THE HIGH PRIESTESS 1.5 (An Interlude)

OTHER NOZOMI

A Long Time Ago, Somewhere Else

Several months before Nozomi died, she'd had a strange, wonderful, heartbreaking conversation with Honoka.

They'd be in New Orleans, for a perfume launch. Honoka had been the face of the campaign. Honoka had looked inhuman, in the video, in the magazine spread, a glowing golden goddess holding celestial spheres. Her dress had looked like molten gold that had cooled around her figure, with a single crack of white skin teasing throughout it. Beams of light radiated from her head, bleaching her hair into a white star's fire. Sometimes, Nozomi thought, muse was stirring the subconscious of everyone they were in contact with, not just their own interior coven of idols.

Honoka had slipped out of the venue (a ballroom, strung with glowing magenta-cyan cubes that hung from the ceiling, constant aroma of gold and cream.)

A strange woman had trailed her, and Nozomi had followed, hearing the thoughts far too loud across the room, target is moving, Andrei wants more pictures, why is she leaving, nothing exciting is going to happen tonight - Honoka's own thoughts were more obscured, as they had been for a very long time, with layers of songs Nozomi had never heard, and secrets wrapped into poems, sighs, and the sounds of traffic. It was summer. The night smelled like jasmine, raw and indolic, the kind of jasmine perfume Nozomi would never have worn as a teenager. There were flowering dogwood trees and a towering oak that enveloped them, like Nozomi's tree of time. There were fireflies down here, languid in the cloying heat, yellow instead of green, like Nozomi was used to. Nozomi had crossed several streets, following the agent's unpleasant observations, and the faint aura that followed Honoka everywhere, her own gold beginning to bow under the green.

The grosgrain ribbons of color stopped at an outdoor cafe. The lights were on, but there was no one in the back garden, besides Honoka. Honoka stood in her terrifying golden dress, humming, no, singing, to herself, a mourning rhythm - "A dress as bright as the sun - "

The air seemed to boil over, for a second, 90 degree heat becoming 95, 100 -

"Nozomi?"

Honoka grabbed her arm. Nozomi looked up. Tears welled, and spilled over. She'd fallen, skirt hiked, pumps smudged, Honoka so far up -

"What are you doing here?"

Honoka had ordered two mint juleps and some kind of powdered sugar pastry, and had talked about nothing but the new mecha movie an agent had messaged her about, and beignets, and the china dishes she and Maki were looking at. Maki wanted a special designer, a former idol turned fine artist. Honoka wanted these orange-blue ones, swirled into nebulas -

Nozomi made appropriate sounds and tried to come back to herself, to the sliver of existence they all pretended was reality, while Honoka's otherworldly aura whispered to her, while the agent watched from a distance, taking photos. Nozomi sipped at the sweet boozy, minty drink.

"You should be flirting with the designer and the director right now." Nozomi tried, summoning her elder sister self. "Mari will be cross with you."

Honoka sighed, either deliberately or undeliberately oblivious to Nozomi's fraught appearance. "A girl needs her beauty sleep. We have a shot tomorrow, too, and an appearance at another party, and you know at least a few of the girls are jealous, even though we're all headlining something, and…" She nibbled at a beignet. "It's not even a new perfume, it's just a flanker. Mari can flirt with the director if she really wants to."

"Shall I flirt with the awful director for you?"

"Oh god, please! Don't make me talk to that weirdo. " Honoka put her hands together, semi serious pleading. "I had to do like fifty takes just for that fountain scene! I'll do anything!"

"Will you…" Nozomi looked at Honoka, across the table. She was so beautiful now, as they all were, almost inhumanly so; the way an angel would be beautiful. But there was something else to Honoka as well, as if songs and concepts she carried within her shone through, beating out externally. Honoka wore all gold today, a dress of dripping chains that exposed everything polite society would bear. "Tell me some of your delicious secrets, Honoka?"

Honoka was frozen, then, terror widening her blue eyes. Then she laughed, as if she didn't know that Nozomi was a psychic, as if she didn't know herself that an agent was watching them, as if Honoka hadn't listened to Maki casually tell her that her father had hired a private detective to watch her. "Maki would kill me if I told you about our sex life, you know."

"I do know about the luxury Italian learther harness with the peridot dildo." (Nozomi knew it was real, but also that it was a gag gift, and that they mostly used air suction toys.)

Honoka laughed. "You really are a psychic, aren't you?"

They laughed together then, and there was a brief moment of Reality, of Normal Existence. A midnight dinner came then, with a nod from an elegant older woman at the restaurant: poached eggs and spinach and artichokes, bread pudding, Bananas Foster, shrimp gumbo that Nozomi could not eat herself, but smelled absolutely delicious on Honoka's plate.

"Thank goddess Umi isn't here." Nozomi said, gazing at the endless plates, feeling the slightest regret Hanayo hadn't somehow come too. "We'd be forced into cigarettes and diet coke for the next week."

