Kofuku woke with her hands zip-tied above her head, the plastic looping around the handles of the wardrobe in the room she had picked. She shifted her position, taking the strain her body was putting on her wrists off, and sliding her back against the wardrobe door. The lights were off, but through the floor, she could tell the engines were one ,and they were going through atmosphere. They hadn’t left yet, which either meant Kimura’s forces were preventing them, or they were biding their time. Neither of those options bode well.

Her eyes began adjusting to the darkness, the only source of light being the soft glow of the wall panel up on the bed. The information tablet she left on the end of the mattress was missing, and once she glanced down, so was her sword and gun, and even the little jar of magical bone powder. Kofuku wasn’t sure what she expected, and tried shifting her hands, jostling her wrists…and sighed. The bracelet was missing, too. Perhaps Falano had been more observant than she gave him credit for.

With the next pulse of light she scouted with one foot under the bed, even though they had taken her shoes along with the tanto she slipped in beside her ankle. Her toes hooked around the holsters - empty. Whoever they were, they were thorough, and there was no hope for the cutlery in the drawer up front, and she assumed they’d already changed the codes to the armoury under the galley’s dining table. Maybe one of the wire coat hangers…no. She wasn’t sure what that would do against four or five heavily armed whatevers.

In truth, she had been holding her breath for Falano’s eventual turnaround. The man may have enjoyed himself on Daizo-Shikigami, but he strained against his bonds every second, even when their goals of survival were aligned, and Kofuku wasn’t her father. How he kept someone like that was a mystery, or perhaps circumstances had been different then. But he wasn’t the only one who banked on a secret.

She closed her eyes. When she had said that she couldn’t astral project, it was only a half truth - everybody at the Institute on Theremis knew the basics one way or another, as a part of the most basic doctoral-level thaumaturgy courses, but she had simply never tried. Traditional casting like that was far from her forte, as she gravitated more and more towards the tool-heavy Kōrō practice of onmyodo, relying on domain knowledge and interactions with the natural world rather than building spells from within oneself. It was the same way with the Tianlu and the Baekho sects of the Coalition and their magical paradigms, and she was pretty sure those shared a common origin, which made the task before her all the more daunting.

The vibrations Kofuku associated with friction of the air against their ship suddenly ceased, indicating they had entered orbit. From there, the transition into a wormhole would be seamless, and it presented yet another challenge: even if she could project her mind forwards, the ship was small and the walls were thinner than those of military vessels, so without control she would slip out and who knew what the structure of the highway universe outside, not designed for human existence, would do to her mind.

She closed her eyes. She had to try. Though cuffed, her hands and fingers were still free, and she braided them together, muttering an incantation in Greek under her breath. She swapped her fingers over each other, changing the repeated phrase, and then turned her face up so that her hands were over her face, compensating for her limited movement. She opened the fingers on either side of her face and pushed forwards, not only her head, but her mind, her very being. Her vision zoomed in, but sprung back, and she willed it back forwards, focusing on the ceiling light bulb that was switched off, until she finally came undone, body and soul.

It was as if her face and body had been pushed up hard against an elastic membrane, as when it finally broke, it did so with a pop., launching her into the ceiling. She held out her arms to stop the crash, but remembered she had none, and looked down instead, finding her limp body still hanging by the arms from the wardrobe and ties. At least, now she knew that projections retained the momentum of their originating bodies, which saved her from having to focus on anchoring to the vessel. That, or if she fixated on the space outside she would come undone, lost in deep space in a reality not designed for her until she faded and her body wasted away.

The act of orienting herself without physical form was strange. Once upon a time, she thought it might have been like swimming based on her college friends’ descriptions, but now that it was happening to her, she couldn’t quite describe it. The literally out-of-body experience, was, surprisingly, beyond the words of the flesh-and-blood.

When she went through the door, it just looked like her vision went to black and then she was on the other side, floating just before the galley. Some of the cupboards had been rummaged, and as she expected, the armory on the underside of the table had been flipped up and looted, leaving only a pair of empty revolvers that she guessed were too outdated for them. The swords, however, had been taken.

Without hands to use any weapons, she just floated through the bridge door, into where four people she didn’t recognise lazed around the dining table, while Falano himself lounged in the pilot’s chair turned around. The shutters were down, and the panel lights indicated they were in fact in a drive bubble.

