Casey gives her a little box.

Casey tells her what is in the little box.

Casey doesn't say it's from her partner - not until she's put it on and tested it - not until, wearing it, she runs into the next room and takes a second to get there, tries and fails to pinch a fruit fly out of the air and it slips between her fingers unharmed, tries to lure Casey across the apartment into her arms and can't. He waits until she's laughed herself sick, until she's cried and calmed down and cried, twice, until she's called their parents. Then she gets to know who it's from. Once it's safe for her to know, that that guy -

- he's got a name, or at least a codename. Traceless. She knew it, she just tried not to think of him as a specific continuous person who might be tracking her existence between visits.

Once it's safe for her to know that Traceless has been thinking of her, has had her in mind enough to be thinking of getting her presents, has been piecing together bits and pieces to know that she'd want this ring: then she can know it's from him, and it will not compromise her ability to accept guiding from him, because she's never going to need it again. She can retire from espering right now, today, this very minute, and she won't have to try to retool as a professional partner with such restrictive needs that it'd be a joke to call her a provider of a service, she won't have to beg for charity, she won't have to watch all her hair fall out and her skin slough off till some internal organ has had enough of her accumulated carelessness, and she especially won't have to do any of those things while taking all morning to craft a disguise to go grocery shopping in, holed up in an apartment for one, scrubbing out her own toilet because no number of millions of dollars will let her permit a cleaner into her home and the last time her toilet broke she moved to a new apartment. It's over. It's all over. Traceless got her her life back in a tiny box from somebody in Korea.

She could just about kiss him, but it wouldn't do him any good if she did! Because she is not going to take this ring off!

...okay, if he has some kind of emergency, she can hold very still, and take it off, and hug him better. A life is not a trivial present. And the important thing is that she must never be backlashed again; a temporary blip in ring-wearing is not going to kill her if she holds still.

But not for anything short of that will it ever leave her finger. And she's getting a tattoo on her ring finger that says DO NOT REMOVE - CRITICAL MEDICALLY NECESSARY DUNGEON MATERIAL. Because she's going to go have a life, now, and if she fucks up, her backlashed self is not going to stand for it. If this thing comes off under any but the most controlled circumstances imaginable -

Miles better than not having any retirement plan at all, though.

Adjusting to having a life is tricky. She has been, even on zero backlash, enslaved to its inevitable recriminations when it reappears. If it didn't behave that way she could have had a life on her days off as long as she was excruciatingly careful not to speed up. She could have gone to the grocery store, perhaps at a very sedate walk or even in a wheelchair to be extra sure, and not fretted about people seeing her. She has a decade of habits about it which did not rely on her being insane at the time she carried them out. She tries four times to leave for a clothes shopping trip before she makes it all the way to the store, maskless, hatless, wearing the drab things she's got in the closet because that's all she still owns but not in a combination designed to disappear in the background.

She does not want to trickle into having a life step by step. She's killed things with more teeth than she has hairs on her head, things that could spit cannonballs, ghoulish monsters made of fire or tentacles or blood, terrifying things that she deliberately baited into charging after her through their own home turf, and she can face down her anxiety enough to buy an outfit. She wants to explode into the world.

She writes herself a mission briefing about it, hiding in the changing room at the shop, and then she reads through it.

She can push through to complete a mission even if she knows full well that she made this one up. And she un-hides and she drops nine hundred bucks on a stunning strapless silver sheath-dress with shoes to match and wears it home and when she catches someone checking her out she smiles at him. She's alive she's alive she's alive.

Her agent is of course an esper agent, not a music industry agent. She has to get a music agent. (She considers that one agency that specializes in espers who work in entertainment, but it's not like she's going to use her powers on stage.)

In between interviewing prospects for that, she builds her wardrobe up again and writes herself more assignments, to go out to dinner, to meet her brother's girlfriend, to catch up with people she lost touch with a decade ago. (Was she hoping, on some level, that if she worked under her real name, her friends would look her up, even if they didn't hear about the awakening incident in the first place? Would know it wasn't their fault, wasn't that she didn't want to be friends?) She has a maid in to clean her apartment and then she decides that actually she wants a house. She wants a house with enough room for parties. She wants a pool, to go with her new bathing suit that matches the streak in her hair. She sends the Koreans an email asking if they happen to know for sure that the material is robust to chlorinated water. It is. She closes on a house.

She has been writing songs, all this time. She has three or four albums' worth of songs even if she cuts some weaker ones that could use another pass of editing. Some of them have words. But she's never sung them. She had her own entrance from her own little carport, in her apartment building; it was not a very big apartment building. But it was still an apartment building, with neighbors. She was sort of deluding herself that she would ever really be able to release any of them, even the instrumentals; certainly she could not have put her voice out there, before.

She sings them, to herself to make sure the words fit, and again to make sure the revisions are good, and then she and her new agent book her a recording studio, and she sings and sings and sings.

She takes Traceless out to lunch at a nice steakhouse. Learns his real name. Thanks him about seventy times. Makes sure he does have a replacement partner -

"I have for months. I actually found out through him about the material."

"Well, if anything weird happens, and you need me, I can put it in my pocket for a little while and hug you very slowly."

"June, don't be ridiculous, I would sooner hook up with my ex-secondary again in spite of all the reasons I stopped doing that. I didn't get you the ring so that I could ever suggest anything of the kind. All I ask is that I can call you when I'm fresh out of a dungeon sometimes."

She hugs him anyway, though, after they split a blueberry cheesecake and she picks up the check, when her car meets her at the curb. And the week after she takes an interview, as a promotional measure.

Indigo, flagship single of the album of the same name, drops to the tune of coordinated marketing fanfare.

It is playing in the grocery store, the next time she goes, to buy herself snacks for the first leg of her tour.