7: the respite

Lili is in a world that is far too bright yet far too dull. Her vision stretches beyond the horizons, but there's nothing to see. An infinite plane of existence and she has it all to herself, no strings attached.

And then the globe appears before her, in all its shining terror. The snow inside is still swirling as if someone's shaken it recently.

She grits her teeth. Lili doesn't waste a single moment as she asks, "Did you disable the radar?"

It doesn't answer, and Lili is pretty sure it can't because it's a globe. Instead, it motions to her body.

Watch out. It’s warning her.

She looks down at herself. There's something bitter, something dark and solid inside her core. It's so angry Lili thinks it might burst. That she'll burst along with it.

It swirls around her. She's completely swallowed herself in a cocoon of smoke and burnt wood. And for some reason, she feels like she's right at home.

—

Avett feels like he's just been forcibly taken and fed to the dogs. It’s difficult for him to recall exactly what had happened to him in the engine room during that encounter. He remembers fumbling with the engine for a bit, but it’s like he’s trying to reach for his memories through a gauzy curtain.

He opens his eyes and sees the bottom railing of the bed above his.

“I’m Avett Ironsturm,” he tests, “and my worst subject was literature.”

…So he’s able to recall entry-level characteristics about himself, which means that he passes the sure-fire memory loss examination, which means he’s just confused from passing out.

He lies there, spending the minutes organising his thoughts. He remembers seeing a vague blur of a globe when they reached that clearing in the mall, remembers the absolutely overwhelming chill of power that had radiated through his bones the moment Lilith laid her eyes on it. Or at least, that’s what he’s assuming happened. Then he remembers being carried to the infirmary, being subject to Auren’s strange Gallian medical procedures… and being thrown off the bed and onto the floor just a few minutes after.

He shoots right up. The headache he gets from doing so is intense. He remembers seeing an outstretched tendril in the tiny cabin window above him, a Butterfly Matriarch. Judging from how the ship isn’t moving at all anymore, they must’ve gotten out of that sticky situation a long time ago.

Good. He takes a few deep breaths before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and making his way into the navigation room.

It’s empty. He swings the fridge door open, brings the closest thing resembling a volume of water to his lips, and starts chugging. Half and half milk. It’s better than the ship’s tap water, so it’s not all bad. He’s just grateful that it hadn’t been beer.

Where is everyone? is his second thought. When he looks outside, he sees the dull surroundings of a sanctuary’s hangars. They’re likely on the upper levels of the Hive. No wonder they left him behind. The third spire is meant to be a haven for off-landers, but the Humans in the two other spires stage enough coups against the third to overthrow a small realm. It’s a wonder how the IRC still considers the Hive a functioning, legitimate sanctuary.

Or maybe he’s just exaggerating their exploits for the sake of demonising Humans again. It can’t be that bad. Then again, the IRC doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to foreign relations—

As he walks down the corridor, he notices that the doors to the armoury are closed. He raises an eyebrow, tucks his bottle of milk under his armpit, and is just about to hit the green button on the side when he stops himself. If he remembers correctly, this is where Lilith sleeps. And considering that the time currently reads 11:38 AM, she shouldn’t be asleep right now. But she is.

Eh, fuck it. They’re not crewmates until she’s had her privacy trounced on like grass in a paddock. No, bad mindset to be in. He knocks anyway.

“You may enter, Avett,” Auren replies from the other side.

… Ok, he’s definitely interrupting something here. Catch-up lessons or something. And he means that in the most literal, least filthy sense because Auren and Lilith have to be two of the biggest buzzkills he’s ever had the displeasure of meeting. When he opens the door, he’s greeted with Auren’s nimble figure, seated right next to Lilith’s unconscious body.

Something sinks in his stomach. He’s missing parts of his memory, and he doesn’t like that one bit. “...What happened here?” he asks. “She’s alright, right?”

“Avett.” Auren folds his hands and crosses them in front of his mouth. He’s letting his hair hang from his head freely, and from the way each strand is just tingling with sunlight, he’s been manipulating ether. “Were you aware that casters could transform their bodies into living, ethereal batteries?”

He drops the bottle of milk. His arms have gone completely slack. He remembers how her wings had unfurled, how she had turned around and told him just how much easier it would be if he still hated her. Whatever that meant.

Then he realises that he’s supposed to say something, so he says, “Oh, fuck. She did that.”

“Yes. She very much did.” Auren turns his head back towards Lilith. “Do you remember what happened after?”

Everything else after is a blank. He must have passed out after answering her question.

He shakes his head. Auren rubs his face.

“That would make two of us,” he answers.

“You don’t know either?”

He shakes his head as well. “However, I can make educated assumptions. When I realised we were moving faster than the Butterfly Matriarch, I assumed you had remedied our fuel problem. My abilities were no longer needed, so I re-entered through the back entrance. I did not expect to see you, Avett, lying unconscious on the floor—and Lili, doing your job, in your stead.”

Avett doesn’t like the way he emphasised those two ‘yours.’ “She did not fix the engine. Far from it.”

“I do believe that you have not checked the engine room since you awoke.”

“I don’t have to be a caster to know that overloading the entire engine with the stench of Human ether is going to completely fuck the—”

He presses his lips together when he catches Auren’s cold-kissed glare. Ugh, what the hell. How does he even have this much power over him? He’s had more experience on the field as a mercenary, fine, but on this ship, he should be far from his superior. That’s Ysh’vanna’s job.

“Anyhow, I requested for repairs earlier. Consider it an extremely retroactive congratulatory gift.” He's still staring at Lilith like she’s some sort of angel. Like she shouldn’t even be alive. Avett is pretty sure she should’ve died.

Then Auren asks, in that saccharine-sweet tone of his, “May I return to my hypothetical now, darling?”

Avett fights off the urge to instantly scrunch up his eyes and turn up his upper lip. “You may, honey.”

The Gallian caster leans forward in his seat, clearly satisfied with his answer. “I would imagine that the load required for Lili to power the ship far exceeded her pool of personal ether. It would have—should have drained her resources instantaneously.” His eyes move to the pair of wings that have been propped against the table. Avett has to do a double-take when he sees them. Each wing is still fully outspread, as if frozen mid-spell, but the crystalline feathers—no, there are no feathers. They’ve all been shattered.

Avett’s glad that he hasn’t bothered to pick up his milk because he probably would have dropped it again.

