“You know,” Matriarch Shulemi says to the table after her laughter dies down, “that isn’t the question I was expecting.”

“You as good as told me I couldn’t recruit your daughter as my fifth, Shulemi.” I do my best to keep my voice casual and whimsical. “Do I need to ask if I can, after you’ve already answered?”

“What? Me?” Vonne startles hard enough that she barks her hip against the table, barely noticing it. “You were supposed to ask Mama to be your fifth! Why would you—I don’t do fighting, Adam!”

“If your mother wanted to be on the surface, she would be.” I smirk faintly. “On the one hand, it’s possible she doesn’t want to risk being bound, and since she can’t be part of a surface delving team’s party without that, she wouldn’t take mine. But I’m pretty sure she could break or subvert the bindings, right? And anyway, it’s not like she needs to join a delving team.

“If she wanted out, she’d make a team and absolutely crush the tournament. Isn’t that so?”

“Hmph.” Her voice is disgruntled, but her smile doesn’t go away. “My daughter could do that.”

“Mama, no,” Vonne whines. “Don’t embarrass me!”

“That Annak boy and Zka’s eldest between them are stronger than most teams, and your singer—”

“—doesn’t wanna fight any more than I do! Mama, please.” Vonne’s voice drops in volume, and she droops in her chair. “I don’t wanna leave, anyway. Even if I can’t see you much, and I can’t see any of the others almost ever, I can do puzzles and math and magic, we can do puzzles and math and magic, and we don’t have to fight anyone. Never ever.”

“You cannot rely on this state of affairs continuing, smallest yet no less dear of my brood. All such arrangements… fall apart, in time.”

“But Lily promised!”

Shulemi’s eyes go wide, and she hisses a breath in, in what I think might be the most genuine emotion she’s made thus far. Zidanya has a pretty similar reaction, an unsuccessfully stifled look of shock and surprise, but on Shalma’s face there’s no stifling it; her eyes are wide open, jaw slack.

“She did, did she.” Shulemi’s murmur is thoughtful. “Now why would she do a thing like that?”

“Ask you why,” Zidanya retorts dryly, “the greatest among us, chained into eternal servitude to a mindless automaton gone verging upon the mindful, does such a thing? Why ever might the only one among us who cannot be truly suppressed foster a study of the fundamentals of magic?”

“Sometimes she asks us questions,” Vonne mutters. “But they’re never questions about us, and they’re never questions about her, and they’re never questions she could use against anyone.”

“What are they about, kit of mine?”

“Mama!” There’s a round of laughter at Vonne’s scandalized look, which even she joins in on, and the mood shifts a little bit away from the serious tone that it had taken as a result of Shulemi’s shock. “Mostly she used to ask us about the Tournament. We’d treat it like a puzzle, how to build things cheaper, how to run things more efficiently. I… Do always remembers every thing that goes wrong and every thing that goes right, and all the problems people have, and Shar understands people so well, and I can put the pieces together and take them apart. And Nik and I can make that make sense in magic and runes?”

Vonne’s voice shifts into a question towards the end of her explanation, and there’s a pensive growl from her mother. “A thousand years ago, the Tournament ran once in six cycles, and sent only the victors to the surface. Five hundred years ago, it ran once in three cycles; now it runs every other cycle, and sends ten, not five, to the surface.”

“I was given to understand that the glyphs of the Temple were… perfect.” Sara cuts in with her usual lack of affect, startling Shalma, but not Shulemi. “That is one of the reasons I consented to accompany the Lord Mayor to this mockery of a realm. How do you improve upon perfection?”

“Well, I mean.” Vonne looks a little bit embarrassed, but not at all flustered. She glances at her mother, who nods at her, and at me for some reason; I give her a raised eyebrow and a grin. “The Temple is optimized and its glyphs are perfect, this is totally, a hundred percent true. There’s no way I could improve on the runework! I mean, Nik can’t even improve on the runework, and they know runes so much better than I do.

“But the Temple’s optimized for one purpose, right? And when you say to the Temple, I’d like to get a scenario that looks like this, you get the Temple’s idea of optimized. So you get the Sky Kingdom, and I’m saying that cause I know Adam’s been there; hits all the right notes, delivers exactly what you asked, optimizes on the victory rankings that you gave it exactly like you asked. But what are those victory rankings?” I blink a few times; it sounds like a machine learning program of some sort, which given Zidanya’s earlier description brings forth some questions I really don’t have time to think about, and anyway, Vonne is going on. “We know a few of them, and not just from talking with Lily, but we, and ‘we’ here means my five, don’t know them all.

