It was half-dark when Viv woke to the alarm; she was curled on her side, with Silk stretched along the curve of her hip. The cat voiced a sleepy complaint as Viv shifted her off. By the time Viv had washed her face and brushed her teeth, Silk was fully awake and restless, complaining at Viv’s heels as she followed her human from room to room. Viv finally kicked her out into the courtyard while she dressed.
Luckily, most of the wrinkles had fallen out of her suit—a close-fitting navy blue pantsuit with white piping that Viv thought very smart, in a sassy sailor-girl way. She was hoping that “business casual” would be the rule in the office, as she only had the one suit, but for her first day she thought it best to dress formally. She buttoned up the jacket, smoothed the pants over her hips, and took a moment to admire the effect in the mirror. A couple of small pearl earrings completed the ensemble. She pulled the front part of her hair up in a simple barrette—it was always hard to get her carroty hair to look sophisticated—and kicked her usual sneakers aside in favor of a slim, stack-heeled pair of black leather business shoes.
It was only six thirty when she was finished dressing, so she poured herself a bowl of cereal, chopped up a banana to put on top of it, and sat cross legged on her futon to eat it, as the kitchen remained bare of table or chairs. When she’d finished that, she stuck her head out into the back courtyard to check on Silk, but her quick scan of the space revealed no cat.
“Silk?” she called, stepping out into the courtyard. “Where are you, girl?” When she was answered only with silence, she called more loudly: “Silk! Here, kitty, kitty!” and finally went so far as to make the pss-pss-pss sound that was Silk’s food noise. At that, she heard a familiar cranky meow, and, turning towards Silk’s voice, caught the Siamese poking her head out from within a cat-door cut into her upstairs neighbor’s apartment.
“Silk!” she cried in dismay, and hurried up the wooden staircase to clutch up the trespassing cat. “You can’t go in there! It’s not ours!” The cat flicked her ears back dismissively, but allowed herself to be scooped up into Viv’s arms.
Viv carried the cat back down the stairs to her own back door, still scolding her, but at the same time scritching her neck and ears. Silk, ignoring the reprimands, began to purr. Viv reached for the doorknob—and it failed to turn.
A firm shove confirmed that the door had well and truly locked behind her, and had no intention of unlocking itself. Viv stood there, aghast, as the enormity of the disaster bloomed in her mind. She was trapped.
She recovered herself enough to look carefully around the courtyard, but her close scan only confirmed what she had at first taken to be an asset: high buildings bordered the courtyard on every side, and there was no way from here to the street. That made the area a safe playground for her cat, but a secure prison for her now. Her cell phone was locked inside, and it was not even seven A.M. Even if she had some way of reaching the apartment manager, he probably wouldn’t be in till nine, and wouldn’t be able to rescue her until some time later. She’d be lucky if she was only an hour late for her first day of work.
Silk began to squirm in her arms, and Viv allowed her to jump to the ground. She couldn’t believe that she’d really managed to do something so stupid. She tried the window, risking splinters in an attempt to wedge her fingertips between the frame and the sill: but it was no good. The window was firmly locked as well.
Viv blinked back the prickle of tears, feeling strongly that the situation was unfair. Knowing the emotion was childish only made her angrier. There was, she noticed, a fine patina of cat hair on the front of her suit. Silk mewed plaintively: she’d been promised food.
Viv could think of only one thing to do, so she trudged up the staircase and stood before her neighbor’s door. She scrubbed the heel of her hands against her face to wipe away any errant tears, took a deep breath, and knocked.
Vague sounds of movement issued in response from within the apartment. Viv stood there, acutely aware of the early hour, until the door was at last opened by a young blond man, barefoot and shirtless with a fuzz of stubble on his cheeks, wearing only the low-slung drawstring pants he’d evidently slept in. He had really great abs.