“A frightful sight, I am aware.” Auren doesn’t bother looking back towards Lili this time. “At first, it puzzled me. How did a Human manage to channel enough ether to power a ship fully? Then I realised why she was continuing to hold onto the box despite being unconscious. The ship was, very likely, forcibly siphoning ether through her body.”

A large amount of foreign ether, introduced into her circulation—not a fun experience. Her wings certainly hadn't been able to take the load, and they had shattered early.

“She should be dead. There is a reason why only trained Gallians are permitted to use ether pens.” Something flickers in Auren’s eyes. A dark, morbid curiosity. “But she is merely resting.”

Merely resting. Avett grinds his teeth together. Lucky bitch. Maybe now’s the best time to bring it up. That he’d been a sitting, waiting duck every time the relic had graced them with its presence, and that he'd love to have some form of self-defence against such an unseen force.

But then he sees the way Auren truly regards Lilith’s unconscious body. Not like an angel—no, that would imply a certain level of respect. Auren is looking at Lilith like she’s a child who’s just figured out quantum theory for the first time. She's a butterfly that's been trapped inside a glass jar, and he's her gentle, giant overseer.

Avett looks away. He’s definitely interrupted something between them.

"I should leave." Avett turns back towards the doors. Auren doesn't even offer a farewell glance. He only continues to stare, his eyes flickering with the occasional glint of ether and curiosity.

Casters are intense.

—

When Avett manages to get out of the armoury and into the safety of the navigation room, he slips his GlassLink out of his pocket and checks if he's gotten any new notifications or if his father is finally seeing someone again. He's immediately greeted with a smorgasbord of messages on the lock screen of his phone, so it's probably the former.

"But she is merely resting." Try as he might, Auren's words won't leave his mind for even a second. It's hard to see Lilith as anything more than Human, let alone as a caster capable of straining against her ethereal boundaries like it's child's play. The fact that she can perform feats only a Gallian—a race of biologically powerful outliers that really shouldn’t be categorised under the all-encompassing term of B class mammalian—is capable of… scares him. She doesn’t have the mental fortitude for that sort of power.

And then maybe she does. He remembers the way she’d slammed him against the wall and told him, in no uncertain terms, exactly how she felt about the bitchfit he’d thrown at her in that old shipwreck. The new backbone looks good on her, but she still needs to grow into it, he thinks.

He slots in two slices of bread into the toaster and dusts off his fingers before he checks into the Ironsturm group chat. It’ll do him no good to dwell on someone as incredibly dysfunctional as Lilith. She might start rubbing off on him.

He sniffs and rubs his nose with the back of his hand. Despite his previous statement about who messages the most, it’s Aoife’s whose texts are flooding the top of his screen right now. They’re in response to his father’s incessant nagging about getting the milk from the back instead of from the front, because now the milk that they’ve gotten is going to spoil in a week, and they can’t finish an entire litre of milk in a week because Aoife is the only one who drinks it.

Terrible. Anyway, his toast’s popped out of the toaster, so he grabs that and pretty much shoves it into his mouth. He’s been knocked out often, more than he’d like to admit, and it always leaves him with an insatiable appetite and a craving for carbohydrates.

“Morning, Avett.” Ysh’vanna’s voice twinkles in after the doors slide open. Her hands are full of groceries, all contained in those flimsy paper bags that the Hive supermarkets like to use.

The bread’s absorbed all of the moisture in his mouth, so he just waves back.

“Sleep well?” She doesn’t do much to hide her grin as she drops the bags onto the table.

Avett briefly considers flipping off his captain before he swallows his uncomfortably large wad of bread. “Like a rock.”

“Good to hear. How’s Auren? Lili?”

Suddenly, busying himself with unpacking the groceries seems like a great idea. “They’re fine. Disgusting, Auren’s heavily infatuated with her like he’s a schoolgirl falling in love for the first time—but they’re fine.”

Ysh’vanna coughs. “Eldraks don’t care about that kinda stuff.”

Shame settles at the pit of his stomach before it flares up into something he doesn’t really want to put a name to quite yet. “Sure didn’t look like it.”

She bites her lip. Opens her mouth to say something, then shakes her head. “How are you, by the way? For real, this time.”

“It was relic recovery. The only thing that could’ve killed me was Lilith.”

She’s putting away jars of pickles in the fridge now. “Lili came back with a stab wound, our comms got cut off, and you’ve been looking shaken ever since you got back.”

Avett doesn’t mean to, but his hands freeze midway through the first paper bag. “Getting knocked out does that to you. Are you an empath now?”

“Can’t I worry about my frontliners, like, at least a little?”

“Go ahead. There’s nothing to worry about.”

His captain straightens herself out again. There’s something in her eyes, and it’s not just the way the light’s hitting them. “Nothing, but you’re angry. What really happened out there, Avett?”

He narrows his eyes and dumps the rest of the bag’s contents into the cupboard underneath the sink. “I’m always angry. Why don’t you pester Lilith about it instead? She might actually like the attention.”

“I’m asking you as your friend, not as your captain—”

Nope. He’s already sauntering out of the navigation room, leaving Ysh’vanna alone with her groceries—and his second slice of toast to cool on the dining table. It’s a miracle how he’s still employed by her. Maybe she doesn’t have a choice. But he’s heavily violating protocol here, and it certainly hasn’t been the first time he’s done something like this. Ysh’vanna must be at one hell of a dead-end to tolerate him at this level of disrespect.

He shouldn’t be pushing her like this. But he’s perfectly content with the fact that only Lilith is aware of his dirty little secret, and he’d like for it to stay that way, weirdly enough.

—

“Lili, I must admit, I am still quite curious about how you managed to draw an excess of ether to the point of…”

Auren’s eyes shift off to the side. He’s eyeing the shattered wings. It’s only been a hot minute since Lili’s woken from her slumber, and she’s felt like she’s been mixed around in a blender on the highest setting ever since. It’s not entirely his fault, but he’s bombarded her post-unconscious state with enough questions that she’s not entirely sure that he’s innocent anymore. She feels numb, and in dire need of a few extra hours of sleep.

“I just did what I had to do,” she answers simply.

The answer doesn’t impress Auren at all. He asks again, this time slower. Lili just gives the same reason. What else should she do? It's not like she's got an answer for him because she's just as confused as him, if not more.

Not that the memory of what had happened to her before blacking out has faded away into obscurity quite yet. She still remembers how the bright shock of pain had scattered throughout her entire body when the fuel tank decided that her best was not enough. It had felt like being crushed between two beds of microscopically-thin needles.

