## Chapter 397 - A Name and a Reason

### Monday, 21 February 2028

Thomas found the emergency socks when he unpacked his Tokyo bag on Monday morning.

They had survived the trip unused, folded beneath the clean shirt that had also survived unused, and this seemed to Isha to settle the argument more decisively than anything either of them had said in the genkan the day before.

“You carried them to Tokyo and back.”

Thomas held the pair in one hand. “That is how emergency equipment works when the emergency does not occur.”

“You were never more than a few minutes from a shop.”

“That assumes the emergency respects retail opening hours.”

Isha looked at the socks, then at him. Her expression made clear that she was considering whether marriage imposed any duty to intervene in this reasoning. Apparently deciding it did not, she kissed his cheek and went to finish tying her hair for work.

The folder from Sunday went back into Thomas's office cupboard rather than onto the dining table. He already had digital copies of the documents; there was no reason for the assay, sale record and legal notes to occupy the flat simply because Matsuda had now seen them. The larger specimen remained where it had been for months, protected in its cabinet, documented and untouched.

Matsuda did not message before Thomas left for work.

He did not message during the morning either.

Thomas noticed this exactly twice and was annoyed with himself both times. Matsuda had said the next day or two. Monday morning barely qualified as the next day, particularly for somebody who had to ask a colleague a question at work rather than summon an answer from a search box.

The university supplied enough competing material to cure the habit. A student needed a residence document reissued after spilling coffee across the first copy; another had received two automated reminders for a task already completed in a different office. Sugiyama knew who owned the second problem and forwarded the student there with the useful part of Thomas's note attached. By lunch, Thomas had stopped thinking about gold.

He found the April working-group folder in his inbox again after somebody added a background note for awareness. He read the first page, confirmed that nothing in it required February action, and filed it.

This remained satisfying.

At home that evening, Isha had no Coach 1 dates and did not ask whether Matsuda had written until Thomas mentioned that he had not. She accepted the information with considerably less interest than he had spent pretending not to have during the day.

“He said one or two days.”

“I know.”

“Then tomorrow is also inside his promise.”

Thomas put rice into the cooker. “I am aware of linear time.”

“You have recently encountered several kinds that make this worth checking.”

He turned to look at her. Isha was standing at the counter cutting cabbage, entirely serious for perhaps half a second before her mouth moved.

Thomas returned to the rice. “That was unfairly effective.”

The evening contained no further professional guidance. They ate, washed the dishes, checked the weather for the next morning and went to bed.

### Tuesday, 22 February 2028

Matsuda's message arrived at 12:18 while Thomas was eating lunch at his desk.

It began with a warning.

`Matsuda: I asked. Two possible routes. This is not me recommending that you hand either company a kilogram of mysterious material.`

Thomas put down his chopsticks.

The next messages were longer. Matsuda had spoken to one of the technical staff he worked with, describing the question as a private materials problem and asking how that person would distinguish a serious outside firm from a polished website. He had not mentioned Isha, gold or the provenance gap.

The first route was an independent analytical laboratory used by several industrial clients for materials characterisation. Matsuda's contact had dealt with it indirectly on two projects and liked that its quotations named methods, sample preparation, limits and subcontracted work before anything changed hands. Its published intake procedure assigned an identifier at receipt and required written instructions for unused material and residues. Private individuals were not its normal customers, but its enquiries page did not exclude them; Matsuda's contact thought a careful preliminary question would at least receive a useful refusal or referral.

The second route was smaller and more directly concerned with geological and mineral specimens. It offered identification and characterisation work to collectors, estates and small organisations as well as businesses, and its public guidance explicitly separated mineral description from precious-metal valuation. Matsuda knew nobody who had used it personally. His contact had included it because the firm stated what it could examine without cutting, required agreement before destructive sampling and did not advertise immediate purchase prices.

A final message followed.

`Matsuda: My colleague's actual advice was: decide what question you want answered before choosing who to ask. Composition, specimen/mineral description, refining and sale are different jobs. You already know this, but apparently professionals also enjoy saying obvious things when they are correct.`

Thomas smiled despite himself.

`Thomas: This is exactly what I was asking for. Thank you.`

Matsuda replied several minutes later.

`Matsuda: Good. Then I have successfully avoided becoming your gold consultant.`

Thomas typed that he had never offered the position. Matsuda informed him this was how unwanted responsibilities began.

Three minutes later, another message appeared.

`Matsuda: I have just realised that at no point yesterday did I ask why Isha owns a large natural gold specimen.`

Thomas stared at the screen for several seconds, his lunch temporarily irrelevant.

`Thomas: I was wondering when that would occur to you.`

He considered the next line more carefully. Matsuda already knew the acquisition-document gap existed; pretending there was a tidy family purchase or forgotten receipt would only create another thing that needed defending later.

`Thomas: That is the part of its history I cannot give you a useful answer to. The gap in the folder is real. We are not asking you to solve it.`

Matsuda's response took a little longer.

`Matsuda: Understood. I mostly wanted to establish that I had finally noticed how strange the original sentence was.`

Then:

`Matsuda: I am not asking my colleague about that part.`

Thomas thanked him again, forwarded the two links and Matsuda's explanatory messages to Isha, and finally returned to lunch.

He did not open either company page until that evening.

That was partly discipline and partly because the specimen belonged to Isha.

She was home first. By the time Thomas arrived, she had changed out of work clothes and tied her hair into a loose braid. Her sapphire ring and wedding band were back on her hand after the climbing shift, and Matsuda's links were open on her tablet beside a cup of tea.

“I like the second one more,” she said after Thomas had taken off his coat.

He sat opposite her. “Because they deal with specimens rather than industrial samples?”

“Because they ask what the object is before asking what someone wants to do to it.” Isha scrolled back to the section she had been reading. “They also say photographs first, then decide whether they need the object. I prefer that.”

Thomas read the page from where she had stopped. The language was cautious and surprisingly plain. A preliminary enquiry required approximate size, known history of testing, photographs from several angles and the question the owner wanted answered. Shipping instructions came later, if they came at all.

“What question do you want answered?” he asked.

Isha looked towards the cabinet where the specimen was stored, though the closed door showed nothing of it. Months earlier they had cut away a small section because they needed to know whether the strange heavy thing from another world was actually what it appeared to be. The destructive assay had answered composition sufficiently for that purpose. A later buyer had answered one narrow market question by buying the prepared metallic material for ¥912,000. Neither answer told her much about the larger object that remained.

“I want someone who knows natural specimens to tell me what they can see without cutting it,” she said. “Quartz, the darker material, how the gold sits through it, whether the shape tells them anything useful. I do not want another piece removed just because we can.”

Thomas nodded. “That sounds like the second route.”

“Yes.”

She did not send anything immediately. They took the specimen out together first.

It remained absurdly dense when they brought its tray from the cabinet to the protected table surface. The cleaned natural mass was irregular rather than decorative, pale stone and darker material interrupted by gold in seams and exposed patches. Knowing what the assay had found had made it less mysterious in one sense and more difficult in another. It was valuable. It was real. Its actual history was impossible to give to any person whose expertise they might reasonably need.

Isha turned it only as far as the existing support allowed and used her phone to take several new photographs under the room light. She rejected the first set because one side had too much reflection, changed the angle of the lamp and tried again. Thomas held a plain scale beside it for two frames, then removed his hand before she took the rest.

They returned the specimen and its tray to the cabinet before drafting the enquiry.

Isha wrote it herself in Japanese, with Thomas beside her only for the terminology she wanted checked. She described herself as the private owner of a large natural gold-bearing mineral specimen, gave the original and current approximate mass, noted that one section had already undergone destructive assay and sale, and said she was seeking a mineralogical description of the remaining specimen with non-destructive examination preferred. She asked what could reasonably be assessed from photographs first and what documentation the firm would require before accepting the object, if physical examination later proved useful.

She attached no assay report and no acquisition story.

Thomas read the finished message once because she handed him the tablet.

“You have not asked for a valuation.”

“I do not want one from them yet.”

“Good.” He handed it back. “I would send that.”

Isha looked at the message for another few seconds, then did.

The confirmation arrived immediately and promised only that an enquiry had been received.

“That is less exciting than the gold dealer,” Thomas said.

“Good. The gold dealer bought something.”

She picked up her tea, discovered it had gone cold and drank it anyway.

Thomas watched her over the table. “He finally asked why you have it.”