“I’m so sorry,” Viv said, squashing that thought, “I know it’s early, and I’m really very sorry to bother you, but I just managed to lock myself out of my apartment. I just moved in, and it’s my first day of a new job, and I don’t know what to do, and I was hoping maybe I could use your telephone.”
“Oh, you’re living down there now?” he said. His face was still creased with sleep, but his voice was friendly: he had the easygoing drawl that, from surfer movies, Viv had half-expected all Californians to use. She hadn’t heard it from anyone till now. He stepped forward: “Let me see.”
Viv moved back and her neighbor trotted down the stairs, jiggling the doorknob just as Viv had, and with as little result. “I didn’t know the door would lock behind me,” Viv said miserably.
“Don’t sweat it,” the pyjama-clad man said confidently, “I know kung fu.”
Before Viv could formulate any sort of response to this extraordinary statement, he drew himself up and lashed out with a powerful side kick. His bare foot connected solidly with the wood just below the door handle, and with a loud crunching sound and a shower of splintered wood, the door flew inward.
“There ya go,” he yawned.
Viv stared in disbelief at her back door. The doorknob now hung askew from a cratered section of wood, and long shattered splinters lay scattered about the ground and the carpet inside her bedroom. She turned her astonished eyes to her neighbor, who smiled back benignly. Viv decided on the instant that it would be unwise to make any sort of enemy of this madman.
“Th-thank you,” she stammered out.
“You’re welcome,” he said casually. “I’m Duane. Is that your cat?”
Silk had wisely retreated a safe distance from the scene of destruction. “It is, yes,” Viv managed. “Silk. She’s Silk. I’m Viv. I’m, um, pleased to meet you.”
Duane yawned. “Mine is Midnight. I’m going back to bed,” he announced. “Welcome to...here,” he tossed over his shoulder on the way back up the stairs.
Left alone in the ruins of her back door, Viv kicked aside the largest of the broken bits of wood, and shepherded Silk back inside the apartment. The door would no longer close at all, so she propped it up in the frame as best she could, and moved her suitcase against it to hold it shut. “‘I know kung fu,’” she whispered. “Jeezy.”
There was nothing for it, though; she had to go to work, and the apartment would have to be left as it was, open to anyone with access to the courtyard. It wasn’t, she reflected, as if she had much to steal. Her eyes fell on the sword.
“It would be ridiculous to take it,” she whispered. “To my first day of work…what would they say…”
And then she thought of lantern-eyed gremlins, their long yellowed nails and sharpened teeth. “No,” she said, louder and firmer. “It would be ridiculous not to take it.”
So in the end, she snatched up the sword on her way out. The subways were much more crowded in the morning: Viv had to stand in line to board, and there was no question of claiming a seat. She clutched the sword close to her body as the other commuters pushed past her, desperately afraid that she’d slice open somebody’s leg—the more so because nobody else seemed to notice it at all.
Her new office was in the South of Market area, a neighborhood mostly made up of brick warehouses. Many of them, though, seemed to have been converted to nightclubs, upscale restaurants, live-work lofts, or office complexes. Viv’s destination had a small sign above the unassuming glass doorway: “Nextwave Public Relations,” with a swirly geometric logo done in contrasting shades of blue. Viv did her best to brush all the cat hair off her suit jacket before stepping inside.
The door led to a narrow staircase, with another sign inside advising visitors that an elevator to the Nextwave offices was also available via the next-door piano tuning & repair store, which apparently occupied the first floor of the building. Viv opted to take the stairs.
Despite the somewhat unprepossessing entrance, she found, when she pushed open the glass door at the top of the stairs, a gleaming lobby of blond hardwoods and polished chrome accents. A receptionist behind the front desk looked up as she stepped in and gave her a friendly smile.
“Hi,” Viv said. “I’m here for my first day of work? The new account assistant?”
“Oh yes,” the receptionist said cheerfully. “I’ll get Kate.”