"Foreign ether knows no owner. I could only imagine the torment that was imposed on you."

She raises her head again. "I'm guessing I wasn't supposed to do that."

Auren doesn't respond, because he's already asked the same 'how?' question so many times that even he's starting to feel exhausted. He’s an endless vat of curiosity, and there’s nothing she can do to sate him.

He changes his method of attack. "Lili, perhaps we could both benefit from an afternoon stroll in the Hives. We could have you fitted with a new pair of wings. Perhaps a newer model might suit your needs.”

So she wholeheartedly agrees, because if there’s one thing she absolutely despises, it’s wasting away in Avett’s shadow. The bitter sting of shame from their first encounter isn’t as bad anymore, but it still plays and skirts along the corners of her mind, a mosquito she can’t quite stamp out.

Lili’s not sure what she’s expecting when they arrive in the Hive’s main shopping district, but it sure isn’t a square full of off-landers… and not a single Human in sight, which might actually be a good thing. Then she catches herself and straightens out her back. She can’t let Avett rub off on her like this, especially when it’s her own people that he’s referring to when he’s on one of his maddening rants about how dangerous the Hive’s third spire is to off-landers.

Even then, there’s a slight inkling of doubt in her head that’s telling her that somehow, these Hive Humans aren’t the same as the ones she’s been well-acquainted with before the fall of Earth. It’s in the way the Hive’s main square feels more industrialised than the Afflatus’ snug network of living spaces. Pipes are exposed, walkways are devoid of any natural plantation, and above each stall’s entrance is a thin string for slamming down iron shutters at a moment’s notice.

Lili bites the inside of her cheeks and breaks out into a gentle jog to keep up with Auren’s long stride. All of a sudden, her caster’s uniform feels like it could be iron-inforced armour, proof of her allegiance to the off-landers and not… them. “Did we ever find out why the radar stopped working mid-flight?”

“I did make sure to question the repairmen before they headed off for lunch.” His expression furrows; Lili’s stomach drops like a weight in response. “They found no abnormalities. I even examined the machinery myself, though the internal functions were incredibly delicate, so I was not able to draw any conclusions without promptly ripping the entire apparatus in half.”

She eyes his stubby fingers. To say that she’s wracked with guilt is an understatement. “There were two relics,” she mumbles.

Auren doesn’t answer at first. “And we only returned one,” he finishes.

It’s all downhill from there. She explains how they’d first assumed that the snow globe was the relic the IRC had requested, how it had trapped them in a neverending version of the mall she knew and loved all those years ago. How she’d thought it was after Avett when in truth it was after her all along, and now it’s somehow following her, influencing the world around her for the worse. She doesn’t tell him about how she’d seen Avett’s gruesome past. She especially doesn’t tell him about the smouldering, burning thing that the globe had shown inside herself. What the globe had been truly after.

When she finishes, they’re already standing in front of the shop’s entrance. The interior is a deep blue, a stark contrast to the world of porcelain-white tiles they’d been subjected to while walking over.

“It seems that you have made a new friend, Lili,” Auren responds.

Her reply is curt and serious. “I have reason to believe that it’s what caused our radar to stop working.”

The inside of the store smells like an office—stale, with freshly printed papers, and a hint of laundry paste that’s wafted from the workers' primly-kept suits. Crystalline ornaments line the walls like she’s in an antique store, and as always: no Humans. She should probably stop looking for them at this point.

“What would you like to do about it?” Auren asks. The shopkeepers give him a puzzled glance as they stroll past a glass case containing what seems to be incredibly expensive wings.

“Preferably get rid of it.”

Auren stops in front of a particular line of wings. These are noticeably less sophisticated than the one Lili had seen in the glass case. The ‘crystals’ aren’t multi-faceted gems that have been shaped into teardrops but are instead flattened, glassy plates. They fan out from the middle, and they look more like upside-down maple leaves than actual wings; a far stretch from the ones she had before.

She turns to Auren. “I can handle bigger wings.”

“Bigger is not better.”

It’s hard to stop herself from scanning the store. The section that they’re in only makes up a tiny fraction of the establishment; the rest of the walls are covered in real wings, wings that drip heavily with gemstones and still manage to look elegant rather than gaudy. “What’s wrong with those ones?” she asks.

“A frontline caster’s needs are vastly different from those of a backline caster’s.” He detaches the wings in front of him from the wall and holds it out from the straps. “You do not have the luxury of going bigger over functionality.”

She presses her lips together. Then she takes off her cape and sides her arms through the straps. The feathers of the wings tinkle against each other as they fall back into a resting position.

Oh, god, she can hear the hushed snickers from behind the counter already. Dread drips through her, and for a moment, she feels just as heavy as the other wings in the store. At least she has her license on hand today.

If Auren had heard them, he makes no indication of it. “Channel your power. See if they fit you.”

She shuts her eyes and braces herself against the walls with both arms. She imagines dipping her hands into the pools of ether around her, lowering her head underneath that deep, neverending, silent abyss—

With a gasp, she snaps her eyes open. It’s cold. Chilly. The absence of power in her veins feels just as oppressive as the abundance of it.

“Lili?” Auren moves to block the shopkeepers from her view.

Her eyes slam shut again. This can’t be happening to her. She needs something simple. Something to prove these off-landers wrong, that she’s not just some deadbeat Human who lucked out and managed to score a side job as a leecher aboard a mercenary ship.

And yet, no matter how hard she tries, all she can manage right now is to teeter at the edge of the void, like she’s looking at the Mariana Trench through a glass-bottom boat.

Her hands fall back from the wall. Confusion makes her furrow her eyebrows; anger makes her grind her teeth together.

“Lili.” Auren bends over to meet her gaze. “Is something the matter?”

“Everything’s fine. These wings are great.” She slides them off her back and folds them right back up before offering Auren a tender smile. “I’ll take these. And we’ll meet outside, is that ok?”

She hands off the wings to Auren and leaves the store as quickly as she had entered it. Waiting for him, the ever-capable caster and Gallian, to finish up his payments and take her back to the ship.

—

The moment she’s back in the ship, she’s facing her distraught self in the form of a glassy reflection with the bathroom door shut firmly behind her. Her knuckles—white. Her face—as white as her bronze skin will allow it. The abyss had not merely gazed back. It had engulfed her, bones and all like she was nothing. In the state that she is now, she might as well be nothing.