Isha's eyebrows rose. “How long after the useful messages?”

“Three minutes.” Thomas showed her the exchange. She read his answer first, then Matsuda's response, and handed the phone back.

“That is fine,” she said. “He noticed. He does not need the answer.”

The message thread had become almost exactly as strange as the friendship allowed: Matsuda had asked the obvious human question, accepted the boundary around it and kept his work enquiry separate.

Thomas took Isha's cold cup and went to make fresh tea.

### Wednesday, 23 February to Saturday, 26 February 2028

The rest of the week failed to become important.

On Wednesday, the mineral firm acknowledged Isha's enquiry with a human-written message saying the photographs and question would be reviewed by the person who handled specimen work. No opinion accompanied it. Isha read the reply between climbing shifts, put her phone away and spent the afternoon teaching people how to use holds that were much less interesting than gold.

Thomas's Wednesday contained an international student who had misunderstood a tuition notice, a printer tray that insisted it was empty while containing paper, and a meeting that ended six minutes early because Mori asked whether anyone had an actual reason to continue. Nobody did. Thomas regarded this as an institutional achievement.

He and Isha met at home after different days and ate noodles with vegetables and egg because neither wanted an ambitious dinner. Thomas had once spent months learning how to produce food from magic that responded to memory, affection and need. On Wednesday he overcooked one egg because he was reading a message while the pan was hot.

Isha ate it.

“You do not have to,” Thomas said. “It is a failed egg.”

“It is an egg. It is still an egg.”

She took another bite with such composure that rescue became impossible.

Thomas considered adding sauce and decided the sauce would only become evidence.

Thursday gave him archery.

At eighteen metres, his first end was respectable by the standards of a beginner who had been practising long enough to know what a respectable beginner end looked like. The second spread itself across the target as though each arrow had been briefed separately. Nakahara changed nothing dramatic. Thomas was lifting his bow shoulder slightly when he became tired; the useful correction was to notice it earlier.

His final arrows were better and then worse again.

He left pleased.

Isha spent the same evening at Shibata's gym. Arai made her repeat a wall escape because her first answer relied too much on turning strength into space. On the next attempt Isha created less space and used it better. Later, Mizuno caught her in a position she had recognised half a second too late and accepted the tap without ceremony. She came home with damp hair, a faint mat mark along one cheek and the calm appetite of someone who had spent two hours solving physical problems nobody expected her to solve perfectly.

Thomas was already eating yoghurt.

Isha stopped in the kitchen doorway. “Those are the last two.”

He looked down at the open pot in his hand, then at the refrigerator.

The second yoghurt was still there.

“I have learned from Sunday,” he said.

“You have learned to count to two.”

“Progress should be recognised at the level it occurs.”

She kissed the top of his head on the way past and took the other one.

Friday brought no Coach 1 dates.

It also brought no answer from the mineral firm, which had not promised one by Friday. Thomas and Isha went to work, came home, did laundry and discovered that one of Thomas's dark socks had attached itself to the inside of Isha's fitted training top during the wash. She held both items up as evidence of a domestic alliance he denied organising.

The nameless group chat remained quiet.

Neither commented on that.

Saturday was colder than Friday and bright, making the balcony glass look dirtier than either had noticed during the week. Thomas cleaned the inside by hand because the cloth was already in his hand and using magic would have saved almost no time. Isha went out for groceries, returned with bread he had not requested and informed him that this was permitted because she wanted it.

They ate some immediately.

The rest of the day divided without negotiation. Thomas read for a while in his office. Isha worked on the second paper hanging at the dining table, arranging cream, green, smoky blue and pale grey pieces, then moving three of them back to almost where they had started. She asked Thomas once whether two lengths looked equal. He measured them because she had asked for a measurement, told her they differed by four millimetres and did not suggest which one should move.

By evening the hanging still was not finished.

Nothing required it to be.

### Sunday, 27 February 2028

Kanno arrived after lunch with no archival box, no camera bag and no crisis.

Thomas noticed the absence of equipment because Kanno usually carried so many work-related objects that an ordinary visit looked provisional. This time she had only her usual black bag and a paper packet from a bakery near the station.

“I bought too much,” she said when Isha opened the packet and found four pastries.

“There are three of us.”

“Yes. That is why four is too many.”

Thomas looked into the packet. “I support this error.”

They made tea and left the fourth pastry in its paper for later. Kanno had spent part of Saturday answering an organiser's practical question about the 25 March Small Works Weekend and had successfully avoided turning the answer into a redesign of her table. The event was now less than four weeks away. Her existing copies of *Until Replaced* existed, the photographs she had agreed to show existed, and the organiser had not demanded the wall series simply because Kanno possessed one.

“I keep checking whether they have become unreasonable while I wasn't looking,” she said.

“Have they?” Isha asked.

“No. It is disappointing.”

Thomas reminded her that she had once complained about the same thing when the organiser respected the first boundary. Kanno said consistency was not part of the service she provided socially.

They talked about work for a while. Thomas's April group remained an April group. Isha still had no Coach 1 dates. Kanno's March event had reached the next calendar page, but there was still room to eat a pastry without turning it into exhibition planning fuel.

The next correspondence opening sat between those dates, expected around 14 March.

None of them knew whether the invitation would be answered then.

That uncertainty had changed shape over the previous two weeks. On 13 February, the missing answer had occupied the room because the page had only just left. By the twenty-seventh, Thomas could pass the flexible-room door carrying laundry and think first about whether the drying rack was still inside. Isha could remember Sereth's four words from the returned page without immediately moving on to the question her mother had not yet received when she wrote them.

Waiting had become something they were doing while other things happened.

Kanno knew the invitation's status but had not asked to see the returned page. Thomas and Isha had told her the relevant parts, including that Sereth thought Isha looked happy and that the station remained unchanged. Kanno had accepted both facts and moved on to her own work.

Sunday required even less from any of them.

After tea they went for a walk along the river because the light outside had become better than the light through the balcony glass. The cherry trees were still bare. Small buds had begun to thicken at the tips of some branches, though none of the three attempted to predict blossom dates from this evidence. A cyclist passed them twice, first heading upstream and later returning with a convenience-store bag hooked over one handlebar. Water moved between the engineered banks with the same narrow winter sound it had made for months.

Kanno stopped once at a retaining wall where an old fixing had been removed and the replacement patch had weathered differently from the surrounding concrete.

She did not have a camera.

For several seconds she looked mildly offended by this fact. Then she took out her phone, photographed it once and put the phone away.

“That felt wrong,” she said.

Isha looked back at the wall. “Because you used the phone?”

“Because I only took one.”

Thomas suggested returning tomorrow with a tripod, three lenses and a formal statement of intent. Kanno told him to continue walking.

They did.

On the way home they stopped at the supermarket. Thomas needed yoghurt. Isha made him put four into the basket. Kanno witnessed this escalation and declined to become involved in household policy.

Back in 202, the extra pastry survived until nearly four. Thomas divided it into three unequal pieces by eye. Isha received the largest because she reached first; Kanno pointed out that this rendered the entire exercise morally suspect; Thomas ate the smallest and refused an inquiry.

Kanno's phone lay on the table beside her cup.

The screen lit briefly with an ordinary notification, then went dark again.

She looked at it for a moment longer than the notification deserved.

Isha noticed. “You expected him?”

“No.” Kanno picked up her tea. “Maybe.”

Thomas knew who she meant without asking. Ian's last message in the group chat was still the one from 13 February: tired after photographing beyond the visible universe, 22:16 on 17 August 2026 for him, going to bed, promising to leave them alone for a few days or so unless they needed him.

Fourteen Earth days had passed.

For Ian, that might have been fourteen days, an afternoon, ten minutes or some interval none of them had yet encountered. The only reliable rule they had learned was that apparent proximity in conversation did not establish shared time.

“He did say a few days,” Kanno said.

“For him.” Isha glanced at Thomas. “Last time he thought it had been a few hours, we had already had nearly a month.”

“Twenty-six days,” Thomas said. The number had been absurd enough that he remembered it exactly. “So he may still be brushing his teeth, or it may have been longer for him than it has for us. We do not have anything useful between those possibilities.”

Kanno regarded the silent phone. “Excellent. A time problem where collecting more examples may make us less informed.”