That name at least was familiar to Viv: her phone interview had been with a Ms. Kate Mullawney. From that conversation she’d formed a mental image of a big, brassy blonde, and was a little surprised to see a very polished-looking older woman, with expensively coiffed gray hair and a slim figure, emerge from the back in the wake of the receptionist. “Viveka,” she said warmly, holding out a hand. “Welcome to Nextwave.”
Viv had to swap Excalibur over to her left hand before she could return the greeting—but Ms. Mullawney, like everyone on the train, didn’t bat an eyelash. “Thank you,” Viv said, brightening her voice with what she hoped was just the right degree of enthusiasm. “The office is lovely!”
“We actually just had it redone,” Kate remarked. “Come on back, you can meet everyone and we’ll get you situated.”
Behind the front desk were glass-fronted meeting rooms, equipped with long cherry-stained tables and leather chairs; a few private offices, one of which was Kate’s (her nameplate declared her Nextwave’s Senior Vice President; there were other VP offices, but Viv did not see one for a President); and after that row upon row of cubicles. Kate led her down one of the cubicle aisles, and raised her voice to instruct those already seated: “Say hello to Viveka, everyone, she’s our newest hire.”
Heads poked out of cubes, and a friendly chorus of hellos surrounded Viv. A curly-haired man in a blue Oxford shirt leaned close to say in a wondering tone, “Has Kate got you running meetings on your first day?”
Viv turned wide eyes to Ms. Mullawney, who laughed gently. “He’s teasing you about your suit,” she said. “We only wear suits here when we’ve got meetings scheduled with fussy clients. Unfortunately for me, that’s pretty much every day. —Ah, Jennifer. Viveka, this is Jennifer, she’ll be doing most of your training.” Kate stretched out an arm to usher forward a petite dark-skinned woman in a tailored black shirtdress and high leather boots. Her shining black hair was cut close around her face, and heavy black eyeliner accented her liquid eyes, giving her face a pixie charm; aside from a light lip stain she wore no other obvious makeup. Viv thought she looked as if she’d just stepped off the pages of Vogue, and formulated a swift inner prayer that she wouldn’t notice the cat hair on Viv’s suit.
“Welcome aboard,” Jennifer smiled, and Viv once again got to practice her delighted-to-meet-you handshake.
“I’m going to leave her with you,” Kate said to Jennifer: “can you be sure IT gets her a laptop by the end of the day?”
“Will do,” Jennifer promised—and with a quick squeeze of Viv’s shoulder and a bright “Welcome, and have fun!” Ms. Mullawney made herself scarce.
“Come on back this way,” Jennifer said, “here’s my cube, and you’ll be right next to me.”
Jennifer’s cubicle was filled with stacks of paper, although color-coordinated tabs demarcating the stacks spoke to at least some degree of organization. She had a laptop docked on the desk, augmented by a full-size keyboard and a wide flat-screen monitor. A calendar was tacked to one of the padded cubicle walls, showing, for April, a sun-drenched coastal landscape that looked like it might be somewhere in Greece. But the dates were bare.
“Just for show?” Viv asked lightly, inclining her head towards the calendar.
Jennifer glanced over and laughed. “Oh, yeah, I keep everything on my iPhone. Have you got one?”
“No,” Viv admitted. “I want one, though.”
“You can get a BlackBerry through IT,” Jennifer said, “but that’s a pain because you have to make sure you only use it for company business. It’s way better to just save up and get your own.” She flipped through the tabs on one of her stacks of paper until she found the sheaf she was looking for. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said sheepishly, “but I have these orientation guidelines and I thought we could just go through them one by one. So I don’t forget anything important.”