“Close your eyes, Lili.” Her voice breaks. She goes through all of her emotional triggers for ether: happiness, joy, euphoria, pride—and when that doesn’t work, she turns to anger. Raw, boiling, guttural rage. And when that doesn’t work, she drives her fist into the wall below the mirror.

The plaster doesn’t crack. Her hand draws back bloodied.

She stares at it, her lungs heaving. It’s all dripping over her hands, staining her pants, pooling onto the floor. Her affinity is hers—her ether is hers. It should come naturally to her, as simple as manipulating a muscle, as shaking out a knot in her leg. That’s what Auren told her. So why isn’t it holding?

A whimper comes out of her mouth as she clenches her hand and runs it underneath the tap. All of this, and she still needs to tell Auren about the relic, except he doesn’t seem to care. She wonders briefly if it’s just the relic’s presence that’s been throwing her off, but the occasional flashing memory of the ethereal abyss serves to correct her.

Useless. She’s useless. An effigy of her former self, constructed from straw bundles and yesterday’s newspapers.

“Aaand here you are.”

Lili stretches her face in incredulity. Of all the people—

Avett closes the distance between them in two, easy strides. His eyes fall onto her hand, then onto her face.

“Impromptu training,” she says.

“Like hell it is.” In seconds, he’s got her by the wrist in an iron-firm grip as he leads her toward the counter that’s underneath the medicine cabinet. It’s scary how strong he is when she doesn’t have her affinity to cover her weaknesses. When she tries to shake him off, all she succeeds in doing is mildly inconveniencing him.

So she doesn’t fight back. “Thanks,” she mumbles.

His nose crumples, just slightly. Then he answers, “You’re a handful, you know that?”

She winces. And it’s not just because Avett is shoving a ball of alcohol-soaked cotton into her open wounds. If only he knew the gravity of the situation. No, bad idea. She doesn’t want that.

“So what brought this one on, Lilith? Haven’t seen you this angry since…” He makes a revolving motion with his other hand. “You know.”

His seemingly innocuous question throws her off guard. She opens her mouth, shuts it again, then reopens it like she’s a fish gasping for air. Avett is the last person she should be saying anything to.

“Nothing,” she says.

“You know, that just so happens to be the exact same thing—word for word—that I told Ysh’vanna when she wanted to know about our little relic encounter. I know you’ve tons to say—especially after that little stunt you pulled with our engines.” He’s wrapping the bandage around her hand again. She’s always injuring herself, and he’s always there, standing at the ready to mop up her shit.

“It’s nothing,” she says again.

Even after he’s done with the bandages, he’s still holding onto her hand. “Nothing,” he says, meeting her eyes, “is the word people go to when they’ve got plenty to say, but can’t find the resolve to just spit it out.”

“That’s crazy, because I’ve actually got nothing.”

He lets her go. And thank god he does, because she swears that she’s never going to get used to this genuine intimacy thing. She’s gotten hugs from Ava, though those had only served to make her uncomfortably vulnerable. Her mother and father were two entirely different matters altogether. Hugs had been currency with them, given to her when she aced a test or acted in line with their ever-increasing demands.

She likes to think that she’d received one from Avett as a reward for listening to him, but as the tender minutes roll by, she’s not so sure about that anymore.

Finally, he leans back onto his hands. “I spilled my guts out to you in that ship. Wouldn’t mind if you did the same to me.”

“Yeah, well.” She stands back up, her focus trained onto the multiple reflections of herself on the bathroom tiling. “I’ll mind.”

Hurt flashes over his eyes.

A muscle in her heart twists painfully. She's been drafting her farewell speech for the possibility of when Auren finds out that she’s dead weight and outs her current predicament to Ysh’vanna, whereupon they’ll drop her off at one of the Hive’s other, less cordial spires, but at the end of the day it’s not like she’s actually ready to hand in her license and uniform. At the very least, by keeping it all to herself, she’ll be able to stay on board for longer. Long enough to hopefully regain her composure and her abilities. She’s staying pessimistically hopeful.

Thankfully, Avett changes the subject. “You heard about our next mission yet?”

She shakes her head.

“You’ll like this one.” He’s grinning up a storm, his prior vulnerabilities having now dissolved into gentle mischief, which just fills Lili with optimism. “We get to go after a B rank.”

Shit.

She covers her mouth with the back of her hand and coughs. “What kind?”

“B5. Would you look at that. An Equaliser.” He flips through his GlassLink and shows her an image of something that looks like it should really belong in a compendium of supernatural occurrences. It carries itself around from underneath a gossamer mist that falls over its hunched, four-legged body like a cloak, and its head is a long tube that protrudes out of one end like a misplaced straw. But the thing that truly arrests Lili’s attention is its eyes—staring directly at her, so keenly that she swears she can almost make out her own stupefied face in those animalistic, glassy beads. Lili’s not even entirely sure if the photographer’s even alive anymore.

Avett pulls the phone back. “Scared of ghosts?”

She clenches her fists. She must’ve looked a little too shaken by the dragon’s appearance. “Hardly. It looks like what you’d get when you ask a kid to draw a giraffe.”

He freezes, blinks—then laughs. “Stars, that’s aptly put. Wish it just stayed in that kid’s head. Environmental workers around the area reported multiple headaches, then vivid nightmares, then their ethereal equipment just stopped working. They left before the hallucinations started hitting them, and for good reason too; I hear they hurt like a bitch.”

A weak aura. Still an aura nonetheless. The image of the blood splatter on the wall is still fresh in her mind, fresh even to make her cringe inwardly. She can’t possibly comprehend how Avett feels about this. “So we’ll just be… walking in? Going insane?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, pretty much.”

A choke catches in her throat. “That’s—”

“I’m not worried.” His hands ball into fists as he leans against the wall of the bathroom. “It took a week for the workers to even register that something was up, and by then all their equipment had crapped out on them. We won’t even be in the area for any longer than three days, and maybe we’ll even finish the job in an afternoon.”

For the first time that day, she willingly meets his eyes.

“What?” He shrugs again. “I’m just not worried. There’s risk, and then there’s perceived risk. If we play our cards right, if we do our job as mercenaries, we’ll be fine.”

Then he stretches out his hand in front of her, his palm outstretched. A handshake. Presumably to ease her nerves.

