough to require immediate attention, and Isha had spent the afternoon doing nothing more organised than a short gym session, shopping and forty minutes reading on the sofa. By eight, the peaches had become dessert with yoghurt and a little honey. Their work bags were put away, and the rain that had threatened all afternoon had finally begun tapping against the balcony rail.

Thomas brought the correspondence notebook from the cabinet because he wanted to add Isha's longer first-aid qualification to the August-page notes. The first two Common lines on the fresh page remained where Isha had written them after Kelda's reply.

*Mira may call me daughter.*

*I would be glad if she does.*

Below them, Thomas had added a short note about the first-aid course and nothing about marriage beyond **no date yet**.

Isha read that phrase while eating the last slice of peach. “We keep telling people we have not chosen a day.”

“We have not.”

“I know.” She set the spoon in the empty bowl. “Do we know what the day is supposed to be?”

Thomas looked at the notebook, then closed it. The rain strengthened against the balcony. There was no form open, no immigration deadline beside them and no jeweller waiting for an answer. He moved the notebook away from the centre of the table.

“I know I don't want to register the marriage and then realise we treated the whole thing like changing an address,” he said. “I don't need a large ceremony. I think I want there to be a day we remember as the day we married.”

Isha leaned back in her chair, one foot resting against the table leg. The sapphire looked almost black beneath the dining light. “A ceremony?”

“Something we deliberately attend. It could be short. Then food with people we actually want there.” Thomas stopped before turning the possibilities into a list. “What do you want?”

Isha had thought more often about being his wife than about the mechanics of becoming one. When she imagined the legal part, she saw signatures and translated documents because those were the pieces of Earth marriage she did not yet understand. When she imagined the day, the pictures were less organised. Thomas standing beside her. Clothes chosen for the occasion. Someone else knowing what they had promised because they had been invited to witness it, rather than because a record existed afterward.

“I want a ceremony,” she said. “Small. I do not want our marriage to happen only in an office where we are thinking about whether the documents are correct.”

Thomas's shoulders eased. “Small is good.”

“It does not have to imitate the living bough.” Isha ran one fingertip along the edge of the ring. “That promise happened where it belonged. I do not want to build an Earth copy and pretend the tree made this one more real.”

Thomas remembered the green above them, the witnesses and the waiting season that had followed. He remembered Ruvan's objections much more clearly than the exact arrangement of branches. The rite had survived being separated from its place; it did not need reconstruction in Sendai.

“No copied tree,” he said.

Isha smiled. “You may have flowers. I am not prohibiting plants.”

“I was not planning to acquire a ceremonial tree.”

“You have planned stranger things.”

The joke settled without carrying them away from the subject. Thomas reached across the table and turned Isha's hand palm-up, his thumb resting beneath the ring. “Who do you already know you want there?”

“Kanno.” The answer came immediately. Isha thought another moment. “Matsuda.”

“Same.”

They did not name anyone else at once. Saitō mattered to both of them, as did the neighbours who had become part of 202's life. There were university friends whose recorded history belonged to a version of them they had not lived and present friendships that had become real anyway. A wedding meal large enough to include everyone they liked could expand faster than the ceremony they had just described as small.

Isha looked towards the cabinet holding Kelda's page. “I do not want empty chairs for people who cannot come.”

Thomas followed her gaze. Kelda had told them not to leave one for her. He pictured an empty chair among people who had actually travelled to the room and disliked it immediately.

“No empty chairs,” he said.

“They are not less our family because the room is full of other people.” Isha's voice remained even. She brought her eyes back to Thomas. “Kanno and Matsuda first. We can decide everyone else later.”

Thomas nodded, reopened the correspondence notebook and wrote beneath **no date yet**:

**small Earth ceremony wanted**

**Kanno + Matsuda definitely present if possible**

Isha read the two notes. “You wrote Earth ceremony.”

“So I do not later interpret 'ceremony' as an instruction to research Wood Elf ritual reconstruction.”

“That is a useful protection against yourself.”

Thomas put down the pen. He did not add venue, clothes, witnesses, surnames, registration procedure, food, photographs or a date.

Isha watched the empty space below his last line for a moment. “When do we tell them?”

“When we have something to ask them to attend.”

“Good.” She reached for the notebook and shut it herself. “Then we are finished tonight.”

Thomas agreed. They took the bowls to the kitchen, and Isha washed while he dried because she had begun first and he had no reason to reorganise it. The rain remained steady enough that neither suggested a walk.

Later, in bed, Isha tried *husband* against the future in much the same way she had once tried *fiancé* against the present. She said it quietly near Thomas's shoulder. He turned towards her in the dark and answered with *wife*. Neither word required further discussion before sleep.

---

On Friday afternoon, coloured paper filled central Sendai above the heads of people who had come to look at coloured paper.

The covered arcades were louder than Thomas remembered from the previous year. Long streamers hung from decorated spheres and moved whenever the crowd or the building's air disturbed them. Paper ornaments descended low enough that Isha still had to watch the upper edge of her vision despite being prepared for it this time. Food smells collected and separated as they walked: grilled meat, sugar, oil, chilled fruit, coffee from shops that had not changed their ordinary menus merely because a festival occupied the street outside.