Viv assured her that she didn’t mind, and so in short order she learned: a) that the desks in every cubicle were reinforced with steel, and intended to provide a safe refuge from falling debris in case of earthquake (“It’s a pain because it’s much too heavy to move, so you can’t rearrange your cube,” Jennifer admitted); b) that her lunch break was forty five minutes, no more and no less; and c) that workplace harassment could take many forms, including non-verbal harassment, and that at Nextwave it was every employee’s responsibility to ensure that the work environment remained safe and professional. Jennifer very solemnly read out an entire list of terms, phrases, and topics of conversation that could cause one to feel harassed on the basis of gender, age, race, creed, or sexual orientation: but about halfway down the list Viv could no longer suppress a giggle, which prompted Jennifer’s own sternly serious tone to crack, and by the time they’d reached the end of the list both women were laughing so hard that Jennifer could barely choke out the words.
“Hey, I feel harassed,” someone in the next cubicle over protested.
“Shut up, Doug, or I’ll harass you in the patootie,” Jennifer retorted smartly.
“Dude, they should put that on the list,” the unseen Doug complained.
They spent a few minutes going over the equipment in Viv’s cube—a phone, a chair, and a backpack of emergency supplies tucked under the earthquake-proof desk. Viv took the opportunity to lean Excalibur in the corner as Jennifer put in a call to IT about the laptop. Then she excused herself to check her e-mail, instructing Viv to take the opportunity to record a new voice message while they waited.
Viv tried out several variations, unhappy with how high and thin her voice sounded on playback; but when she pitched her voice artificially low it only prompted more laughter from the distant Doug. She settled on a simple, cheery, “Hi, this is Viveka Janssen at Nextwave, I’m away from my desk but please leave a message and I’ll be sure to get back to you,” although privately she still felt that she sounded about fourteen.
“Hey, are you the new girl?”
She looked up and saw, with a shock of recognition, that the skinny bearded fellow occupying the entrance to her cube, with a bundle of electronics in his arms, was one of the young men she’d encountered at the beach. He clearly placed her in the same moment: “Oh hey! I met you the other day!”
“Omigosh,” Viv said, and then, with a smile: “I’m not stalking you, I swear. My name’s Viv. It’s my first day here.”
“Noah Goldberg,” he said. “I’m the tech guy. Here, let me get you all set up.”
Viv obligingly pushed her chair back, and Noah set his armful of computer gear on the desk, untangling wires and power cables into a laptop, mouse, keyboard, and docking station. He wriggled under the desk to thread the power cables to the floor and connect them to an electrical socket in one corner. His voice floated up to her from under the desk: “Okay! Try turning it on!”
“I’m not going to electrocute you, am I?” Upon receiving his assurance that she was not, she flipped open the black plastic case, found the power button, and pressed it firmly. The computer beeped and flashed its LEDs at her. “Success!”
Noah retrieved himself from the floor, brushing dust off his jeans. His black tee shirt had a string of zeros and ones printed on it. “Okay, now let’s get you on the network.”
That operation proved more complicated, and after wrestling with several log-in screens Noah threw up his hands and told her he’d have to go edit some config files. “I’ll have you up and running by the end of the day,” he promised.
“It’s all right,” Jennifer chimed in, “I’ll take you to lunch. What do you like?”
“Oh, you know, everything, really,” Viv said vaguely. “I’m not a vegetarian or anything,” she added, and then worried that she might have offended someone: weren’t most Californians vegetarian? But Jennifer didn’t seem offended.
She gave Excalibur a backwards glance as she left her cube: but the sword was apparently invisible, or at least had its own methods of taking care of itself. And Viv didn’t care to juggle silverware and a four-foot longsword as she tried to make chitchat with her new supervisor. Whether it was smart or not, she felt safe in the daylight, and in the company of people as polished and confident as Jennifer.
They ended up eating at a nearby Thai diner. The walls were painted red, festooned with gold-woven hangings, pictures of heavily adorned elephants, and a portrait of the Thai king in an elaborate gilt frame. “Never mind the decor,” Jennifer said deprecatingly, “the noodles are great”: but Viv privately thought it looked splendid.