Lili is silent at first. His flippant attitude is very easy for her to subscribe to, even with her current circumstances. Avett is incredibly capable on the field, even while working on his lonesome. In fact, he prefers it. Maybe her loss was predestined.

For a moment, she thinks about telling him. But then she locks it away behind all of those endless walls and bars and padlocks. He’ll be able to handle himself out there. He never needed her anyway. 

She takes his hand in hers and squeezes it with all the strength she can muster. “Our job as mercenaries,” she repeats.

6: the truth about Avett

"We were in the region—Eighth Quarter—when it happened." Avett stares at the captain's seat. He runs his fingers over the felted material before snatching his hand away. "We were just about to return from a successful relic retrieval mission when we ran into a C10. A Keeper. Something was off about it. The moment the two other frontliners and I came within proximity of the ship, it came pouncing at us."

"Was it not meant to?" Lili asks.

"We like to call them Keepers 'cause they 'keep to themselves.' If you don't bother them, they don't bother you." He snorts and paces forward slowly, letting the warm glow of the outside world cast a harsh shadow upon the rest of his body. "This one… clearly didn't. We got the first one, and we were fine then. We could've just left and—"

Avett wobbles on his feet and looks away at the navigation panel. He continues, his voice rough like tree bark. "I kept chasing the others. Easily got overwhelmed. Got reckless. And by the time my teammates bailed me out of my fine little mess, it was already too late. I don't even know what happened  after that. I do remember feeling incredibly angry, like the world had offended me somehow, and all I needed was an outlet—but when I came back, all I saw was Freu's face… and the nice little exhibit on the wall."

He holds his arms and stops pacing. Takes a shaky breath.

"For a moment, just for a moment, I thought I was a fucking killer. Freu consoled me. Comforted me. He said he finished him off, so I shouldn't worry about it. I saw the pilot lunge at him from behind, so I raised my blaster, but he—he—"

Lili looks at him, her gaze hard, yet yielding. You can stop here, if you'd like. She’s heard enough to fill in the unspoken blanks herself. Freu, the white haired caster, pushed down Avett’s blaster and finished off the pilot himself, but the encounter had been lethal both ways. Her mind wanders back to that particular apparition. The still figure, bleeding out in his own blood. He’d looked like a lone lotus bud in a sea of crimson.

Avett lets out two barks of laughter, though they sound more like sobs to her. His hand grooms through his hair as he turns his attention towards the ground. "I… fuck—I kind of wanted to get through all of this without crying, you know? What a shitty first mission.”

She stuffs a hand into her pocket and brings out a scrunched up napkin that she probably stole from the noodle restaurant. “Who was Freu?”

He takes it—doesn’t use it just yet, just keeps it balled up in his fist. “Classmate and senior,” he finally settles on saying. “I was an accelerated student. I just kept getting As upon As and I guess they thought it was grounds to boost me up two years into the gifted class. Put me on the field earlier than everyone else. That’s how I met him. He was seventeen—I was fifteen. And a smartass.”

A curse wearing the clothes of a blessing. She’s heard of grade skipping, of academic acceleration for students deemed too able in comparison to their peers. It seems hardly right to have such an arrangement in an institution centered around training combatants for field work. It’d worked against him that time. Avett, the inherently gifted, golden child. Thrust onto the field and into the midst of violence far, far too early.

“I’m starting to feel a little bit of pity from you.”

Or maybe she’s wrong, and she’d been putting feelings in his mouth this entire time. She shakes her head. “Sorry. I’ve probably gotten it all backwards.”

“Whatever you were thinking, you’re probably right. I wasn’t ready for the field—and Freu knew it. He was leagues above me in skill, as a person, even. Fuck.” A stupid grin plasters itself on his face as he toys with the napkin in his fingers. “A Kattish backline caster; those are rarer than Gallian arms specialists. I don’t know why he didn’t choose to go to some off-realm, prestigious, Gallian founded caster’s academy instead of an IRC funded merc school. Stupidly studious, kind of a nerd l guess, but everyone liked him. Respected him. He actually worked for his place in the gifted class, I kind of just floated in there. Freu was… an incredible person. Until the very end."

Lili’s pocket lurches downwards all of a sudden. She pats her side, and sure enough, she feels a round, smooth protrusion. Even if the relic enjoys what Avett is saying, she finds herself feeling a tinge of envy before she can help it. They are not so similar after all—Avett had been surrounded by warm presences, of respectable, honorable people. Lili can’t remember the last time she’d told someone that she loved them. Can’t remember if she was ever allowed to say such vulnerable things.

Her eyes flit back towards Avett. She recalls the sensations the relic had taken her through: sickening, nauseating regret—and stomach-gnawing yearning. The very same set of emotions she’d experienced on that harrowing day. "You regret it, don’t you. How that day played out.”

“Everyday. When I first came back from a grueling week of questioning from the IRC dispatch team, I promised to my father that I would never go back onto the field. I worked tirelessly into the early mornings with him at his friend's motor store, just fixing, fixing. False pretenses and productivity felt better than mulling over it.” He clenches his hand over the napkin. “Everyday I’d work until dinnertime, thinking I’d moved past all of it, then I’d go to bed and cry myself to sleep. Whether it was in my dreams or if I was consciously thinking about it, I kept replaying that day over and over. If I hadn’t chased those Keepers, if we’d just gone back to the ship early and left the area—”

A breath. He stops, his shoulders shaking. His cheeks are wet. “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Freu hadn’t stopped me from killing our pilot first.”

And that intense yearning, that desire to do something right, Lili guesses, had brought him back onto the field not even a year later.

Before she can speak again, he continues, “I—I won’t lie. I hated you from the moment we fought together. I think I might still. Everything you did, every choice you made on the battlefield just reeked of my old, stupid, seventeen-year-old self. The fact that you were still alive, still damn functional—I envied you. You were clean. So damn naive.”

Another shaky breath.

“Then I screamed at you. In genuine anger. I’ve faced shallow pity, I’ve been on the receiving end of all of those superficial stock phrases people think to use all the time. It was so easy to. You’re like a wall, and you still are. Never giving, always receiving everything I threw at you.”

“Ah.” Lili shuffles around, her boots tapping against the faux-wood flooring. He’s still looking at her. Those endless pools of eternal sunlight, fixed right onto her plain-jane irises.

“But then you hit back.” The sunlight from the window graces his back as he turns towards her, forming a golden halo around his shadowed figure. ”Screamed back. You’re just as fucked as me—and now I just feel like garbage.”