The silence that followed was comfortable. They did not need Ian for anything. The invitation had been sent and explicitly left alone. The March passage would arrive when the System's counter allowed it. Kanno had no next impossible trip waiting for permission. Isha had an Olympus Mons idea she had specifically told Ian to bring back only when he knew what he was actually offering. Thomas had no desire to discover whether reality could improve his university inbox.

Still, the empty group chat had become noticeable.

Kanno set down her cup. “He said unless we needed him.”

“We do not,” Isha said.

“No.” Kanno reached for her phone. “I am considering whether curiosity counts.”

Thomas leaned back. “That seems dangerous wording around him.”

Kanno unlocked the nameless chat. The last visible messages were still their good-nights from two Sundays earlier, absurdly mundane beneath the same conversation that contained Venus and an external view of the universe.

She looked at Thomas and Isha once. Neither objected.

Kanno typed.

`Kanno: Ian. Are you awake yet?`

The reply came before she had finished putting the phone back on the table.

`ian: hey. awoken, worked, and now it's evening.. not quite 24 hours after we last spoke, 20:07. how are you all doing?`

For a moment none of them answered.

Thomas looked at the date on his own phone, then at the message again. The calculation required no help from the stranger varieties of time they had accumulated over the previous months.

“Fourteen days,” Kanno said.

“Nearly twenty-two hours for him,” Thomas said. “Assuming his date moved normally from the one he gave us last time.”

Isha leaned against the back of his chair to read the message. Her hair fell over one shoulder and brushed his arm. “He slept, worked and came back. We had two working weeks.”

Kanno's expression suggested that this remained personally unreasonable despite no longer being surprising. She picked up the phone.

`Kanno: Fourteen days for us. So yes, the timing remains extremely inconvenient.`

She considered how to answer the actual question. Two weeks compressed badly when nobody had travelled to another planet, altered a System or rediscovered a lost reality.

`Kanno: I am fine. My event is now less than four weeks away, nobody organising it has become unreasonable, and today I photographed a wall with my phone because I failed to bring a camera. This was apparently upsetting.`

Thomas smiled at the last sentence and took his own phone from the table.

`Thomas: We're well. I went to Tokyo to see Matsuda last Sunday and finally asked him for some professional help with Isha's gold. He found two sensible specialist routes without learning anything he shouldn't, and Isha has contacted one of them. Otherwise I have mostly worked, shot arrows with inconsistent competence and carried emergency socks unnecessarily.`

Isha read it over his shoulder.

“You are admitting the socks were unnecessary.”

“I said they were carried unnecessarily. Their existence remains defensible.”

Kanno watched them for a moment, then returned her attention to the chat rather than entering a dispute she had already seen enough evidence to adjudicate.

Isha took her own phone.

`Isha: I am well too. Still no Coach 1 dates. Training is normal. The paper thing I am making is still unfinished.`

Her thumb paused before she added another line.

`Isha: We have also managed fourteen days without climbing Olympus Mons.`

Thomas turned in his chair. “That sounds as though restraint was required.”

“He said we were going next weekend.”

“He corrected himself.”

“After I corrected him.”

Kanno made a quiet sound into her tea.

The four messages sat beneath Ian's reply. Seen together, they made the missing fortnight look remarkably small: work, a wall, a mineral enquiry, archery, training, paper and socks.

Kanno looked again at the timestamp.

`Kanno: So is it 18 August 2026 for you now?`

The answer came while she was still holding the phone.

`ian: Yes it is. Does anyone fancy scones? Together. Somewhere.`

Kanno read it twice.

“Scones.”

Thomas leaned far enough across the table to see the message. After Venus, Berlin, altered Hero-System firmware and an image apparently taken from outside the visible universe, the proposal required an unexpectedly small amount of interpretation.

“I think that may be the least alarming invitation he has made.”

Isha was looking at one word rather than the food. “Somewhere.”

“That part has range,” Kanno agreed.

The last time Thomas and Isha had eaten with Ian, the café had subsequently travelled towards another world. Kanno's own visits with him had included an unplanned argument about her passport followed, eventually, by Berlin. None of that made a plate of scones suspicious in itself. It merely meant that *somewhere* deserved to become a place before anyone opened a door.

Kanno lowered the phone. “I want scones.”

“So do I,” Isha said. Her answer came easily enough that Thomas smiled. She noticed. “What?”

“Nothing. I was remembering that you once had to ask what clotted cream was.”

“And then I learned.”

Thomas accepted the correction. “I also want scones.”

Kanno looked between them, then returned to the chat.

`Kanno: Yes. All three of us.`

After a moment she added:

`Kanno: Where did you have in mind?`

The answer came quickly enough that none of them had time to speculate.

`ian: Come through the door. Any door, with intent. Nothing bad, no modifying databases or the world. Hopefully you trust me by now you can always leave and I wouldn't let you get hurt.`

Thomas read it once, then again.

“Any door,” Kanno said.

Isha's attention had gone sharp in the particular way it did when something impossible was offering rules. “And *with intent*.”

“That part at least is consistent,” Thomas said. “The café worked by deliberate use of the flexible-room door.”

Kanno was still looking at the screen. “He added the part about not modifying databases or the world.”

“Which suggests he knows exactly how this sounds.”

“It sounds,” Isha said, “better than being told to put on a coat and meet him in a field.”

None of them seemed frightened. Thomas noticed that with some care. A year earlier, perhaps even six months earlier, a sentence about any door in the flat opening somewhere else would have carried more dread than comedy. Now it mostly required choosing how literal to be.

Kanno glanced towards the corridor. “I would prefer not to test whether the bathroom becomes a portal to cream tea.”

“Reasonable,” Thomas said.

“The front door also seems unnecessary,” Isha said. “If this is only for us.”

That left the flexible room by silent agreement.

Thomas stood first, more from habit than leadership. Kanno put her phone into her coat pocket but did not put the coat on. Isha checked the table once as though confirming they were in fact interrupting nothing important, then followed them down the short corridor.

The flexible-room door looked exactly as it always did.

Thomas rested his hand on the handle and looked back at the other two. Neither objected. Kanno's expression had settled into the dry concentration she wore before doing something she knew would later sound stupid if she described it too quickly. Isha stood calm and ready, one hand loose by her side.

“With intent,” Thomas said.

“Scones,” Kanno replied.

He opened the door.

The flat disappeared.

The first thing Thomas saw was sky.

Open blue spread overhead with white clouds drifting through it in bright familiar shapes. Green grass rolled away in a smooth broad rise beneath them, the colours so clean that recognition arrived almost before the rest of the scene did.

A table stood on the grass beneath a large parasol. Four cups of tea were already poured. A wide plate of scones sat in the middle. Three spare chairs waited around the table.

Ian was already there.

Kanno stepped through first.

Of the three of them, that somehow felt correct.

Ian looked up.

Whatever attempt he had made to conceal how pleased he was to see them failed before it began. The expression reached his face openly, and he raised one hand in an uncomplicated wave towards the table and the empty chairs.

Kanno stopped just beyond the threshold.

She had seen Ian pleased with himself before. Berlin had produced one version; recovering the Aelira shirt had produced another. This was different enough that she did not immediately make fun of him.

Behind her, Thomas stepped through and looked across the hill.

“Oh.”

Isha followed him, then glanced back. The open doorway still showed the flexible room in 202: floor, storage, the familiar edge of the hall beyond. She looked forward again at the intensely green slope, blue sky and white clouds.

Thomas was staring at the horizon with the particular expression of someone recognising something too mundane to belong in an impossible place.

“This is *Bliss*.”

Isha looked at him.

“The Windows XP wallpaper. Or almost exactly it.”

Kanno surveyed the scene as a photograph. The grass was almost offensively green beneath the clear sky. The parasol, table and four chairs looked as though somebody had improved a desktop background by installing afternoon tea on it.

She crouched briefly and touched the grass.

It behaved like grass.

“That may be the problem,” she said.

Thomas understood. “Too recognisable?”

“Too clean.”

Isha walked a few paces farther before returning to the table. A light movement of air touched her hair and the grass around her ankles. She looked up through the parasol, then at the four cups and the plate of scones.

“He did promise scones.”

“He has met the specification,” Thomas said.

They took the three empty chairs.

Ian spoke first.

“I knew you'd know the location Thomas. I always think of the line ‘reject modernity, embrace tradition’ when i see this. Please, eat.”

Thomas looked from Ian to the hillside again.

“I am not convinced Windows XP qualifies as tradition yet.”