Jennifer had a bowl of chicken and noodles in a coconut-milk broth (so: not a vegetarian), and Viv ordered the pad thai, which was excellent as advertised. Chatting over the food, she learned that Jennifer had recently been promoted to a full Account Executive, from a job similar to Viv’s own. “Nextwave is good,” she assured Viv. “The paychecks always go through. Believe me, some of these places! They spend all their money on a fancy front office, and they take the clients to Boulevard and Chez Panisse—and then the clients can’t pay, because they’ve spent all their money on promotions and ‘branding’” (Jennifer used her fingers to mark quotes around the word) “and even their demo software doesn’t work! And then your paycheck bounces! But Nextwave is good. It used to be we were beating the clients away with sticks, and even now you could make account exec in six months, probably.”
“That’s really good to hear,” Viv said. “I was pretty nervous, coming out here after just a phone call and some Web research.”
“I was a hire fresh out of college too,” Jennifer said, “not here, but at another firm. It’s not so unusual. They actually used to send recruiters around to colleges around the country. Most firms don’t do that anymore, but they’ll still take a chance on new graduates. It’s a good way to get your foot in the door; and of course, for the company, it’s good because they can pay you next to nothing.”
“It seemed a really big salary when I was still in Ohio,” Viv said.
Jennifer laughed. “Toto, you’re not in Ohio anymore.”
After lunch, Jennifer handed Viv over to the HR department, which apparently consisted of one overworked representative, who was nonetheless patient and helpful in guiding her through the 401K and health benefit forms. The paperwork ate up an hour, after which Viv wandered back to her cubicle: but Jennifer was gone.
Viv timidly poked her head into the cubicle that, according to her best guess, housed the mysterious Doug: “Have you seen Jennifer?” she asked the khaki-clad fellow inside.
“Oh yeah, I think she had a meeting,” he answered.
“Oh, um—she didn’t say anything about what I should be doing, did she?”
“Unh-uh,” he said. “Just, you know. Get set up.”
“Okay!” Viv said brightly, and retreated to her own cubicle. She minutely shifted the phone and docking station so that they lay in perfect parallel lines, then gave a few experimental spins on her new chair. She clicked through all the desktop wallpapers offered by Windows 7 Professional Edition, eventually settling on an image of leaf-strewn autumn road. Finally, guiltily, she opened Minesweeper.
After an innumerable number of rounds—many won, some lost—she was startled by the reappearance of Noah at her cubicle. “Hey, you should be on the network now,” he announced as she hurried to close the game. “Your login name is vjanssen. Hope I spelled it right.”
He lingered as she tried the login, although she hesitated when prompted to choose a password, throwing him a sidelong glance: “Oh sorry,” he laughed, politely averting his eyes.
“No,” she said, feeling silly: “I’m sure you know everybody’s password. I mean—I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I forget them instantly,” he assured her. “It’s the mark of a good sysadmin.”
She typed in SILKYCAT as her password, only to have it rejected as insecure: SILKYCAT!, however, passed the test. She was rewarded with an e-mail inbox of her very own. “All good!” she announced to Noah.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything else.” He turned away—and stopped, his eyes landing directly on Excalibur.
“Ha!” he laughed. “You’re still lugging around that sword!”
Viv swiveled her chair to face him. “You—you see it?”
“I, uh, yeah. It’s right there.”
Viv’s breath hitched in her throat. “Come here,” she said, jumping up from her office chair. She grabbed Excalibur with her right hand and Noah with her left, tugging him along by a fistful of t-shirt. “I need to talk to you. Right away.”
“Uh…okay?” He stumbled along after her, confusion stamped all over his face. Viv scanned the office, looking for some semi-secluded place, and settled on an empty meeting room. She pushed Noah inside, kicked the door shut behind them, and laid Excalibur down on the broad central table.
“Nobody else sees it,” she hissed. “And that’s not all, but it’s the part that I can prove to you right now. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Noah’s expression, beneath the bushy beard and his enormous metal-rimmed glasses, had changed from confusion to outright alarm. “Wait here,” Viv repeated, and went back to Doug’s cubicle.