Her reply comes hastily. "I'm sorry you feel like garbage. I guess I have that effect on people."

Lili doesn’t even get to react before Avett pounces on her, his arms wrapping around her body like she's one of those teddybears you'd win from one of those rigged carnival games. She's never been hugged like this before. What should she be doing with her hands? Her mind is blanking out, like he's melting down her carefully constructed walls of ice just by being there. He smells like a mix of sweat and male-marketed deodorant.

Then her mind finally decides to let it all click into place. Avett is hugging her.

Oh, god.

"Don't say that. Talking to you made me feel way better. You're someone who gets it—someone who gets it and who doesn't also happen to be a stone-faced bastard looking to diagnose me." He breathes in, his head nestled between her head and her good shoulder. "So that's got to count for something, right?"

She stands, limp and at the mercy of his hold. A compliment. Not a backhanded comment, not a scathing response to something she'd done, not even an empty word of praise. A compliment. From Avett. To her.

The ship's interior wobbles in and out of sight, making Lili feel like she's even more dizzy than she already is. They've done it—they've appeased the demands of the relic, and now they're allowed to leave. A scalding presence at her side reminds her of what she's here for, and so, she takes it out of her pocket.

Confusion flickers across her features.

A small, wood-carved doll. The sunlight streaming in from the collapsed roof of the mall strikes at every knife-nicked groove on the figure in her palm.

She pushes away from Avett. He opens his mouth to scold her for ending the embrace far too early for his liking, but then his eyes fall upon her new acquisition.

"...What is that."

Judging by how it seems to be faintly pulsing against her hand, it must be a relic. But that… can't be right. Where is the globe? Her hands turn to jelly. Something is very wrong. Her stomach feels like it's going to sink right down to her toes.

"It’s… another relic." Avett has his GlassLink out, no doubt scanning away at the new object.

“It’s not the same one.” She wobbles on her feet. The globe had called out to her, had made its existence painfully clear to the both of them. This little doll is so small that she could wrap her entire hand over it and still have room to dig her nails into her palm. And it’s not just physically small either; Lili can hardly sense its presence at all. In comparison to the globe—a goliath created from the fulmination of Avett’s emotional distress—this is just a tiny weed in the asphalt.   

She watches Avett’s face light up as he swipes at his phone. He's so blissfully unaware. “Wait, comms might be up again—”

No sooner do the words leave his lips does the resounding crack of dread echo in Lili's bones again. She crumples to the floor, her head in her hands, her teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her cheeks. She looks for Avett, but all she can see is a bluish haze all around her, like she's in the midst of a snowstorm. She can't feel anything other than the roar of uncertainty, can't hear anything except for the solid beat of her own heart. Charcoal burns inside her core, responding to the powerful reservoir of energy, screaming against the howl of snow and trepidation.

But she hampers it down again, like she's holding in a retch. Recognition blooms in her like an unopened bud in the early days of spring.

When the ceiling was collapsing, the relic had only called out for her. And some strange, smouldering part of her had continued to recognise its reply, over and over again. It had never wanted Avett; instead, it had mistaken her for him, taken his regret and yearning and sorrow and translated it into a false projection of what it had deemed to be Lili.

She squints against the raging storm, holds out a splayed hand in front of her face. The worst part is that she'd known—or at the very least, had some inkling of an idea as to what it had been doing to her—and she did nothing in response. She hid herself. Had let Avett take the brunt of the relic's whimsies. And now it's mad that it didn't get what it wanted.

She takes one, wobbly step forward. She's sorry for being such a coward. For being a terrible person.

Another step forward. The relic is right there, a distant glow of warmth amidst all of the garbage. She holds out her hands. They feel like they could freeze off at any moment.

Another step forward. The scent of charred wood fills her nostrils. She latches onto the glass dome, its surface hot as fuck to the touch, even through her gloves.

Rage splinters through her. "Fucking shut up, you piece of shit!"

There—a lull in the deepest part of the globe. It recognises her.

It blinks once. Twice. Both times in acceptance. Lili holds her breath.

Then it flickers into a dim hum, satiated in being in the hands of Lilith Wang-Rosales.

The storm halts to a grating pause. Lili teeters forward. Regains her balance in a single step. She takes both relics, gives them one last glance over, and shoves them back into her pockets.

Soon she's stumbling over the rocks and trying her damndest not to roll her ankles. "Avett!" she calls out.

She hears a low, delirious grumble from somewhere underneath her. Avett is on the ground, and he's hardly moving at all. It doesn't take long for Lili to hoist him up and throw his arm over her bad shoulder. Her knees buckle, her mouth lets out a sharp hiss as a throbbing pain beats like a wardrum throughout her entire body. Her ether rolls through her body in response.

"Gotta get outta here…" Avett rasps. "Everything stinks of ether. Especially you… you smell like fucking trash, I dunno."

"You can walk, right?"

He lets out an unsure moan before totally slumping against her shoulders.

Cool. He's out. If only she'd been brave enough to introduce herself to the relic before Avett did. She's wracked with guilt for a brief moment before she's interrupted by a distinct vibration coming from his pocket. She reaches in and pulls out his Glasslink. Hope blooms in her chest as she swipes across the screen. His call had gone through after all.

Ysh'vanna's voice immediately pierces Lili's eardrums. The device is already on some sort of speaker mode, and she'd held it right up to her ear. "Avett? Avett, you're there, you're finally calling us again so that means you're safe, right? When you stopped sending us voice mail, we got so worried. We thought we'd lost you for good. Where are you? Can you even hear us?"

Lili thinks back to his comment about Kattish dicks, oral sex, and pruning. Unfortunate. They'd heard it all—but that's Avett's problem. Her problem is getting out of the mall and onboard the Winnow. "Ysh'vanna, Avett's unconscious and I don’t think I can carry him out. I have the relic. We're still in the mall, but there's a huge hole in the ceiling that you might be able to use to land."

Lili almost expects Ysh'vanna to squeal in delight and derail the topic, and for a second it seems like she might when she pauses for the briefest of seconds. But then she replies, "Understood, Lili. We'll catch up when you're on the ship. Don't hang up."

She stares at the unrelenting, cloudless sky. She could use a change of clothes.

