Michael was staring at the book but not reading it.
He was thinking about the fact that there was a girl standing eight feet away who looked like the best cosplay he had ever seen in his entire life and he did not know what to do about that.
He snuck a look.
She was scanning the tree line with those yellow-green eyes, her bow on her back, her tail moving in slow arcs. The afternoon light was getting lower and it caught the side of her face and her dark green hair and she looked like something out of a high-budget fan art commission. The kind that got forty thousand likes and a comment section full of people losing their minds.
He looked back at the book.
He was very bad with women. That was just a fact about him. He'd never had a girlfriend. Never been on a date. He talked to women online plenty. Gaming streams, Discord servers, comment sections under cosplay posts. He knew how to type to women just fine. In person he basically had the social range of a houseplant.
The last time he'd spoken to a woman face to face outside of work was probably three years ago. And that was asking a pharmacy cashier where the cold medicine was.
Atalante turned her head and looked directly at him.
He looked at the book very fast.
"You were staring," she said.
"I wasn't," he said.
"You were."
"I was reading."
"The book was upside down."
He looked down. It was upside down. He flipped it right side up and said nothing.
Atalante made a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. Her ear flicked once. She turned back to the tree line.
He is embarrassed, she thought. Good. At least he knows shame. That is more than most men start with.
Michael decided to focus on practical problems because that was safer than whatever his brain was doing.
No money. No ID in this world. No place to sleep. The clothes on his back, one book, one Servant who could probably put an arrow through a brick wall without trying.
He also had no idea how Atalante was walking around looking the way she looked without people stopping dead on the footpath. The cat ears. The tail. The outfit straight out of a character sheet.
He looked around. A couple jogged past without even glancing at her. A kid on a bike rode by. Nothing.
"Can people see you?" he asked.
"If I allow it," she said. "Right now I am allowing it only to you. I can make myself fully visible when needed."
"Okay. That's useful."
"Yes."
He went back to the problem list. The most urgent thing was money. He had nothing. He needed food and water and somewhere that wasn't a park bench in March. The temperature was dropping. He could feel it settling into his hands already.
Somewhere behind him a man was sitting on a bench with a Bluetooth speaker going low. Michael caught pieces of it on the wind.
"—Secretary Ross's proposal continues to gain traction, with seventeen nations already backing the Sokovia Accords. The document would place enhanced individuals under a UN oversight panel—"
Right on schedule.
He knew this. He'd seen the movie twice. He knew every beat that was coming. Tony and Steve were going to tear each other apart in the next few weeks and the fallout was going to reshape everything.
That was actually useful. He knew where things were going. He could plan around it.
He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. Old grocery store habit, always had one. He wrote in the margin of the book: CIVIL WAR TIMELINE. ACCORDS. AIRPORT FIGHT COMING. Then he thought about it and crossed the whole thing out. Didn't want that written down.
Atalante walked over and sat on the bench beside him.
Not close. She left a full person's width between them. But she sat, which he hadn't expected.
Up close she was even worse for his brain. Her eyes were genuinely yellow-green, not contacts, not a trick of light. The scratch marks running down her left thigh from under the hem of her skirt were old and healed silver and he tried hard not to look at her thighs and looked at her face instead which was a different kind of problem because her face was also extremely good looking. Small features, that slightly upturned nose, jaw set firm and clean.
He was very aware that he was twenty-three years old and had never kissed anyone.
"You know what is coming," she said. Not a question.
"Yeah." He cleared his throat. "I know this world. The politics. The big players. What happens next."
"How."
"In my world it was all fiction. Movies. Comics. I watched everything. Read everything."
He waited for her to call him crazy.
She said, "I was summoned by a stick. My judgment about what counts as insane is currently suspended."
That was fair.
"So you have knowledge," she said. "Of this world's powers. Their locations."
"Some of it. The movies didn't cover everything."
"But some."
"Yeah."
She was quiet. Her tail curled around the side of the bench and then uncurled. Thinking.
"The book," she said. "There are other Servants in it."
"Hundreds. Maybe more. I can't find the last page. Literally cannot reach it."
"You intend to summon more."
"That's the whole plan."
She looked at him then. Really looked. Straight at his face, steady, like she was taking inventory. He sat still and tried not to be weird about it, which definitely made him weirder.
No training, she thought. No discipline. Cannot hold eye contact for three seconds. But the contract is written into me now, bone-deep. Hmm, I will watch and see.
"You need money first," she said.
"Yeah."
"And shelter."
"Yeah."
"You have neither."
"I'm aware, thanks."
She stood. Reached into a fold of her jacket he hadn't noticed before and pulled out a small leather pouch. She tossed it at him. He caught it badly, fumbled it, grabbed it with both hands before it hit the dirt. It clinked. Heavy. Coins, old ones, and he could see the dull gold color through the gap in the drawstring.
"From the Throne," she said. "A Master's starting provision. It is part of the summoning contract. You should have read further."
He opened the book to page forty-seven, which he hadn't touched yet, and there it was. Starting provisions. Material support allocated at point of first contract. He read it twice.
"I need to read this whole thing," he said.
"Yes," she said, like that was the most obvious thing anyone had ever said.
He stood, tucked the book under his arm, and shoved the pouch into his pocket. The coins were heavy enough to pull the fabric sideways. He started walking toward the park exit without a solid plan past find a pawn shop and figures the rest out from there, and Atalante falls into step exactly three feet behind him, eyes already moving ahead of them both, scanning, doing the thing she was made for.