“There’s a, not exactly a space constraint, there’s always enough space for anything you want ‘cause the Temple builds into the Void somehow, but the Temple is always gonna give you something that has no wasted space, if there’s patterns they’ll always be perfect tessellations, if there’s eight identically cubic rooms and you ask the Temple to build you a building with them, you’ll get a cube. Things like that, right? But not all of them are… not all of them make sense, or are necessary. So sometimes you have your two-unit cube and you need teleporters to get from the third room to the fourth, so you can reshape it and now it’s cheaper?”

“Optimizing along the wrong axes.” Sara’s voice is pensive. “Not an imperfection in the glyphs themselves, or even the runes, but in how they produce an environment.”

“And, you know, dungeonstone is super expensive for the Temple to make, and also to unmake. So Lily only uses dungeonstone in the places that don’t get dismantled between cycles! And that’s not something you can get out of the Temple’s built-in designing functions either, she says, and also Auntie Zka says.”

“Auntie Zka says?” Shulemi’s voice is low, tense, eyes affixed on Vonne all of a sudden in a totally different way than before. “And why would she know about these things that I haven’t heard anything of from you, my daughter?”

“Auntie Zka comes to the puzzle rooms to spend time with Do, since she’s Do’s Mama. Unlike my Mama, who I only see if she wants to use me to get someone else in trouble. Never seen my Mama bring shellcakes or fishloaf to the ingest table.”

“With absolutely no intention to invalidate even the slightest bit of what you just said or to suggest we should move on without addressing it,” I say with perfect insincerity into the suddenly yawning depths of the silence, “I think we might be in danger of getting off topic.”

“Adam.” Shulemi nods at me with clear relief in her eyes, smiling a little bit with a smile that makes my heart jolt. Tea must be wearing off, I think to myself wryly. “You aren’t wrong about what would happen if I decided to achieve the surface. But why not ask for one of my children to fill out your five? You need someone who can win you distance and time, who can baffle and muddle minds, do you not?” She smirks, and indicates Sara with a subtle motion of her head. “And someone more light-hearted than your so-serious ally and companions.”

I shrug. “I dunno. Doesn’t seem necessary. We’ll win the one fight we have to win with the four of us, so why risk our dynamic? Why introduce a complication? Besides, Vonne’s the only one I know, and I get along with her, but she doesn’t want to do violence and why would I want to ruin that?”

“Ruin.”

“Yes. Ruin.” I smile at Shulemi. “The state of not wanting to do violence is the correct state. The necessary mental adjustments to do effective violence are damage.”

“What an interesting notion. Did you watch your own rise through the Temple’s floors?”

“I’m barely keeping my shit together,” I respond flatly, letting the honesty of it show. “I get screaming, cold-sweat nightmares anytime I’m asleep unless I’m being held. The only reason I’m not killing random people for imaginary threats is that my orbs are faster and more reliable than my own cognition, and I can offload threat evaluation and rapid response to them. Even so, I desperately need to take, I don’t know, at least three months and decompress without needing to even think about killing people before I’d trust my decisions about anything significant.” I take a couple of deep, slow breaths, realizing that my voice has risen and I’m on the verge of ranting. “Not that I can avoid making decisions about significant things,” I say a few seconds later, sighing. “I just don’t trust the decisions I’m making. Pretty awkward, huh.”

There’s a look of fleeting emotion on Shulemi’s face, probably negative emotion of some sort, but also there’s a tail wrapped around my right calf, and there are actual, literal tears welling on Vonne’s face as she hugs my arm. “Well,” she says, and then visibly pulls herself together, which I am almost entirely sure is a bit of acting for my benefit. “To answer your question, there is no sed, there are no two sed or five sed, who could achieve the surface and survive until the next group rises in our wake. Not even if two of those were myself and Matriarch Khazka.

“So say all the augurs, so say all the seers.” Everyone’s eyes other than Zidanya’s go wide, Vonne included. “And so we have continued to wait, and learn, and train, as little Gavonne has been training with you; all in hopes of becoming strong enough that the answer changes.”