—

When she’s onboard with the rest of the crew, Auren is immediately onto Avett, his hands working down his back as he guides the two of them to the infirmary. Lili works her hardest to unstrap every weapon and body bag from his body, leaving a trail of blasters and battery packs down the corridor. The moment she finishes easing his body onto the bed, the taller Gallian shoves her back.

“He—” she starts, not really knowing where to begin. “We were hit by a snow storm, I think it was ethereal—”

“I am aware.” His voice isn’t cold, but it isn’t warm either. “Would you be so kind as to leave the room?”

The doors slam shut behind her. She picks up Avett’s gear, piece by piece, until all she’s left with is his larger-than-life crossbow in front of the ship’s entrance.

“Don’t bother picking that up,” Ysh’vanna says from the navigation room. “It’s a bitch to carry.”

“I’ll manage.” Ether rolls through her body as she throws it over her shoulder. It’s still quite heavy. This is Avett’s base strength, she realises. She sends his crossbow careening into the walls of the armory a little too violently at the thought of that. A resounding metallic clang vibrates throughout the entire ship.

“Told you,” Ysh’vanna says when Lili comes back in.

“I just lost focus for a bit, that’s all.”

The view outside the window lowers. Lili feels her stomach lurch as Ysh’vanna takes two of her fingers and slides upwards on a panel. She has a feeling that, like the initial drop of an elevator, she’s never going to get used to this.

Finally, when they’re several metres above the mall, Ysh’vanna turns back towards Lili, her features feral. Itching for an explanation. Lili doesn’t have to be asked twice, if asked at all.

Lili says, “The relic trapped us inside the mall.” Simple and easy. She slips a hand into her pocket, expecting the globe’s cool kiss.

She feels nothing of the sort. Feeling awkward, she takes out the wooden doll instead and places it on the dining table.

Ysh’vanna’s reaction is incredulous. “This lil’ thing? I can barely smell it.”

The exhaustion she’s feeling right now is incredible. She’d definitely put the globe back into her pocket, but from the way it had escaped her notice earlier, she’s willing to accept anything at this point. “Not really. There were two relics. The one that gave us the most trouble… kept vanishing. I swear I put it in my pocket but now it’s gone again.”

Her eyes fall upon the doll. It’s a young girl, and her arms are crossed over her chest. Like she’s been laid to rest. Ysh’vanna shrugs. “No big deal. We got what the IRC wanted, so here’s a formal congratulations from me to you, as your captain. Good work out there.”

Euphoria blooms in Lili’s chest as she watches Ysh’vanna lean against the table to give her the biggest smile anyone’s ever given her. Maybe she’s fit for this job after all. Maybe all of those years she’d spent alone in the wilds have finally given fruition to something worth cultivating.

Something catches in the corner of her eye. At first, she thinks it’s just an artifact in her eye, but as the tell-tale wave of ether washes over her, she knows exactly what it is.

Ysh’vanna catches Lili’s slight change in mood and whirls around. When her body stills, Lili knows that it’s not just a trick of the eye in the harsh sunlight. She throws herself into her captain’s chair and glares at the radar.

Nothing. Not even a blip.

“Ugh, shit!” Ysh’vanna slams a fist into her armrest. “What a time for the radar to crap out on us. There’s no way it hasn’t spotted us yet, I’ll turn arou—”

The ship lurches again. Lili glances towards Ysh’vanna, only to find that same look of shock on her features. She slaps a palm against the navigation panel, and a live feed of the Winnow’s rear slides out and upwards. It’s a shot from the perspective of the thrusters. The flames are guttering out, hardly clinging on to life, and tailing them is a dark, undulating mist—

Not mist. If Lili looks close enough, she can just spot out hundreds of glowy, blue membranes. A swarm. Of tiny, voracious dragons.

Ysh’vanna grits her teeth. Clenches her hands—unclenches them in the same second. Steeling herself. “D3s, but if they’re here then—” She shakes her head and fixes her eyes on the horizon. “I think they’re in our engine, we’re not outrunning this thing like this.”

“I supposed as much.” Auren is behind them in seconds, having felt the ship’s abnormal movements from earlier. “Your commands, captain?”

She narrows her eyes. Kicks at an invisible flap underneath all the panels and buttons and cuts out the power before tugging a lever above her head. The navigation interface briefly flickers in and out of life. “Backup battery array is on. Stuff ‘em out.”

He nods, then as smoothly as he had arrived, he leaves for the engine room.

“Fire?” Lili asks. She’s not as well acquainted with the Winnow as Ysh’vanna is, but thermal warfare in the engine room sounds like a surefire way to quickly render their thrusters useless.

“No, suffocation. You couldn't burn out an entire swarm of these guys even if you wanted to—that's how they got into our thrusters.” Ysh’vanna keeps her eyes glued to the dragon on the horizon. Uncertainty floats in her lime-green eyes for the briefest of seconds. “Auren is extremely proficient in what he does, but if he gets too carried away in there, we’ve got Avett on hand.”

Lili looks at the dot on the horizon. It's getting closer with every second, even with Ysh'vanna putting the ship into a full reverse. "Wait. Carried away?"

Another explosion rocks the ship. Lili hardly manages to grab at the kitchen counter before Auren steps out of the engine room, his hair loosely hanging from his head in limp strands. He's got a gas mask on.

"You get them?" Ysh'vanna asks as she poses to kick the hidden panel next to her foot again.

"Ysh'vanna," he starts. "We seem to have run out of fuel."

The tiny captain pushes away from her seat and storms into the corridor, grabbing a mask from a cabinet as she does. Lili follows, but doesn't enter the engine room, just stands outside as Ysh'vanna rips open one of the metallic boxes and swears. It's a mess of sparks and gnarled wires. The five—supposedly replaceable, Lili isn't sure—fuel tanks have been chewed clean through. Each and every one of them is empty.

"It's fucked. They got into our machinery. Lili, get Avett."

Something pushes Lili aside before she can even respond. Avett stumbles into the room, his tail swerving all over the place as he tries his damndest to fight against his own bodily weakness.

"Auren, we can’t avoid an encounter at this rate. I need you outside." Ysh'vanna ushers him out of the room and motions to Lili to do the same before disappearing around the corner.

She doesn't leave. She keeps watching Avett's hands as he makes his way around the wires like they're a part of him. Every movement is precise, a calculation made minutes in advance before he actually executes them. He isn't just some part-time mechanic who picked up his trade during a year off—he's the ship's only lifeline.

But then he shudders, slams a gloved hand into the side of the box, and groans.

