pi youngbae —「d6. fin.」

Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.

That’s why everything in Pi’s life is so dull: she understands it all with a laser-edge clarity. Mathematics, physics, biological systems—all of them had formulas and theorems that illustrate their essence and lend light to their supposed magic. Everything has an answer, everything has an explanation. To Pi, there is really nothing such as the unknown anymore.

Or so she thought.

But since the beginning, she has never been one to believe in something as childish such as magic. Girls like her had to grow up quick or they would lose their chance to. The ones on the outskirts, the ones living in places unmapped, they are the ones who have a single chance most of the time. No margin for error, no room for silly mistakes. One stumble and it could cost you your whole damn world.

And what a world that was. Burdened, desperate, and so tightly mechanized for survival, she was a girl born to parents who worked from dawn till dusk, their hands always scarred after a day’s labor. Eomeoni’s hands are forever wrinkled, abeoji’s fingers have been reduced to nine. These are the little details they have turned away from, learned the ways of forgetting.

That doesn’t mean she forgets, though.

The sparks to her fire could be retraced to that unforgetting, those stains in her memory where she had locked away nights spent starving and days spent working and it’s just …

It’s unfair, really. But Pi herself has learnt the second lesson that the world itself is an unfair thing and you can’t really change your circumstances within it by dwelling on the bad.

No, instead you had to change them yourself.

Or, in her case, soar towards ones.

Eomeoni handed her a bag the night before she left; it was full of rice-cakes. “You can’t succeed on an empty stomach,” says her mother, and the feelings are so raw in their small hut then that Pi doesn’t protest against her words.

“보고 싶을 거야,” she whispers.

I’ll miss you.

And then she looks at her father, face pale in the light of the gas-lamps and yet still strong. Still unbroken.

“Both of you.”

They pray at the family altar until sunrise. She does not believe in their gods and yet she pretends to. Pi knows that she has no guardian though, no deity looking out for her. She is a godless bird in pursuit of her own wings and as she looks over at her shoulders towards her parents swathed in the dawn-light, she knows it’s her time to leave the nest.

Her eyes look forward. The horizon is bruise-blue, tasseled by night still, but it seems to welcome her.

She knows what she will find there. Ibrahim has sent her sketches of the mech-suits, blueprints of their first designs, and a single wire that, if she accepts, she knows would find its way in her spine.

And that’s new. She has learnt a few topics on neurons and how they interact with each other but wires and nerves, flesh and steel?

Her eyes glimmered when she first heard.

That’s magic.