“It does to some people,” Kanno said. She had already reached for a scone. “Although reconstructing one of the most recognisable computer wallpapers in existence and then adding afternoon tea is an unusual argument for it.”

Isha took one as well. The scone came apart cleanly beneath her fingers, still warm inside. She tasted a piece before reaching for her tea, then looked across the immaculate grass with more interest than nostalgia. Thomas's recognition belonged to a technological childhood and adulthood she had never shared; to her it was simply a strangely perfect hill that millions of people had apparently once seen without standing on it.

Thomas finally took a scone himself.

Kanno ate another bite and regarded Ian across the table.

“So this is your traditionalist position? Windows XP and scones?”

Ian wobbled one hand in a gesture that conceded *maybe*.

“Is this—” He gestured around them, taking in the open hillside, the doorway and the scones. “—sort of thing ok?”

The question changed Kanno's expression. She set down what remained of her scone and looked past Ian towards the open door. Flat 202 was still visible through it, absurdly rectangular against the green hill.

“This is okay,” she said. “You asked us to come. We came because we wanted to, and I can still see the way home.” She considered him for another moment. “I trust you enough to walk through the door. That does not mean I trust every idea you have. I think those statements can coexist.”

Thomas smiled faintly. “Definitely. I also don't think you need to provide a risk assessment and exact coordinates before offering us tea. If *somewhere* mattered in a way that would affect whether we wanted to go, then I would want to know before opening the door. This was a hill and scones.”

Isha had listened while finishing the piece in her hand. She looked towards 202 herself, then back across the table.

“You asked. We chose to come. You did not move us while we were sitting at home, and leaving is still ours.” Her eyes moved briefly over the blue sky and brilliant green slope. “Yes. This sort of thing is okay.”

She reached for another scone.

Ian sighed in relief.

“I'm glad yesterday.” He pondered. “The last time, wasn't the only ... experience ... that was ok.”

Thomas's expression softened slightly. Kanno occupied herself with her tea, leaving the awkward sentence intact rather than helping him out of it.

Ian turned to Isha.

“Have you thought about Mars? And climbing?”

Isha rested her forearms on the table. She had clearly not forgotten the earlier conversation; her answer took no searching.

“Yes. More than once.” She glanced out across the impossible green hill before looking back at him. “I still want to know what climbing Olympus Mons could mean. I have thought about the mountain, the effort, how long I would want it to feel like, and whether being protected from harm would also protect me from everything that makes climbing worth doing.”

She paused, then added, “Last time I told you to ask again when you knew what you were actually offering.”

Her eyes stayed on Ian.

“Do you?”

“I have thought a little. I am no climber, but falling off the mountain and stopping floating in air probably isn't as exciting. I could make it so a fall is a fall, but you don't hurt, you slow gently and stop at the bottom, i ensure no boulders land on you, you don't bash yourself on the way down.. but the normal wear and tear of climbing on your body works as normal? i could always heal anything you want, and, of course, death and horrible injury is disabled.”

Ian paused.

“Beyond that it is up to you really. I'd like to be there, to watch, or wait at the top (maybe not the very top, i think 20km would take a while). But, if you wanted to do it alone that's cool.”

Isha listened with both hands around her tea.

The proposal was no longer only *Olympus Mons under unspecified omnipotence*. Ian had found a boundary between removing catastrophe and removing the experience itself. She could fall. The mistake could remain a mistake. Her body could become tired and sore. What disappeared was the part where one bad foot placement destroyed her body.

“That is much closer to what I meant,” she said. “I want Mars to stay Mars. Its gravity, the ground, the distance, whatever the slope actually gives me. I want to get tired. I want sore muscles, blisters and the consequences of deciding I can continue when I should have stopped earlier.”

Thomas's mouth moved slightly at that last example.

Isha noticed and ignored him.

“I would not want you healing ordinary discomfort while I was climbing unless I asked. If something genuinely terrible happens, yes, prevent it. I have no interest in proving the climb was real by dying on it.” She looked out across the green hill for a moment. “I don't know yet whether I want you beside me, watching from somewhere, or whether I want to do most of it alone. I think I would need to see the place before I knew.”

Kanno had been quiet through the answer. “A fall that remains frightening but stops before permanent injury makes more sense than discovering gravity has been switched off whenever you make a mistake.”

Thomas nodded. “It is possibly the strangest safety plan I have ever heard, but I understand what it is protecting now.”

Ian let them finish.

“You could fly around first to find a good spot, as it's so massive?”

A little smile appeared.

Isha saw it and laughed softly.

“Flying around Olympus Mons to choose where to climb is an offensively useful scouting method.”

The idea had plainly caught. She considered it for several seconds, no longer looking at Ian so much as at a mountain that was not there yet.

Then she met his eyes again.

“Could the first visit be only that? We look at the real mountain, fly around, choose nothing except perhaps a route I might want later, and then come home?”

“I mean you would be able to literally fly. Not being in a plane or anything. Like a bird.”

Isha stopped with one hand near her tea.

“Oh.”

Her eyes went upward into the impossible blue above the parasol. For several seconds the mountain disappeared from the conversation entirely. The smile that formed was slower than laughter and considerably less restrained.

Thomas watched her realise what Ian had actually offered. “I think you have changed the proposal.”

Kanno glanced at the abandoned half of Isha's scone. “Substantially.”

Isha ignored both of them. Her attention had already gone somewhere beyond the green hill, into a sky she had never moved through under her own control.

“I want to fly,” she said.

The simplicity of it made Thomas smile.

Isha looked back at Ian. “If you mean I can actually choose where I go myself—up, down, faster, slower—then yes. Very much. How would I control it?”

“Why don't we go and do a... slightly different... climbing survey? Kanno do you want your camera? I've got about half an hour, I didn't sleep so well last night.”

Isha's expression changed immediately. The possibility that had been comfortably hypothetical a moment earlier had apparently become available between one scone and the next.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to see it.”

Kanno caught the other part.

“Half an hour, then.” Ian's poor sleep did not need an intervention from three people who had known him for a collection of badly synchronised days, but the limit he had given them was useful. She glanced towards the open doorway into 202. “And yes, obviously I want my camera if you're offering me Mars.”

Then her mouth tightened.

“My camera is at my flat.”

“If you go through the door Kanno, with intent to go home, it will take to your home, similar on return. When you get back we'll go. Likewise, Isha, Thomas if you want anything do the same. I'll be here.”

Kanno looked towards the doorway standing improbably in the green hillside.

“My own home.”

The practical usefulness of that took a moment to displace the strangeness. She stood, brushed a few crumbs from her fingers and crossed the grass. At the threshold she glanced back once, less from uncertainty than from wanting to know exactly what she was testing.

Then she stepped through with home in mind.

For Thomas and Isha there was only a brief impossible glimpse of another interior before Kanno disappeared from sight.

Thomas watched the empty threshold for another second.

“That is going to make trains feel unnecessarily elaborate.”

Isha smiled, but her attention had moved to herself. She was dressed for a Sunday afternoon in Sendai, not Mars. After considering the problem, she looked down at her shoes and shook her head.

“I do not need anything. This is a survey, not the climb.”

Thomas reached the same conclusion for less adventurous reasons. His phone was already with him; nothing in 202 would make flying over Mars more sensible. He took another drink of tea while they waited.

Kanno returned less than two minutes later with her camera bag across one shoulder. The doorway gave her back to the hillside as casually as though her flat occupied the other side of the wall.

She stopped immediately and looked behind her.

The view had changed back again.

“I dislike how quickly that becomes convenient.”

Thomas looked at the camera bag. “You still used it.”

“Obviously.”

Kanno sat long enough to open the bag and check what she had brought. Camera, normal lens, spare battery, cloth. Nothing elaborate.

Isha had stopped eating. Excitement had returned to her face now that the transition from discussion to departure was no longer theoretical.

Thomas set his cup down.

“All right.”

The three of them turned towards Ian.

“We're ready.”

Ian stood and asked them to stand.

They did.

There was no visible transition at all.

One moment the parasol and impossible green hillside still existed around the table; the next they were gone, and the four of them were standing beneath a dark salmon sky on a vast open height that made ordinary mountains feel parochial.

The ground was rust-red and broken, scattered with stone and dust. The light was stranger than evening or afternoon, thinner somehow, the shadows precise. Distance behaved badly. The land rolled away in slopes so broad that Thomas's first instinct was not *mountain* but *country*, until the horizon and the scale of everything else corrected him.