The soldier in the beret, who she had seen come out of the car, was scraping his spoon inside a depleting can of beans. “How much do you reckon this ride would go for, F?”

“You tell me,” Falano said. “I barely got a look at this thing from the outside.”

“I know a client or two who’d cream themselves over those damn wings,” said the woman with the eyepiece scanning over the length of a sword. “This too. There’s a huge market for real Kōrō gear, especially since the factories are mostly dead now. Ship is fifty mil, easy.”

“Are we talking credits or that jemawa stuff? Let’s face it, your clients are just rich Mandala boys who want to cosplay as a daimyo.” He ate the last spoonful of the beans. “They’re not that rich. Twenty million creds.”

“Tilly?” Falano asked, turning his eyes onto the other woman, polishing parts of her pistol laid out on a cloth.

“This conversation is pointless,” she said flatly. “Just mark it up. Someone’s going to be desperate enough eventually.”

“Your ‘eventually’ is going to be in like ten years,” the largest man said, crossing his arms in his oversized uniform. “Shouldn’t you start saving for your retirement already?”

Tilly gave him the middle finger.

“The real question is how much the girl is worth.”

“Kitt,” Falano said to the big guy, leaning down in his chair. “No injuries for the princess. If we want to ransom her we threaten to hurt her, not hurt her more, because then it doesn’t have as much of an effect.”

“I doubt it’s that much anyway,” Kitt said. “Didn’t you say her dad’s dead?”

“Yeah…but her mum is Lord Regent. And we don’t have to extort her for money, just some of that god shit we can sell to mages who want a little taste of power. Lasts longer that way.”

Kitt scoffed. “Don’t those guys just buy demon parts or something from Turpentine?”

“How good is the material?” the beret man asked.

“I meant it’s literally crafted from a dead god.” Falano reached behind the chair and removed the sword, now unwrapped from the dirty cloth. “Apparently this is too. Yo Kellens, catch!”

The woman with the eyepiece grabbed the sword as Falano tossed it to her. “Oh, this is magic alright. What does it do?”

“No idea. Can’t tell if the part where it makes people unable to approach it was just the containment or the sword itself.”

“It’s not very active.”

“Should I ask the princess?” Kitt smirked. “She probably knows a thing or two. Am I allowed to slap her awake?”

“Her snoring stopped a while ago,” Tilly muttered. “She’s probably up. You can skip straight to the electrocution.”

“Oi!” Falano snatched the sword from Kellens before Kitt could reach for it. “I just said no touching the princess. Plus, I have no idea if putting too much distance between her and me is going to cause my head to explode.”

“Jeez, cap,” Kitt said. “Weren’t you the first one to suggest electrocution like, every time?”

“It was different back then. We’re not with Fairweather anymore…are we?”

“Not since the heist.” The beret man laughed, leaning back in his chair. “Thought you loved it back there?”

“The whole of last week, sleeping beauty in the back has just been going on about ‘ride the lighting’ this, ‘ride the lightning’ that. I’m seriously just sick of that shit.” He picked up a cup of instant noodles with his other hand. “You just keep him sedated and we’ll be fine.”

“I kind of called dibs on that.” He pointed at the noodles.

“I don’t think she’s eaten for over twelve hours,” Falano said, moving it away. “How about we don’t starve the hostage to death.”

“Everyone, shut the fuck up,” Tilly demanded. “We’ll sort this money business later. Annoy me again and I dock your pay.”

Everyone clammed up at that, and Kofuku watched Falno open the door to head into the galley. She quickly directed her spirit after him, and back through the bedroom door, where her body was still slumped against the wardrobe. She moved closer and pushed herself into the head…only to find darkness, and back out.

Two metalling knocks on the door. “Hey, princess! You awake!?”

Kofuku, of course, couldn’t physically reply. Getting out of her body had apparently been the easy part, and now she was struggling to remember what her textbooks had said about getting back in. The mind was simply a collection of electrical signals, and her astral form was just these signals projected into the air, maintained by the magic-conducting proteins in her body resonating on a higher place…alignment! She turned around and tried backing into the body, but found herself just floating in her own skull. She pulled forwards again, out of the head. Maybe it was speed? Maybe it had to align with some kind of nerve impulse, or generate one. She moved back again, slamming back harder this time.