"Ha! Do you think she's doing coke yet? Wait wait wait, actually, is she doing coke?"

"No, but I am, and I sold your girlfriend some." Nozomi winked. "How do you think I got those Klint paintings?"

"Hard work? Selling clippings of your hair to a fan? Uh…. Eli's mysterious trust fund?"

"Selling Maki coke was very hard work."

Nozomi didn't remember the last time she'd spent one on one time with anyone who wasn't Eli (or occasionally, somehow, always, Nico). This was the first time, in a long time, that she'd enjoyed a conversation with someone, and somehow the secretive nature of her existence (and everyone else's existence) felt less painful around Honoka.

Nozomi's golden tree lit up, just then.

Nozomi steeled herself. She didn't want to say this. But Nozomi needed to, she saw, on the tree that rose up high, that she needed to say something, for some long reaching consequences that she herself did not understand.

"I know you're in very deep, Honoka. Deeper than the others."

Honoka smiled. "Yes, I am in much deeper than the others."

"Why?"

"Why not? Why become an idol? Why fall in love? Why do anything?"

Nozomi had no answer to that.

"Why are you with Eli?"

"I love her."

"But you know, don't you?" Honoka seemed ashamed to even bring it up, and fidgeted with a chain that laced across her arms.

"Of course. I love her even more for the minor indignity."

Honoka laughed, a chiming bell. They were silent, for a long moment, before Honoka spoke again. "I'm worse than you, you know." Honoka's voice dropped, carefully neutral. "I feel like I'm becoming… someone I don't like, with Maki, sometimes. I'm the only one who knows, the only one with the… experiment, besides her. I'm the only person who can help her. And she needs help. Doing it by yourself would be -" She didn't finish her thought.

The glinting chains across Honoka's body gave her the ghastly look of a prisoner, suddenly. A goddess in shackles.

"Do you want to keep going?"

"Not really. I just… don't want Maki to get stuck. And I know how bad it is, what we're doing to everyone and everything else. Maybe you know how bad it is, too."

"Yes."

"But we can't stop. She can't stop."

Honoka pulled a few papers out of her bag. The notes appeared to be music, but also something else, that Nozomi could make no sense of.

Honoka held the papers for several seconds. "I can't show you this."

"Okay."

Honoka seemed to be fighting something. Something stirred in Nozomi's internal sense of prescience, that told her not to push, but also screamed at her to do something, anything.

"What is it?"

"It's the newest project Maki is working on. It's this…narrative show."

"Narrative show?"

"A high concept concert. Only Kotori and Umi are working with her right now. I think she wants Eli to be the star."

"Eli?"

"Yes. Eli has… the most potential, for the role, she'd said."

"Why not herself?"

Honoka shrugged. "I don't know." Nozomi saw that Honoka was lying, but did not know it. Deep down, Honoka understood something about Maki, even if Honoka didn't know the words for it, what to call it, even if Maki didn't understand it herself.

"And you can't tell me?"

"It's all up in the air. Fairy tales, mostly. She wanted to go in a ballet direction for Eli."

"I've never heard of anything like this before."

"We will be revolutionary." Honoka said, with a small prideful smile. "Art idols."

Nozomi knew that the strings of the never-ending maze that led them all to their deaths had long been tied into place. But this final idea: the greatest work of music that Maki would ever compose, the finest poetry that Umi would ever write, the costume work of Kotori's that would grant her a posthumous art exhibition - would lead to all of their deaths.

Except one survivor. Almost. One? Almost two. An endless amount of possibilities opened up, of half lives and half deaths, ghosts and in the scrap of paper Honoka held in her hand, and the song Nozomi had heard Honoka sing, a dress as bright as the sun… Other songs, infinite songs, Swan Lake Suite and Frank Sinatra, their own songs, each tinged green and gold. Maki's internal song, playing over and over and over with increasingly bizarre happenings each time, Nozomi's tree shadowed whenever it played.

Nozomi looked at Honoka's paper, with all of its convoluted equation-music, this… experiment, that they'd referred to, that was somehow connected to the wrongness of Honoka and Maki. Nozomi thought of the elaborate concert Maki was going to perform - a spectacle. A ritual. An experiment.

"Honoka." Nozomi said, taking her hand. "Are you familiar with the occult?"

"Only what Nico tells me."

Nozomi sighed. "I was afraid of that."

"Why?"

Honoka the idol. Honoka the mega-idol. Honoka the scientist's assistant, the part-time musician of muse, and now, Honoka would receive a brief lesson in magic. Nozomi laughed. This was too looked at Honoka again, in her dress of chains, bound deep into herself, both more and less herself than everyone else. Honoka had a bright pulse of will that would have beaten Umi's discipline, or Eli's force, or even Maki's brilliant, sultry intelligence. They were all going to die, but, Nozomi realized then: somewhere across the abyss, this Honoka would exist as well.

"You're going to go the deepest of us all, Honoka." Nozomi said. "You might as well learn a few basics."