They had come later in the day, after Thomas finished work and Isha had spent the morning at the kyūdō dōjō. Her engagement ring was back on her left hand. She carried no bow now, only a small shoulder bag and a folding fan she had taken from the drawer before they left home.

Near the public wish station, Isha slowed.

The previous year she had written that she wanted to learn to make something beautiful that no one needed. Thomas remembered his own wish and had no desire to check whether he had fulfilled it according to any standard stricter than not returning to judo. Kanno's client-free Saturdays had become real often enough to count as a life change rather than festival magic.

Isha looked at the hanging slips and did not take a new one.

“I still owe this one work,” she said.

Thomas glanced upward at a curtain of coloured strips shifting above the crowd. “You have made drawings.”

“They were studies of Fold No. 6. That was useful to me.”

“Beauty can be useful to you and still qualify.”

Isha considered this with the seriousness of a person finding a loophole in a rule she had invented for herself. “No. I want to make something whose failure causes no problem at all.”

Thomas recognised that requirement more easily. “That rules out dinner.”

“It also rules out your arrival process.”

They continued through the arcade. At a stationery shop away from the busiest decorations, Isha stopped in front of packets of coloured paper and thin cord. Some paper was plain, some patterned, some translucent enough to change when layered. She chose a small mixed packet in greens, amber, cream and blue, then added a spool of fine neutral cord and two slender wooden craft dowels. Thomas asked what she intended to make.

“I don't know yet.”

“That seems promising.”

The purchase cost less than their festival dinner. Isha carried it home in a paper bag that contained no instructions.

Saturday passed without the project beginning. They met Kanno briefly for iced coffee between her errands and showed her the packet when she asked what Isha had bought at Tanabata. Kanno handled one sheet by the corner, held it against the window and asked whether Isha wanted technical advice.

“Not yet.”

Kanno put it back immediately. “Then I have none.”

Thomas looked at her. “That was suspiciously easy.”

“I sell advice during working hours.” Kanno drank her coffee. “Unrequested advice costs more.”

They spoke instead about the small-press event. Kanno had sold more copies after the table than during it, including two orders from people who had taken the card and waited several days. She had also received a message from someone who thought one photograph should have been printed larger and a different one removed entirely. Kanno disagreed with the second half and was undecided about the first.

By Sunday afternoon, the coloured paper had spread across the dining table in 202.

Isha decided she wanted something that hung. She did not want to fold an animal or imitate one of the formal Tanabata ornaments she had seen in the arcades. The first idea was a set of narrow paper loops suspended at different lengths from a horizontal thread. On the table, the pieces looked simple enough to obey.

They did not.

The first loop twisted after she joined its ends. The second held its shape but showed too much adhesive along the seam. The third was cut narrowly enough that one side bowed inward when she suspended it. Isha sat with the three failures hanging from a chopstick balanced across two mugs and regarded them with increasing interest.

Thomas was reading at the other end of the table. He had offered the cutting mat and steel ruler, then returned to his book when Isha said she wanted to discover the rest herself.

“This one is ugly,” Isha said.

Thomas looked over the top of the page. “Which?”

“The blue one.” Isha turned the chopstick until the shiny seam where adhesive had escaped faced him.

Thomas considered it from across the table. “It is recognisably a loop.”

“That is not praise.”

“I was not sure praise was requested.”

The blue loop continued to rotate after Isha released the chopstick. “Correct.”

She cut another strip.

The next hour produced improvement without competence. Isha learned that narrower paper showed every error, that a longer overlap made the seam easier to hide but changed the balance, and that measuring identical lengths did not make identical curves when she pressed each join differently. She abandoned the chopstick after deciding it made the object look like laundry and replaced it with one of the plain wooden dowels from the stationery shop.

Thomas noticed the substitution and said nothing.

She tied five loops beneath the dowel: green, cream, amber, blue and another green cut from a darker sheet. The lengths differed by eye. Two loops turned in opposite directions. One hung lower than she intended because the knot slipped while she tightened it.

Isha held the dowel up in front of the balcony window.

The object was not symmetrical. The amber loop had a visible crease. The blue loop remained the least attractive part, though she had remade it twice. When the air conditioner moved the hanging pieces, they rotated independently and briefly layered colours across one another.

Thomas put a marker in his book. “Do you like it?”

Isha watched the loops turn. “Parts of it.”

“That sounds survivable.” Thomas leaned back far enough to see the whole arrangement against the window. The loops kept moving after Isha's hand became still, their shadows crossing the pale wall behind them.

“It has no function.”

“It could indicate airflow.”

Isha turned her head slowly towards him. The pause was enough. Thomas raised one hand. “I withdraw the function.”

She looked back at the paper. The darker green loop had caught behind the cream one and needed a small touch to release it. Isha freed it, then carried the dowel to the living-room side of the LDK and held it beneath the narrow wall space near Fold No. 6.

Thomas followed with the removable hook box because the rental walls remained rental walls. He set it on the low cabinet and waited while Isha chose the height. When she pointed to a place, he handed her the hook rather than installing it himself.

Isha fixed it, waited for the adhesive strip to settle and hung the dowel from two lengths of cord. The right side dropped lower than the left.

Thomas saw it at the same moment she did. “I can shorten—”

“No.”

Isha stepped back, folded her arms and watched the crooked little arrangement turn in the conditioned air.

After a few seconds, the amber loop bumped softly against the blue one.

“It is finished,” she said.