"Yeah, little bro."
Finn kept looking at the sky.
"So is she a bad guy or not?"
Ray went looking for an answer and found out he didn't have one. He looked at the flattened circle in the grass, where a barn-sized bat had been standing twenty minutes ago, and then at the kid's knuckles.
"She gave your house back."
"She bit Jake!"
"And she gave your house back."
Finn turned and squinted at him. "...Those are two different things!"
"I know." Ray let his breath out slowly, which hurt. "That's the problem."
Finn thought about that, picking at the scab on his knuckle. He didn't look happy with it. He didn't look like he was going to argue, either, and Ray was going to take that.
Jake came out a minute later with the sleeping bag over one shoulder and BMO under his arm, and he grew big enough to carry everybody without being asked. Ray waved them off from the step. Then he went in, dropped the bar, and lay down on the floor, very carefully, one side at a time.
He fell asleep listening to the window frame creak against its vines.
...
Jake showed up the next morning at the usual time, which was a small miracle, and he had something pink stuck in his collar.
"Came this morning." He pulled it out and handed it over. It was an envelope, almost as big as a plate, with a seal of pink wax on the back. "Little gumdrop guy, tiny hat. Didn't say a word. Just bowed and left."
Ray opened it. The handwriting was neat and round and leaned a little to the right.
'Ray. I would like to continue the tests at your earliest convenience. Today would be convenient. There will be breakfast. PB.'
"She's not finished with me," Ray said.
"Told you." Jake crouched down so Ray could climb on. "Also she said breakfast, so we're going."
Finn was already sitting on Jake's head. He scooted forward to make room, and he didn't say anything about last night, but he did hold out his hand to help Ray up, which was something.
...
The lab looked the same as before, all glass and brass and things bubbling in tubes, and Bubblegum looked the same too, except that this time she was waiting for him. She had a fresh notepad. Ray didn't love that.
She took one look at him walking in and put the notepad down.
"You're holding your side."
"Am I?"
"You've done it since the door. Sit." She pointed at the stool, and he sat, because he knew that voice from foremen. She pressed two fingers along his ribs, one at a time, watching his face.
"Ow! Shit. That one."
"Bruised. Not broken." She picked the notepad back up. "What hit you?"
"A barn."
She wrote it down. Then she looked at it, and put a question mark after it.
"It was a vampire!" Finn couldn't hold it anymore. "A giant bat vampire! She stole our house and she bit Jake and she hit Ray with her wing, and I punched her in the face, and she gave the house back! It was Marceline!"
Bubblegum's pen stopped.
It was a small thing. If Ray hadn't spent four months reading supervisors' faces to guess when he was about to get yelled at, he wouldn't have caught it. Her mouth went flat, and for one second she looked really tired. Then it was gone.
"Marceline." She put the pen back on the paper. "Marceline and I are not a topic. Hold still."
'Okay. So that's a whole fucking thing.' Ray held still.
She wrapped his ribs in a long strip of something that smelled like peppermint and went cold on his skin, and she didn't say another word about vampires. When she was done, she sat down across from him with her notepad on her knee.
"Now. Your breathing."
"Funny you should say that." Ray had been thinking about how to ask all the way here. "That's actually what I wanted to talk about. The breathing's half of the whole thing, right? And I can't train it. I've tried. I just get hot legs and pass out."
"Tried how?"
"There's this thing they do. Where I'm from." It came out easy now; it was horrible how easy it came out. "Swordsmen, the serious ones. They train their lungs by blowing into a gourd. A hard one, a dried one. You blow until it bursts. Then you get a bigger gourd, and you do it again, and you keep going until you're breathing like that all day without thinking about it."
"By breath alone? Until it bursts."
"Yeah."
"How big do the gourds get?"
Ray held his hands apart. Then he thought about it and held them further apart. "There was a guy who did one about this size."
"Across the sea." She wrote it down.
"Across the sea," Ray agreed, and felt bad about it.
She looked at the notes for a moment, tapping the pen against her lip. Then she got up.
"Fascinating. Wait here."
She was gone almost an hour. Jake slept under the window. Finn walked around the lab twice, very carefully not touching anything, and then touched one thing, and it hissed at him. When Bubblegum came back, a pair of Banana Guards came behind her carrying a tray.
On the tray were three gourds. They were real ones, dried until they rattled, and she had painted them with something that made them shine like glass.
The smallest was the size of Ray's fist. The biggest was the size of Jake's head when Jake was being normal. Each one had a little brass mouthpiece in the top and a thin tube coming out the side, and every tube ran to its own gauge.
"I hardened them," she said. "They'll burst eventually. Not easily. Start with the small one."