“Hey,” she said brightly. “Can I borrow you for a second?”
“Sure, new girl,” he said genially.
She led him to back to the conference room, where Noah was bent over the blade of the sword, his hands clasped behind his back as if to restrain himself from touching it. “I have a bet with Noah,” she said. “Do you see anything different about the table?”
Doug looked over the smooth expanse of varnished oak, his eyes scanning over Excalibur without a pause. “I—no?” he offered tentatively.
Noah straightened, glancing back at them. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice oddly tense. “Viv thought she scratched the table. I can’t see it myself.”
Doug shrugged. “I certainly can’t. I won’t tell on you.”
“Thanks,” said Viv.
“Lemme know if you need anything else,” he offered, and Viv managed a smile as Doug turned away.
“So,” Noah said, as soon as the door to the conference room had swung shut. “I think I see the sword because you pointed it out to me, when we first met. We could have tested that theory on Doug—see if he would’ve noticed it, if we told him there was a sword, but I dunno. If this is…magic…then I think you should be careful about who you break the spell for.”
A swell of relief rushed up from Viv’s stomach, leaving a tingling warmth along her scalp and spine. “Then you believe me,” she said in a rush. “Thank goodness. I’ve been feeling—it’s been so crazy.”
“I believe,” Noah said carefully, “that this sword is special. I believed that as soon as I got a close look at it. And I can’t think of a better way to explain what you’ve told me, and what I just saw happen with Doug, than to guess that there’s some kind of SEP effect around it.”
“SEP effect?”
Noah waved his hand. “Magic. Subtle magic. Keeps people from paying attention. I should probably call it ‘glamor.’ It’s just I actually read more sci-fi than fantasy, believe it or not.”
Viv took a deep breath, just looking at him. At the one other person in this city who seemed prepared to help her deal with the truckload of crazy that had just been backed onto her head. He met her eyes pretty steadily from across the swath of conference table.
“There’s more,” Viv said. “I’ve seen things. Monsters. I was attacked by—goblins, they looked like, but the Piper said they were redcaps. Piper was…I don’t know. Magic, somehow. He said that this is Excalibur. He said—”
“It’s not Excalibur,” Noah interrupted.
Viv gaped at him for a second. “You were the one who said it might be!” she protested.
“I know, I know, but that was when I didn’t actually believe it. Now I believe you, so let me explain why it’s impossible. This is Damascus steel. I think.”
Viv bit down on her frustration. “What does that mean?”
“Come here,” he said, and Viv moved to stand beside him, looking down at the sword on the table. “You see these wavy lines in the metal?”
Viv nodded. “The markings,” she said. “I noticed that straight off.”
“Well, when I first saw the blade from a distance—when you were carrying it at the beach—I assumed it was just patterned steel. Pattern-welded steel goes back to the Vikings. It’s a way of tempering the blade with different kinds of metal. That makes it more flexible, which you want, because a rigid blade is more likely to get broken in battle. A lot of modern reproduction swords are pattern-welded, both for the flexibility and also because it just looks cool. It’s nice but it’s not that special.
“But pattern welding makes, basically, just parallel lines. Parallel wavy lines. Damascus steel is something different, it makes these neat kind of circle-patterns, like here.” He pointed to the blade, and Viv leaned forward, looking at the way the curving pattern in the metal separated and rejoined, random yet intricately repeating. “And even here—” he moved his finger, pointing to a section of the metal that showed spikes in the lines. “This pattern is called Mohammed’s Ladder, it’s very characteristic of Damascus steel. This kind of steel—it was prized across the ancient world. Damascened swords were the sharpest, the strongest kind ever made. Nobody’s figured out how they did it. The secret has been lost.”
He turned to her, catching Viv’s eyes in his own. “You’ve got to understand,” he said, his voice deepening with intensity. “Damascus steel is one of the greatest historical mysteries. There are lots of theories. Some people think they had a special ore called vanadium. Some people think the smithing technique created, like, super-resilient nanostructures in the metal. But whatever they did, it made the swords amazing. These—these swords can cut through rock.”