A gentle breeze moved across the summit.

They could breathe.

No heat or cold bit at exposed skin. No pressure crushed them, no radiation announced itself through consequence, and the Martian air did not treat their presence as a medical emergency. Kanno recognised the same basic logic as Venus: the place remained materially itself while the things that would kill them had been made harmless.

A clear footprint appeared beneath Thomas's shoe.

It vanished before he finished noticing it.

He shifted his foot deliberately. Another mark, another disappearance.

Ian looked around at them.

“How's this?”

For a moment nobody answered.

Isha turned slowly where she stood, taking in the enormous red sweep around them. Olympus Mons did not present itself as a peak in the earthly sense. It was too large for that. What lay around them was height without nearness, a summit so immense it had become landscape.

Her face went utterly open.

“Oh,” she said, and then again, lower, “oh.”

Kanno's hand had already gone to the camera bag.

“No trace,” she said quietly, watching one of her own footprints disappear. “Good.”

She had the camera out now. Habit and astonishment worked together. She turned once in place, framed before shooting, then stopped to look through the viewfinder properly. The first shutter sound felt absurdly normal.

Isha took three steps away from the others and crouched, touching the red ground with her fingertips. Real texture met her hand: dry, granular, cold rather than merely cool. When she stood, the place where she had touched it looked untouched.

Thomas's attention moved from the dust to the sky, then farther, to the impossible scale below them. “This is ridiculous,” he said, not as criticism.

“Yes,” Kanno replied, still photographing. “Fortunately.”

Isha laughed once under her breath, still looking outward.

Then she turned towards Ian.

“How do I fly?”

“Think about flying, with intent. Then.. I think you can guess. You won't be able to fly into anything at a speed that hurts you, and the pressure of the air won't feel like you're in a wind turbine, so you can go faster or slower as you wish. Have a play. If you get lost, or worried, or anything. Think of me.”

Isha looked upward.

There was no spell to reach for. No remembered movement belonged to this body, and even her old Levitate experience had depended on Thomas's magic rather than anything she controlled herself. For several seconds she simply stood on Mars trying to decide what *flying with intent* felt like.

Then she chose up.

Her boots left the ground.

Only by a few centimetres at first. Isha looked down sharply, saw clear air beneath both feet and laughed.

Thomas stepped back to give her room. “You appear to have solved the first part.”

“Quiet.”

She rose another metre.

The movement had no obvious thrust behind it. Her hair and clothes responded to the gentle air around her, but her body simply went where she meant it to go. She leaned experimentally forward and drifted in that direction, corrected sideways, stopped, then descended until one boot almost touched the ground.

The control was immediate enough to make her bolder.

“Kanno.”

The camera was already in Kanno's hands.

“Photographs?”

“Yes.”

Kanno raised it.

Isha went upward.

Five metres became twenty before Thomas's sense of distance caught up. Against the immense Martian landscape she remained startlingly small, pale hair and Earth clothes suspended beneath the muted sky. Kanno followed her through the viewfinder, took three frames, lowered the camera to judge with her own eyes and raised it again.

Isha turned in the air.

That movement finally broke whatever caution remained.

She accelerated.

Thomas had expected something like falling sideways: an awkward body translated through empty space. Instead Isha found posture almost immediately. She extended herself into the movement, arms loose rather than spread theatrically, legs adjusting as though balance still mattered even when there was nothing beneath them. She swept low across the red ground, climbed sharply and curved back towards them.

Her laugh reached them before she did.

She passed overhead fast enough that Thomas instinctively ducked despite Ian's guarantee, then climbed again into the open sky.

Kanno lowered the camera.

“That one was deliberate.”

Thomas straightened. “I believe we have reached the play portion of the instructions.”

High above them, Isha slowed.

Mars opened beneath her.

From the ground, Olympus Mons had already resisted being understood as a mountain. From above, the problem became worse. There was no convenient summit ridge giving way to obvious valleys, no Earth-sized arrangement her old field instincts could reduce to ascent and descent. The slopes travelled outward on a scale that made choosing a climbing route feel less like selecting a line on a mountain and more like deciding which part of a country she intended to cross.

She went higher.

Every small intention answered. Faster meant faster. A turn could be broad or tight. She could stop in open air and remain there with nothing beneath her, then drop deliberately until the ground seemed to rush up before changing her mind and letting the descent ease away.

That last experiment made her stomach react even though she knew she could not be hurt.

Good.

She laughed again and climbed.

Below, Kanno photographed until Isha became too small for the lens she had brought to be useful. Then she stopped trying to make every impossible thing into a frame. Thomas stood beside her, one hand shading his eyes despite the subdued Martian light.

“She is going to want this again.”

Kanno kept watching the pale moving point above them. “Obviously.”

Isha eventually came back low over the ground, slower this time. She descended beside them with surprising care, as though landing well mattered even after discovering she could simply stop wherever she chose.

Her boots touched Mars.

The prints disappeared.

She stood very still for one breath, cheeks flushed despite the protections around them, then looked back across the enormous landscape she had just begun to see properly.

“I need more than half an hour to survey this.”

Thomas laughed.

Isha turned towards Ian, still smiling from the flight.

“Why don't you hold Thomas' hand and try again.”

Isha looked at Thomas rather than reaching for him immediately.

He had been watching her fly with an expression caught somewhere between delight and the knowledge that he possessed none of the relevant abilities. At her raised eyebrows, he held out his hand.

“I would like to see what happens.”

She took it.

Her grip settled firmly around his, and Isha rose slowly this time. For the first half metre Thomas remained on the ground, arm lifting above his shoulder. Then his heels came up.

Nothing else supported him.

Thomas looked down at Mars receding beneath his shoes, then at their joined hands. Isha's arm had taken his weight as plainly as if she were helping him over a ledge. The flight belonged to her; he was coming because she was strong enough to bring him.

“Oh,” he said.

Isha laughed.

She raised them another few metres, testing the load before committing to movement. Thomas swung slightly beneath and beside her until she adjusted her posture and acceleration, finding a pace that let him settle into the motion instead of hanging vertically from her arm.

Kanno's shutter began clicking below.

Thomas looked towards the sound. “There will be evidence of this.”

“There should be.”

Then Isha accelerated.

Not as fast as she had alone. Thomas's added weight changed what felt comfortable even if nothing could injure either of them, and Isha treated that as part of the problem instead of something to erase. Her shoulder and back worked against his weight while the impossible flight carried both of them over the enormous shallow sweep of Olympus Mons.

Thomas laughed when the ground began moving properly beneath them.

He had no control over the movement except the most basic one: he could keep holding Isha's hand, or ask her to stop.

He looked across at her.

Isha was grinning.

“You like this far too much.”

“Yes.”

She banked gently.

Thomas's body swung outward. For an instant his stomach insisted they were falling sideways across Mars, although their joined hands never slipped and the movement softened before it could become painful.

Isha laughed harder and straightened their course.

They moved out across the mountain together, Isha choosing the line and height while Thomas looked down at terrain that would eventually have to become something more specific than *Olympus Mons*. Channels, ridges, broad changes in slope and stretches of broken ground became easier to read from above, though the scale resisted quick judgement.

Below, Kanno followed them through the camera until the lens ceased to be useful.

She lowered it.

Two figures were moving against the Martian sky now, one flying under her own impossible control and the other unmistakably carried with her by one hand.

Kanno took one final wider frame.

Then she let the camera hang against its strap and turned back towards Ian.

“Kanno.. could i..” Ian looked a little sheepish. “.. could i take a photo of you? only if you are ok with it, of course. The last one, even the machine version, was nice to see.”

Kanno's hand went automatically to the camera hanging against her chest.

For a moment she looked more surprised by the reason than the request. On Venus, Ian had photographed her because they were standing beside Venera 14 and she had agreed that he could use her camera. The later reconstruction had been something else entirely: interesting, good, irritatingly good, and still filed apart from what the camera had actually seen.

This was simpler.

He wanted a photograph of her.

She glanced upward. Thomas and Isha were distant against the Martian sky, moving slowly enough now that Kanno could track them with her eyes.

Then she looked back at Ian.

“Yes.”

She lifted the strap over her head and held the camera out to him.

“Use mine. Then I know exactly what kind of photograph it is.”