She could immediately tell she was realigned with her body when the back of her head slammed hard into the wooden door of the wardrobe, sending a jolt of pain shooting across the scalp. “Fuck!” But that was the least of her problems. As the pain in her head and its minor adrenaline injection faded, she felt every muscle in her body and her limbs ache, straining from the act of the projection that ripped the energy right out of their cells to fuel their resonance. She slumped and felt the zip ties bits into the skin of her wrist, now a little inflamed and more vulnerable to chafing than before. Sweat clung to her pores, seaking into her shirt and undershirt, and made her socks damp.

The door to the bedroom opened, Falano stepping in with a cup of noodles, now steaming with hot water, and the sword, which he set against the bed. “Nightmare?”

“Fuck you.”

He put the cup noodles on the bedside drawer. “Aw come on, don’t be like that. This is how the game is played, right? You put a bomb in my head, I sell you into slavery…”

“I’m struggling to imagine what my father saw in you,” she hissed, trying to hide the fact that she was completely out of breath.

“You want to talk about Takeshi? You barely knew him.” He popped out the blade in his left arm section, stepping closer.

She couldn’t help but flinch.

“You wanna eat or not?” He sliced through the ties on her left hand, sheathed the blade, and then set the cup noodles on the floor where she could reach it. “Now play nice and I leave this free so you don’t pull a muscle.”

“You don’t know anything about what my father stood for.”

“Is that so?” Falano sat on the ground, staring at her, his knees propped up. “You seem to have this idea that he was some kind of honourable man who went around saving people. But he worked with me and Richard.”

“That’s not charity, dipshit. The Shogun was trying to kill him, and he had no resources. You’re a valuable asset. I’m surprised he didn’t kill you after he was done.”

“That’s it? That’s your honour?”

“A disgusting opportunist like you would never understand-”

Falano laughed. It echoed through the filters in his helmet and combined with what came through the speakers, giving it a multi-layered cadence. “Would you like to know what I did for him? What he explicitly ordered me to do? How do you think I got all those things to make the perfect sword in three months? How much blood do you think he signed off on, princess?”

“He would nev-”

“Oh he would! And he did!” He glanced at the closed door, and then back to her. “This guy you’re thinking of, he doesn’t exist. Never did. If you knew just how desperate he was…and I don’t even mean me and Ritchie.”

She said nothing, just stared right back at him.

“Of course you don’t believe me. Princess, your father wasn’t just fighting the Shogunate. He was fighting to replace them. If he had won, nothing would have changed. The other warlords liked him because he was more like the old leaders: cold, efficient, brutal…but you’re right. I was useful. That’s the only way he ever saw people. What makes you think you’re any different?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“A daughter he scarcely visited. I’m pretty sure I had more facetime with the guy than you did during the war. And this…” He grabbed the sword. “Is the last piece of him. Given the sort of shit he put me through I’d say he owes me some financial compensation.”

“That belongs to me.”

“Tough. You know, even though you can’t - no, you don’t want to see it - I can tell where you’re headed.”

“You know you’re not going to get out of this, right? That last payday you dream of, finally retiring, going legit. It’s never going to happen.”

“That’s rich. You know nothing about me.”

“I don’t need to.” Kofuku pushed herself upright with her free hand. “I’ve been around you way too much these past days. Can your friends even see it? How long has it been? They’re still looking for that out. This ship isn’t going to be it. I’m definitely not it. You don’t want this, Duran.”

“You’re telling me what I want when you yourself don’t know what you want?”

“Oh I know what I want. I’m not just afraid to admit it.” The words sounded a little hollow to her, but it still stung her, just a little.

The lights in the room automatically turned on, and the pitch of the engines changed. Out of the hyperway, and this early…?

Falano got to his feet. “Better eat up, princess. I’m not buying you any more food until we get to the base.” He exited, sealing the door behind him.

Kofuku idly stirred the noodles with the plastic fork that came with it. Falano was wrong. He had always been to blind, too monstrous, to see that side of her father. But deep down, a part of her began to stir, old and atrophied from years of suppression. Even if that was true, what was she fighting for?