“The sword in the stone!” Viv exclaimed: but Noah shook his head and continued impatiently.
“That’s the thing though! Damascus steel, it was made in Syria, from—if I remember right, from about the ninth century to the thirteenth or so. I could be wrong about the exact dates, but that’s the general period. Around the Crusades. Now, Arthur lived some time around the year 500. So there’s no overlap there. It’s not possible.”
Viv grimaced. “So…you’re okay with it being a magic sword, but you’ve got some objections to the dating?”
Noah raked a hand through his dark curls. “Magic is—well, sure, fine, it’s magic, I can deal with that,” he said. “But it doesn’t change history.”
Viv bit her lip, staring down at the sword. “All right,” she said. “What if somebody had figured out how to make Damascus steel centuries before? An—an isolated scientific breakthrough. Wouldn’t that sword be the stuff of legend? A kingmaker, even?”
Noah’s face caught the light of possibility for a second, but he resolutely shook his head. “It’s just all wrong to be Arthur’s sword,” he said. “I mean if it was Roman it would have at least a slightly wasp-waisted blade rather than a straight one, and if it was Welsh—No. I’m telling you, this just can’t be Arthur’s sword. It’s from a completely different place and time.”
“I’ve met…people,” Viv said carefully. “Like I said. I was attacked. And then, rescued, I guess, by someone who called himself Piper. He was obviously magical. And he recognized the sword. He called it Excalibur. He said it has many names.”
“Tell me everything,” Noah said, “from the beginning.”
So she did, right there in the conference room, starting with how the sword had found her an apartment, and ending with that terrifying night fighting goblins in the fog. She told him how Excalibur had moved in her hands, and how the Piper had told her to rally her knights.
“It is a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” Noah asked, when she was done.
“Which part?” Viv asked dryly.
“Me,” he said. “My part. I mean, I was there, when the other Lady gave you the sword. And I’m one of the few people in this city who can teach you how to really use it. Not the magic, I mean. But I’m in the SCA. I can teach you real sword-fighting.”
Viv knew the SCA, but only as the kids most likely to wear velvet capes to class. She was even dimly aware that there were divisions within the cape-wearing crowd: for instance, the ones who ran Renaissance Faires were not the same as the ones who filed their teeth into vampire points. “Society for...” she fumbled.
“...Creative Anachronism,” Noah finished. “Yeah. We have meetings at the Round Table Pizza on Geary. You could come, if you wanted.”
“So,” Viv said. “Are you a knight?”
He laughed, a short, sharp exhale. “I am, actually,” he said.
“Is everybody in the SCA a knight?”
“No,” he said. “It’s kind of a big deal. I mean, to us. You have to earn it.”
She met his eyes, and the silence hung between them. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s probably not a coincidence. I think maybe you should come with me on Saturday—to meet Piper again.”
“Sure,” he said immediately.
“You’re taking this…well,” she ventured.
He waved a hand. “I have been training for this moment, like, my entire life. I sort of expected to be playing Luke rather than Obi-Wan, but it’s okay. Obi-Wan’s cool too.”
Viv laughed, startling herself—but she liked it. She liked that she could laugh. “You are into sci-fi,” she said.
He shrugged. “They’re old stories, just dressed up in new clothes. Myths and, like, archetypes, that keep coming back around. Look, I’m not saying this isn’t a lot to take in. Let me go off and look some things up. See what I can find out about all this stuff.”
Viv nodded. Then, fervently: “Thank you,” she said. “It’s really good having someone to talk to about all this. It’s—it’s amazing, actually.”
“Yeah,” he said, “We’ll talk. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She could only nod again. And he nodded, and then they both laughed a little. Then he backed out, a little awkwardly, and Viv was left to make her way back to her own cube.