Ray picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.
'Okay. Training arc, take two.' He put the mouthpiece in his mouth.
He did it the way he did it before a strike. In through the nose, slow, all the way down to where the heat started, until his whole chest was full and then a little more. Then he blew.
Nothing happened. He blew harder. His face got hot, then hotter, and the heat went down into his legs the way it always did and stopped there, useless, like a stove with nothing on it. The room got very bright around the edges.
The needle on the gauge moved about the width of a hair.
"Keep going," Bubblegum said. She was standing right next to him, watching the needle and his face at the same time, with her sand timer in one hand.
He kept going. The bright edges came in. The last thing he saw clearly was the needle, which had not moved again, and then the floor came up, and Jake, who had woken up at exactly the right time, spread himself out like a mattress and caught him.
...
Finn held the spare pen.
He had asked if he could help, and the princess had said, "You may hold the spare pen," the same as last time, and now he was holding it. He was holding it really well. Nobody was looking at how well he was holding it.
Everybody was looking at Ray.
Ray was on the stool again with his face all red, blowing into the little gourd for the sixth time. The princess was right there next to him. She had her hand flat on his back to feel his breathing, and she was counting under hers, and writing things down without looking at the page, which Finn had never seen anybody do.
"Again. Slower on the way in."
Ray did it again. The needle hardly moved.
"Good." She wrote something. "That's better. You're an excellent subject, Ray."
Finn's stomach did a weird thing.
He didn't know why. He liked Ray more than anybody except Jake. He liked the princess... a lot. He should have been happy that they were getting along. Instead he was standing there with the spare pen, feeling like he was the spare pen.
"Princess? Do you need anything else held?" He held up his free hand. "I've got this one free."
"Hm? Oh." She didn't turn around. She reached behind her, felt around on the table, and put a little brass weight in his palm. "Thank you, Finn. That's very helpful."
He looked at the weight. It didn't do anything. It was just heavy.
Jake had rolled over under the window. He had one eye open and he was looking at Finn with a big, slow grin.
"Somebody's got the green-eyes," he said, not very quietly.
"I don't have green eyes!" Finn hissed. "I'm not anything! I'm holding a pen!"
"And a weight."
"And a weight! Because I'm helpful!"
Jake closed the eye again, still grinning. Finn held the pen and the weight and looked at the back of Ray's head, and then at the princess's hand on Ray's back, and he couldn't figure out which one of them he was supposed to be mad at, which made it worse.
...
By the end of the afternoon, Ray had blown into the smallest gourd forty-one times. It had not burst. It had not even creaked. He had passed out twice more, and Jake had caught him twice more, and the bandage on his ribs had gone from cold to warm to itchy.
Bubblegum sat back with her notepad, which was now mostly full.
"I want to make you a sword," she said.
Ray stopped rubbing his ribs.
"A proper one. One that holds." She turned a page back and tapped something on it. "The steel in my captain's blade carried your current for an instant and then had nowhere to put it. I need a blade that lets it through instead of fighting it. I believe I can make one. It would be yours."
"For real? Like, mine mine?"
"Yours." She smiled, a little. "The sword is a gift, Ray. The monitoring is a condition."
'And here's the catch.' He'd known there would be a catch.
"Conditions, plural, actually." She held up one finger. "You come here every three days and train with these until they burst. I measure you while you do." A second finger. "And when the kingdom calls, you answer. I won't ask often. But when I do, you come."
Ray thought about it. He thought about four charcoal lines on a doorframe, and a handle Finn kept as a trophy, and a bread knife.
"Is there breakfast at these sessions?"
She blinked at him. Then she wrote that down too.
"There can be."
"Then yeah. Deal." He held out his hand. She shook it once, firmly, like she was closing a drawer.
...
They left a little before dusk, Ray riding on Jake with his ribs wrapped and his head still swimming, Finn sitting up front and not talking much.
Bubblegum watched them go from the window. Then she sat back down with the notepad and the three gauges, and did what she had been waiting all day to do.
She put the numbers together. His breath at its best, which wasn't much yet. What it would be when the gourds burst. The scorch mark in the drill yard, twenty-one paces long. The way the captain's steel had come apart along the grain, as if something had run through it looking for a door.
'Then give it a door.' She underlined that.
By midnight she knew what the metal had to do. It had to take a current like that and carry it the whole length of the blade without heating, without splitting, without holding any of it back.
She went down the list of every metal in her vaults, then every metal in her armory, then every metal she had ever read about in the kingdom's records. She went down it twice.
There wasn't an ounce of it anywhere in the Candy Kingdom.