Ian took a few steps back across the red ground, found his angle and asked Kanno to turn slightly, looking off to the right rather than at him.

She did.

The request was simple enough that she did not overthink it. She stood with one shoulder nearer the camera, the wide Martian height dropping away behind her in dusty bands of red and muted brown. The light was thin and clean. A faint movement of air touched her coat and the loose ends of her hair.

The shutter clicked once.

Then again.

By the second frame the breeze had shifted just enough to move her hair back from her face.

Ian handed the camera back with a smile.

Kanno took it automatically, already half-focused on the review screen before the strap was fully in her hand. She stepped aside by instinct, not because Ian had done anything wrong, but because looking at a photograph was always easier at a slight angle to the person who had made it.

The first image appeared.

Kanno stopped walking.

For a second she only looked.

She occupied the left side of the frame, turned towards the right, profile and upper body held clear against the immense openness of Mars. Beyond her, the landscape fell away into the broad impossible scale of Olympus Mons.

And in the sky were two points she had not consciously noticed while standing there.

Earth was a bright star.

Near the direction of her gaze sat Phobos, small but obvious, roughly a third of the apparent size Earth's moon would have been in a familiar sky.

Kanno enlarged the image slightly with two fingers, then returned it to full size.

“That is rude,” she said at last.

Isha and Thomas were descending now, Isha bringing him back towards the ground with considerably more care than she had shown while banking.

Kanno moved to the second image.

The difference was small and decisive. The wind had shifted her hair away from her face, leaving more of her expression visible. Earth remained bright. Phobos still hovered where her gaze nearly found it.

This one was better.

Thomas came around beside her once his feet were back on Mars.

“Well?”

Kanno turned the screen towards him.

Thomas took in the first image, then the second, and his eyebrows rose. “Oh.”

Isha came to his shoulder and looked as well.

The smile that spread across her face was immediate. “That is excellent.”

Kanno, still studying the second frame, seemed faintly offended by the universe's cooperation. “I would like it noted that I did not arrange the background bodies.”

Thomas looked from the image to Ian. “Did you?”

Ian's answer came with the easy satisfaction of somebody who had found a loophole in the question before it was asked.

“I didn't say *when* we were going to Mars.”

Kanno looked again at Earth and Phobos.

“That remains rude.”

Isha leaned a little closer to the screen.

The second image held Kanno against another world without making her look posed inside it. The landscape mattered, the sky mattered, the celestial coincidence mattered, but the strongest thing in the frame was still Kanno herself: dry, exact and slightly turned away, as though she had been caught in the middle of considering something.

Kanno zoomed in once more on the second photograph, then out again.

Her fingers settled more securely around the camera body.

Ian spoke before she decided whether to say anything else.

“Thank you, you look lovely against the martian sky. I think mars and you did more work on that photo than I, it was easy to bring out something nice with the celestial and friend-shaped subjects”

Kanno looked up from the camera.

*Friend-shaped* caught for a moment. Ian moved on before she decided whether to answer it.

“Thomas, Isha, did you enjoy? We can come back again, if you want.”

Isha's answer arrived before Thomas's.

“Yes.”

She looked back across Olympus Mons. The flight had left no physical mark on her beyond the colour still high in her face, but the pleasure of it had not settled yet. Her attention kept returning upward, as though ordinary standing had temporarily become an unnecessarily restrictive way to occupy space.

“I want to come back. I want to fly again, and I want to look properly for a climbing route.” She turned to Ian. “Not today. Half an hour is enough for a first look, especially if you are tired.”

Thomas glanced at her. “You are being remarkably calm about discovering personal flight.”

“I am standing on Mars. My standards for calm have changed.”

He laughed, then considered Ian's question for himself.

“Yes. I enjoyed it.” Thomas looked down at the ground where another footprint had already vanished. “Being carried through the Martian sky by my wife was not an experience I had identified as missing from my life, but apparently it was.”

Isha's smile widened.

Thomas added, “I would also come back. Although next time I may want both of her hands.”

“That sounds less dignified,” Kanno said.

“I have already been photographed hanging from one. Dignity has ceased to be recoverable.”

Kanno checked the second portrait once more before lowering the camera. “I also want to come back.”

Her eyes moved briefly towards Ian.

“One at a time still applies. But yes.”

“We can come again, all together or, just Thomas and Isha, or just.. anyway we can arrange that later”

The unfinished phrase did not escape Kanno.

She looked at Ian for a second, camera still in her hands, then spared him whatever interpretation she might have made of it.

“Later is fine.”

Isha's attention had already returned to the sky. “Yes. I do not want to decide the actual climb while I am still discovering that I can fly.”

Thomas looked at her. “A surprisingly specific sentence.”

“It is an unusual afternoon.”

The gentle air moved across the four of them. Behind Kanno, Olympus Mons continued outward on a scale none of them had properly understood yet. The survey had established almost nothing useful about a future route except that Isha wanted another one, longer and considerably less distracted by the existence of personal flight.

Thomas checked his phone from habit before remembering how little an Earth clock meant to Ian's half-hour. “If your time here really is limited, perhaps we should leave the route planning until next time.”

Kanno returned the camera strap over her shoulder.

Isha looked back towards Ian.

“Do we return to the scones from here?”

“A photo of the three of you first? No Phobos photo-bombing”

Kanno glanced at the camera hanging from her shoulder.

“Yes.”

Thomas looked towards the sky with exaggerated suspicion. “I appreciate the guarantee regarding orbital interference.”

Isha moved beside him, still smiling from the flight. “One photograph?”

Kanno gave her a look. “That is not how photographers work.”

“You are not taking it.”

“That is irrelevant.”

Thomas laughed and stepped closer to Isha. She put an arm around him without arranging him much further; after being carried across Olympus Mons by one hand, posing formally beside her would have felt strangely artificial.

Kanno joined them on Thomas's other side, leaving enough room that the three did not look compressed against the enormous landscape. She adjusted the camera strap, then lifted it over her head and held the camera out towards Ian.

“Fine. But if Mars provides another suspiciously perfect background, I am blaming both of you.”

The three of them settled together beneath the Martian sky and looked towards Ian.

He took several photographs.

He changed the angle slightly between them instead of arranging the three into new poses, letting whatever happened in the few seconds between shutters do the work. Kanno heard each click and resisted the professional urge to ask what he had seen. Thomas and Isha stayed close beside her, the enormous Martian landscape making their small human grouping improbable enough without further direction.

Then Ian lowered the camera and returned it.

A door stood behind him where there had been only Olympus Mons a moment earlier.

“Shall we?”

Isha looked once more across the mountain.

The urge to go upward again was visible enough that Thomas did not tease her for it. She had flown for only minutes and already looked as though walking away required an actual choice.

“Yes.”

Kanno settled the camera strap over her shoulder. Thomas took Isha's hand, though this time both of them intended to remain on the ground.

They crossed the red dust towards the door.

Kanno went through first. Thomas followed, with Isha beside him.

Flat 202 received them without ceremony.

The flexible-room floor was exactly where it belonged. The storage unit, drying space and ordinary Sunday light had not changed. Thomas turned almost immediately.

Mars remained framed in the doorway for another second: red ground, muted sky, Ian still on the other side.

He did not follow.

The door closed.

When Thomas opened it again, the flexible room continued normally into the hall.

Isha stood looking at it.

Then she looked down at her own feet.

“I flew.”

Thomas leaned against the wall. “You did.”

“I carried you.”

“You also did that.”

Her smile returned.

Kanno had already moved to the LDK.

By the time the other two joined her, the camera was on the table and she was reviewing the photographs Ian had taken. She passed quickly over the two individual Mars portraits she had already seen and reached the group sequence.

The first was almost formal by their standards. All three faced the camera beneath the Martian sky, Thomas and Isha close together, Kanno beside them, the great empty landscape spreading away behind.

The second had been taken perhaps a second later.

Thomas was no longer looking at the camera. His head had turned towards Isha, apparently reacting to something she had said or done between frames. Isha was still looking forward, but the beginning of a smile had altered her face.

Kanno advanced again.

In the third, Isha was laughing. Thomas had returned his attention to the camera but had failed to stop smiling at whatever had caused it. Kanno herself was looking slightly sideways at them, her expression caught between endurance and amusement.

She stayed on that one.

Thomas came around the table to see. “That seems accurate.”

“It is annoyingly good.”

