Precious

Each of you has food to eat, every day, thrice a day.
You have a place to sleep that will not cause bodily harm.
Heat and cold are no concern of yours.
You are required to stay physically fit.
Your every need is provided for.
You deserve nothing else.

Marina grins at Scale. "Pearl still asleep?"

"An astute observation, Miss Marina." Scale the butler steps to one side. "Though I admit to hearing no less than six alarm clocks this morning. Do come in."

Marina takes off her boots in the entryway, stretches, and detours to the kitchen to drop off breakfast and grab a glass of water before she starts up the stairs. Pearl's room is down the third hallway on the right, take a left at the golden fountain, take a right at the sixth shoe closet, turn down the hall lined with photos of the two of them. On the right side of this hallway are them at performances, on the news, or clipped out of newspapers; on the left are casual poses, Pearl crowdsurfing, one of Marina asleep writing Shark Bytes (in honor of that one horrendous Salmon Run shift at high tide where they faced nothing but maws and steel eels, splatting over a dozen of each before finally being overwhelmed. And also about how media and the government lies to people) that Marina hates, and dozens of mountain-climbing selfies.

Pearl's door is locked, but Marina has a key. She pushes it open. "Rise and shine, Pearlie!" Then she ducks the pillow Pearl throws at her.

"Nnnnngghhh."

Marina laughs. "Come on, sleepyhead! The sun's been up for an hour! The Umami Trail's a tough one; we need an early start or else we'll wind up camping."

"Camping?" Pearl sits up, blinks twice, and flops back down, looking completely adorable. "Oh. Or else. I am not the sun," Pearl grumbles, and rolls over.

Marina raises an eyebrow. "I stopped at Crusty Sean's and bought us both schwaffles. If you're not downstairs in ten minutes, I'm putting ketchup on yours."

Somewhere in the mess of pillows and blankets strewn across Pearl's king sized bed, an alarm starts going off. Pearl swears and throws herself across the bed, digging down through four layers to silence the thing. "You are disgustingly cheerful at this hour." Pearl finally manages to silence the alarm and flops down again, yawning. "Camping doesn't sound bad. Why don't we go camping? We don't have to be anywhere tomorrow."

"No tent, no sleeping bags, no equipment, no plan. Bring a sweatshirt; it's gonna be chilly for a while yet."

Pearl buries herself in the covers again. With practiced aim, Marina tosses the glass of water all over Pearl and books it from the room before Pearl can escape the blankets. Pearl's shrieks follow her back down the stairs to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later, Pearl appears in the kitchen, wearing a tank-top and short shorts and yawning. "Did you ruin the shwaffles?"

"Nah, you made it on time." Marina tries to be light-hearted, but her hearts are pounding. Umami Trail is the trail with the log over the river. The one she hiked in dozens of remembrances.

The one that'll let her know, once and for all, if this is real.

The two of them eat their breakfast, then pull on their shoes and head out. Mount Nantai is almost deserted right now, so they gave their bodyguards the day off, and each travels with weapons: Marina, her brella, and Pearl, her 's got on boots and leggings and her favorite pink-and-yellow sweatshirt on over a tanktop; Pearl doesn't change at all. "You're going to freeze when we get higher up," Marina comments.

Pearl makes a show of rolling her eyes. "I'm wearing twice as much as you were when we met." She pulls on her hiking backpack. "I'll be fine."

Marina rolls her eyes and pulls on her own backpack. They both have two full bottles of liquid to drink as they hike, but Marina's also got her mini practice keyboard with the fake drums and their recording microphones so they can work on things (they've gotten lots of bits and pieces of songs, or just screaming, done up there) and the first-aid kit and magnifying glass and sunscreen. Pearl has their picnic lunch and whatever else she deemed essential.

Considering the seashells, weird rocks, hammers, engines, rope, and other objects Marina's wound up carrying for Pearl on previous trips, Marina doesn't dare ask what she's got this time. It's gotta be ridiculous, though; the pack's almost bigger than she is.

They've reached the base of the trail when Pearl pauses to look at her. "Are you all right? You seem distracted."

Marina blinks, shakes her head, and pushes her longest tentacle out of her eyes. "Just admiring it all," she says.

Pearl raises an eyebrow. "Uh-huh. Sure you're not wondering about if it's gonna be this trail?" Pearl scans the list posted at the foot of the track. "We want to follow the pink octagons. You still haven't told me anything about your family."

Marina swallows hard and lets Pearl lead. "I had a younger brother. Harbor. And Mom, and Dad. But..." She pauses to take a sip from her first bottle, already half empty. "If they're still alive, I don't want anything to do with them. Or the stuff around them. Not anymore."

"Fair enough," Pearl says. "But you still like some of your past, don't you? Else you wouldn't want to be here all the time."

Marina doesn't want to be here. Not now. Not this trail. Not with her stomach clenching and hearts pounding and knowing, knowing that in a few hours she'll be sure this has all been fake, all this time.

And if it's not?

Marina stops that thought right there, before it has time to take root. "I've been working on some beats for our next song. I wanna do a call and response. Something really fresh and loud, ya know? The sort of thing they'd play at Turf War and the kids sharking'll get caught because they yell along with it."

"We've gotta work superjumping into it, then," says Pearl. "It's like flying! You just make a leap into the air, not gonna know where you come down. You just gotta have faith it's gonna be in a spot with a teammate and not a spot where a splat's waiting."

"Pearlie, I've superjumped maybe twice for just that reason."

"Next time we turf together, you need to spend thirty seconds just jumping up and down at the spawn," says Pearl. She skips a few steps. "Hey! Maybe we can just grab a bunch of people—Callie and Marie, they're kinda friends now, that intern that's always giving us the big eyes when she thinks we're not looking, a couple others—and just do an eight-person squid party. All beakons, jump up and down in the middle of the map." She tries to skip a few steps and the weight of her pack almost makes her fall over.

"What's in there, anyway?"

Pearl ducks her head. "Stuff."

"You're gonna be exhausted before you're halfway up. What kind of stuff. Can I carry any of it?"

"No! It's gonna be a surprise."

Marina's eyebrows climb towards her tentacles. "Pearl-"

"The sky is really pretty this morning, isn't it?" Pearl glances up.

Marina does too. The path's going through a clearing now; she can see the sky. It's a shade of blue you never see with hypnogoggles on, pure and innocent as a child's first turf war. Clouds, white and light-gray, form different shapes as they blow across the sky. Back in the domes, she saw pictures of the sky, and she thought the clouds always stayed the same, puffy white circles. Not shifting, morphing like an octoling going from kid to octo, the shapes up there look like a steel eel. As she watches, quiet, it separates, until it's more like the squid sisters dancing. "It's gorgeous. Better than I could ever imagine a sky could be."

The two stare for a few more minutes, before Marina realizes she slipped into Octarian. "Uh, sorry."

"It's all right," Pearl says, and takes Marina's hand, laces their fingers together. "Some things you just understand."