Isha leaned over Kanno's shoulder. Her long hair fell forward until she pushed it back with one hand. “I like that one.”

Kanno looked through the remaining frames before returning to it. None was technically miraculous. Ian had not somehow transformed into Nagai or given himself decades of photographic practice. He had simply kept pressing the shutter while the three of them stopped posing.

That had been enough.

She marked the frame rather than deciding anything more about it.

Beside the Mars sequence sat the two photographs of Kanno alone: Earth bright in the sky, Phobos near her gaze, the second with the breeze moving her hair away from her face. Actual photons through her own lens, recorded by her own camera while Ian held it. Another category for a collection that had acquired too many categories in too little time.

Kanno closed the review screen.

Isha was still smiling.

Thomas looked towards the flexible-room door, now only a door again.

On the table behind them sat the remains of the Sunday they had left: cups, pastry paper and tea that had gone completely cold while they were on Mars.

Thomas picked up his cup and tested it anyway.

“No.”

Isha laughed. “You expected it to stay warm?”

“I have had an unusual afternoon. My standards became unreliable.”

Kanno took her own cup, found the same result and put it back down.

Outside, Sendai remained exactly where they had left it.

For several seconds, the cold tea was the only problem any of them addressed.

Thomas emptied the pot and started again. Kanno left the camera on the table rather than packing it away, and Isha sat with one leg folded beneath her, still carrying the restless brightness she had brought back from Mars. Every so often her eyes moved towards the ceiling as though she had remembered that ceilings were now optional under sufficiently strange circumstances.

Thomas noticed on the third occasion. “You are thinking about flying again. How continuously?”

“Since I stopped.” Isha looked at her hands, then towards the ceiling once more. “I wanted to see the mountain. Then he told me I could fly, and for several minutes I did not care about the mountain at all.”

Kanno made a small sound that might have been sympathy. “That seems extremely difficult for climbing.”

The kettle clicked off. Thomas poured fresh water over the leaves and let the admission sit where it had landed.

“What did it feel like?” Kanno asked.

Isha took longer over that. “Like deciding where my body belonged and having the answer happen.” She moved one hand through the air, tracing a shallow turn. “There was still balance. I still wanted to arrange myself properly. When I carried Thomas, his weight mattered. But I did not have to push against anything.”

Thomas returned with the new tea. “I can confirm that the carried person retained weight.”

“You were manageable.”

Thomas accepted this with the dignity available to someone who had recently crossed the Martian sky suspended from his wife's hand. Kanno watched Isha take the cup he placed in front of her, then asked, “Would you want the flight during the actual climb?”

Isha's answer came immediately. “No.” Then she frowned. “Probably no. If I am climbing, I want to climb. I do not want to reach a difficult section and discover I can solve it by thinking upward.”

Thomas sat down. “Ian could presumably disable it during the climb.”

“Yes. Or keep it only for an emergency.” Isha looked towards the camera. “I need to decide what the climb is first. Today showed me that I do not even understand the scale well enough yet.”

She had seen ridges and broken stretches from above, but nothing had become a route in the practical sense she trusted. A future visit could be longer and deliberately duller: fly, look, land, walk, inspect, perhaps leave without climbing anything.

“I think I want another survey,” she said. “A real one. Then come home and think about it.”

Thomas nodded. “And after that?”

“Maybe climb part of it first.” She gave him a brief smile. “I do not have to begin with the largest possible version merely because Ian can make it safe.”

Kanno reached for the camera and brought the group sequence back up. “Good. Because if you try to climb an entire Martian volcano in one visit, I am not photographing all of it.”

“You do not have to come.”

“I know.” Kanno advanced to the frame where Isha was laughing and Thomas had lost whatever expression he had intended to give the camera. “That is why I can decide later.”

Kanno had enjoyed Mars. She had also enjoyed Berlin and Venus. Her camera bag did not need to follow every door Ian opened simply because the view on the other side was unique.

Thomas leaned closer to the screen. “I still like that one.”

“So do I.” Kanno marked it again, unnecessarily, then went back to the portrait Ian had made of her. Earth remained a bright point above the Martian landscape. Phobos sat near the direction of her gaze with the compositional arrogance of something that knew it could not be asked to move.

“He really did get lucky,” Thomas said.

“Yes.”

Isha looked at Kanno rather than the photograph. “You like that he took it.”

Kanno's thumb rested against the camera body. “Yes.”

That answer seemed to surprise her less than it might have a month earlier.

“He asked properly,” she continued. “He wanted a photograph of me. He said why. Then he used my camera because I asked him to. There was nothing to correct afterward.”

Thomas remembered the neutral café in January, the passport appearing in Kanno's bag, the Berlin plan stopping because Ian had solved the wrong problem by changing her belongings first. “An improvement.”

“A significant one.” Kanno looked down at the image again. “And he looked very pleased when we came through the door today.”

Isha had noticed that too. “He was relieved when we said the scones and doors were okay.”

Thomas wrapped both hands around his cup. “I think he was asking a larger question than whether we approved of the wallpaper.”

Kanno gave him a look. “That sounds dangerously like emotional analysis.”

“It is a hypothesis.”

“Better.”

Isha smiled into her tea. “My answer is still yes.”

The room quieted for a little while. In the space of an Earth afternoon Ian had supplied a familiar hillside, tea, personal flight and Mars, then sent them home because his own evening had a limit. Isha kept glancing upwards. Kanno kept returning to the same photograph. Thomas drank his tea.

Kanno eventually said, “He called us friend-shaped.”

Thomas had been waiting to see whether she would mention it. “He did.”

“I heard.” Isha's smile returned.

Kanno looked mildly betrayed by both of them. “I am aware you heard.”

Thomas drank his tea. “Are you objecting to the classification?”

She considered the question with more seriousness than the wording deserved. Months earlier she had told Ian they were not friends yet, but could be. Since then he had asked before offering Venus, followed the terms she set, spent an afternoon with them over scones and Mars, and asked to photograph her instead of simply manufacturing an image after the fact.

“No,” she said at last. “I am not objecting.”

Isha did not tease her. That restraint lasted almost four seconds.

“Friend-shaped is not exactly friend.”

Kanno pointed at her. “Do not help him.”

Thomas laughed.

The nameless group chat remained silent. Nobody asked how they had liked the return, and no new image arrived by surprise. Ian had said he was tired.

Kanno packed the camera only after copying the marked frame numbers into a note on her phone. She would back up the files at home, including the two portraits and the Mars group sequence, then decide later whether any deserved paper.

Isha stood to carry the fresh pot back towards the kitchen and stopped beside Thomas's chair. She placed one hand over his.

“Next time,” she said, “both hands.”

Thomas looked up at her. “For flying?”

“Yes.”

“That may be less dignified.”

“I know.”

He smiled and let her pull him to his feet anyway.

All three phones sounded.

Ian's message filled most of the small chat window.

`ian: I hope you enjoyed that. I don't want to take over your life with even fully consenting ... unusual experiences... so i will try to let you have normality, but it brings me joy to see you smile Isha whilst flying. It brings me joy too, taking amateur photos of you, Kanno, after seeing the wonder in your eyes. And Thomas, you got to fly holding hands with Supergirl, so I'm not giving you any compliments`

Thomas reached the end first.

“I see.”

Isha leaned over his shoulder to read it again. “What is Supergirl?”

Kanno, who knew enough to understand the comparison without needing Thomas's explanation, closed her eyes briefly.

Thomas gave Isha the shortest useful version. “Very strong woman. Flies. Comic-book character.”

Isha considered that against what had actually happened on Mars. “I was carrying you.”

“Yes. I believe that is his argument.”

She looked pleased enough that disputing the comparison would have been difficult.

Kanno had stopped on a different part of the message. *After seeing the wonder in your eyes.* She had been photographed often enough to know when a camera was simply present and when the person holding it had wanted something particular from the moment. Ian's two Mars portraits had felt like the latter.

She typed first.

`Kanno: I enjoyed it. And the photos.`

Her thumb hovered.

`Kanno: "Amateur" is permitted. You asked before taking them.`

After another moment she added:

`Kanno: Normality is still useful.`

Isha had already begun her own response.

`Isha: I enjoyed it very much.`

She looked upward again before continuing.

`Isha: You do not need to stop offering unusual things because they are unusual. Ask, and let us decide. Today was good.`

Thomas read that over her shoulder and nodded.

His own answer required less philosophy.

`Thomas: I accept this allocation of compliments. Being flown across Mars by my wife was sufficient compensation.`

He paused, then added:

`Thomas: And yes, I enjoyed it too. A great deal.`

Nobody added another question.

Ian did not answer immediately.

That suited the room. The conversation had already travelled farther than their Sunday afternoon had expected, and nobody seemed inclined to keep it moving merely because the chat made that possible.

Kanno checked the time and frowned.

“I should go home.”

Thomas looked towards the window. The February light had thinned considerably while they were elsewhere. “You were only supposed to visit for pastries.”

“I did that. The Mars part was unscheduled.”

Isha stood with her. “You could use the door.”

Kanno understood which door she meant. For a moment the convenience was tempting: two steps into the flexible room, the correct intention, and apparently her own flat could replace the other side.

Then she shook her head.

“No. I want the journey home.”

Thomas did not ask her to justify it.

Kanno put on her coat and lifted the camera bag carefully onto her shoulder. The files inside it had been made on Mars less than an hour earlier, but the bag itself still required the usual small adjustment where the strap caught against her collar.

At the genkan, Isha handed her the bakery packet containing nothing because Thomas had already folded it for recycling.

Kanno stared at it. “Why are you giving me rubbish?”

“You brought it.”

“That is not how hospitality works.”

Isha put it back on the cabinet.

Thomas opened the front door before the argument developed into a building-wide legal principle. Cold corridor air reached them.

“Back them up before you start deciding what they mean,” he said.

Kanno looked down at the camera bag. “I know.”

“I know you know.”

“That made it worse.”

Thomas accepted this.

Isha hugged her briefly before she left. Kanno returned it with one arm, constrained by the bag, then stepped into the corridor.

“I will send you the group photograph after I have looked at it on a real screen.”

“And the flying ones?” Isha asked.

Kanno's expression became immediately proprietary. “After I have looked at them.”

“That means yes.”

“It means exactly what I said.”

The lift arrived before Isha could improve her interpretation.

Kanno entered, raised one hand and disappeared behind the closing doors.

Outside the building, the cold felt sharper after Mars.

She stopped beneath the entrance canopy long enough to zip her coat properly. Cars moved along the nearby road. Someone farther down the pavement was walking a small dog in a padded jacket. The sky over Sendai had faded towards evening grey, with no visible Earth hanging in it because she was currently standing on Earth and reality had resumed its usual refusal to provide useful compositional labels.

Kanno started home.

The camera rested against her side with every step.

She resisted opening the review screen again. The photographs would survive until she reached her desk. The portrait with Phobos, the group frame, Isha flying with Thomas suspended from one hand—all of them were already on the card. Looking at them for the seventh time on a pavement would not make them more real.

Her phone vibrated while she was waiting at a pedestrian crossing.

She expected the group chat.

It was not.

The message had come to her alone.

`ian: Kanno, we could, if you wanted, sometime, go to other planets too. Or the Sun, Or... sorry, too much. Enjoy your evening`

Kanno read as far as *the Sun* and stopped.

The crossing signal changed. She remained where she was until another pedestrian moved past her, then put the phone away and crossed before considering the problem properly on the other side.

Mars had been less than an hour ago. Venus was still recent enough that she had not decided what its photographs were for. Now Ian had casually expanded the available list to *other planets*, reached the Sun, noticed himself doing it and retreated.

The retreat helped.

She took the phone out again.

The private route was still there. More strangely, it remained available after the message itself: a place where she could answer Ian directly, separate from Thomas and Isha and without needing him to begin another conversation first.

Kanno looked at the empty reply field for several seconds.

That was new.

She did not immediately decide whether it was useful, dangerous or simply convenient. Ian had given her a way to contact him. He had not attached a demand to it.

She typed:

`Kanno: One planet at a time. Mars was enough for today. Good night.`

Then she put the phone back into her pocket.

A few minutes later it vibrated again.

This time the four-person chat opened.

`ian: Good night everyone.`

By the time Kanno saw it, Thomas had already replied.

`Thomas: Good night, Ian.`

Isha followed shortly afterward.

`Isha: Good night. Sleep better tonight.`

Kanno added:

`Kanno: Good night.`

No further message appeared.

She continued home.

Her flat felt smaller than it had that morning, although nothing about it had changed. The same desk stood beneath the same light. The same prints waited where she had left them. Her work bag was still beside the chair, and the ordinary Sunday disorder of paper, charging cables and a mug from breakfast had survived her absence without acquiring planetary significance.

Kanno took off her coat and dealt with the camera first.

She copied the card to her computer, then to the separate backup drive she used for photographs she would be particularly angry to lose. Twenty-seven Venus frames already occupied their own directory structure elsewhere. Mars received another.

She did not name the folder *Olympus Mons Project*.

That would be ridiculous.

`2028-02-27_Mars` was sufficient.

The files appeared one after another.

Isha suspended several metres above the red ground.

Isha climbing sharply into the sky.

Thomas hanging from her hand with an expression he would probably object to if Kanno described it accurately.

A wider frame of both of them flying over terrain whose scale still resisted comprehension.

Then her own portrait.

Kanno opened the second one full-screen.

The wind had cleared her face. Earth remained a bright point against the Martian sky, and Phobos occupied the impossible convenient position near her gaze. Ian had been right about one thing: he had not needed to do much. Mars had supplied most of the background. Kanno herself had supplied whatever expression he had seen.

She left the image open while the backup finished.

The private route to Ian remained on her phone beside the keyboard.

Kanno looked at it once, then turned the phone face down and went to put water on for tea.

The kettle began heating in the kitchen.

Kanno stayed at the desk.

Before getting up, she opened the Mars directory again and moved through it from the beginning. Her own frames came first: Isha above the ground, then higher; the first wide attempts at making Olympus Mons look like a mountain rather than a continent; Thomas and Isha crossing the sky together, his body hanging unmistakably from her hand.

Then came the photographs Ian had taken.

Kanno in profile. Kanno with the wind moving her hair. Earth and Phobos doing far more compositional work than celestial objects had any right to do.

The three-person sequence followed.

She stopped on the frame they had all liked in 202.

Isha laughing. Thomas smiling beside her. Kanno herself turned partly towards them rather than the camera. Three people on Mars who had met through a university history only one of them properly remembered, become friends after an accident, and somehow reached the point where being photographed together on another planet had interrupted a Sunday involving pastries.

Three friends.

Kanno sat back.

There was no Ian.

She advanced through the remaining frames to make sure the fact was as complete as it felt. No accidental reflection. No distant figure caught while she had photographed Isha. No shadow at the edge of a composition. No self-timer group image. Across the whole short Mars visit, Ian had stayed on the photographer's side of the camera.

That was perfectly normal.

Photographers disappeared from photographs constantly.

It was also difficult not to notice from a man who could have made almost any image he wanted.

Kanno went back to the group photograph.

Ian had arranged the afternoon, taken them to Mars, given Isha flight, protected Thomas when she carried him, borrowed Kanno's camera only after asking, and then stood outside the record he made of the three of them. The photograph did not look incomplete. She did not find herself searching for an empty fourth position where he should have stood.

That interested her.

Months ago she had told him they were not friends yet.

Today he had called her friend-shaped, then hurried past it.

The photograph answered none of that. It showed Thomas, Isha and Kanno because Ian had been holding the camera. Anything beyond that would have to wait until somebody actually chose it.

Kanno looked at the second portrait of herself again.

He was absent from that too, but less completely. The direction of her gaze was his instruction. The framing was his. The second shutter release had caught the wind at exactly the right moment because he had waited long enough to see it.

A photographer could be absent from an image and still be all over the reason it existed.

That thought became dangerously close to something she might once have put into an artist statement and regretted later.

Kanno closed the photograph.

The kettle clicked off.

Before leaving the desk, she opened the plain text note she kept beside unusual image sets and added two lines beneath the date and location.

**Mars / Olympus Mons. Actual camera files.**

**Frames made by Ian with my camera are marked separately.**

She saved it.

No ontology. No explanation of how they had reached Mars. No attempt to decide what Ian was to her because he had taken a good photograph and offered access to the Sun with poor conversational restraint.

The private message route remained available on her phone.

She left it alone.

Kanno went into the kitchen, poured the water and returned with tea. When she sat down again, the three-person photograph was still on the monitor where she had reopened it without quite noticing.

She looked at it once more.

Then she drank her tea.