"Stop watching me," he says. His breathing is labored.

He shouldn't be up, Lili realises. Shouldn't even be awake, let alone moving around. But he has to; it is necessary. He's aware of it all too well.

"Good luck," she offers quietly.

She expects a cocky 'don't need it.' Instead, Avett returns a wobbly smile and says, "Thanks."

As soon as she turns the corner to meet with Ysh'vanna in the navigation room, she feels the ship's altitude lower, just for a heartbeat—before returning to normal. She looks outside. She wishes she hadn't.

On the deck, Auren is standing in front of the dragon, his gauzy wards floating around him and the ship in multiple layers. The dragon itself… isn’t a dragon at all, not in the traditional sense. Like the swarm Auren had disposed of earlier, its skin is more membranous than scaled. Instead of two, powerful wings, its body is a flat disk that undulates with the wind, expanding and contracting with ease when it needs to. When it moves to blot out the sun, the light passes right through it, creating strands of ocean-blue beams into the navigation. Occasionally, it lashes out with a tendril formed from its main body.

Then she realises that they aren’t close to it at all. It’s still rapidly approaching, even though she can clearly spot out each of its golden-yellow organs, floating around like sunken treasures at the bottom of the ocean. It has to be at least ten times larger than their ship. They’re ants standing before a mountain god.

“B3.” Ysh’vanna grips the counter. “A Butterfly Matriarch.”

Auren’s efforts to fend it off are a practice in futility. Every projectile he musters, every lick of pure ethereal flame is swallowed up by the Butterfly Matriarch’s fleshy body. That’s when she realises, exactly, where the limits of his abilities are. He doesn’t have the mental power to ward the ship against attacks while simultaneously performing counterattacks with sufficient power.

They aren’t going fast enough. Lili guesses that it has something to do with how the ship is using the backup batteries instead of actual fuel. Avett is in no shape to repair the ship at all, let alone at the rate the situation demands of him. Real panic flutters through her body. She imagines the Matriarch's body, wrapping around the ship, slowly oozing into every crack until—

Lili blots out the image and fixes her eyes on Auren. Calm, dependable Auren—stone-faced until the day he died. She shakes her head. She can't think like that. Even though he’s hardly functioning at his full power, the ship seems to jerk backward with every pin-pricked blast. Of course he’s capable of such a demanding task. He’s a true Gallian caster, leagues and worlds above Lili.

And yet, at the rate things are going, she’s not sure if they’ll even be making it out of here alive.

She storms into the engine room. Keeps that image of Auren fighting on the frontline cemented in her head. If ether can propel the ship, then maybe there's something she can do to help. She doesn't have to be deadweight.

Avett is still hard at work, and when she sees just how much he’s gotten done, her worst fears are confirmed. The wires are still frayed, the remainders of the chewed-up fuel tanks discarded and left to rattle around on the floor. Lili doesn’t have to be a mechanic to know just how fucked they are.

She moves closer to the engine. Stands over his heaving, scrunched over body. “Avett, move,” she says. Not a request. A statement.

“Over my dead body,” he grits out. His hands are shaking like dead twigs in the wind.

And maybe it makes her an asshole, but if it means saving the rest of the ship, then she doesn’t care that pushing Avett aside and onto his ass makes her as mean as him.

He lies there, his breath coming in shallow beats. “What are you doing?”

Lili grips both sides of the fuel tank cabinet. It’s cool to the touch, and not unbearable to work with. She can do this. All she has to do is throw her power out into the ship. Like extending a hand. Like assimilating herself into the iron and supplying—no, becoming the fuel—that the Winnow would run on.  

Her eyes squeeze shut. She feels her wings unfurl behind her.

“I have a feeling that I know exactly what you’re trying to do.” She hears the squeak of rubber-soled boots against metal, then a faint bump as he falls to the floor again. “Fuck. Fuck. Please stop. You don’t want to do that.”

Avett’s delirious ramblings are a blur against the sudden rush of emptiness she’s exposed to once she enters the ship’s inner workings. It’s dangerous. It's like if she's not careful, it'll grab her head by the hairful and plunge her underneath the surface of the water.  

She inhales sharply and opens her eyes again. The sheer amount of ether she needs in order to power the ship for even a second is enough to strengthen her entire body for at least an hour straight. It's a deep, never-ending well down there.

Another tendril manages to find its way through all of Auren's wards and rocks the ship with a slow swat. None of his wards are going to matter when the dragon ends up engulfing them anyway. She lets a pebble of her ether drip down into the void.

If it hit the bottom at all, it makes no indication of it.

The abyss is staring right at her, and she finds that she can't quite look at it in the eyes. If she takes the plunge, embraces it entirely—there's no telling if she'll ever see the surface again.

She looks back towards Avett. Sees his wide-eyed, pleading face. Silently bargaining with her, exchanging emotions like currency and receiving nothing in return. But why? He shouldn't give a rat's ass what happens to her. He shouldn't be caring at all. Avett hates her because she's everything his seventeen-year-old self was. He can't bear to be around her; that's the narrative that he's painted out for himself.

She asks, "Am I doing something you would have done three years ago?"

He doesn't say anything at first. Then, with a tired voice that could leave wood smouldering, he answers, "Yeah. You are."

"Good." Her hands tighten against the box. "It'll be easier if you still hate me."

Then she dives into the engine and welcomes the chill embrace of the void.

5: the detention room

Avett is at a loss and a standstill.

A loss, because he isn’t sure whether he should back down and apologise to Lilith for lumping his shortcomings with her own poor decision making—he shouldn’t have shot the floor. She shouldn’t have pounced at him either. A standstill, because he’s genuinely mad. The only reason she’s even allowed to be considered as a viable crew candidate—and he’s sure of this—is because she’s a Human, and the IRC kisses the lips of any off-realm ship blessed with a Human crew member onboard. Put simply, it’s not an offer to pass up. Not even for Lilith.

But something tells Avett that, no matter what he’d chosen to do all those hours ago, the relic would’ve found another way to trap them inside the mall. He knows nothing about all of this airy, floaty, ethereal nonsense, but he knows the relic wants one thing and one thing only; Lilith. Now he’s not trained like her, nor is he ethereally inclined like Auren. But he does have experience working with relics, and even though retrieval missions are supposed to be easy—which they are—he’s heard enough disaster stories to know that when shit hits the fan, it hits the fan hard. He just didn’t expect it to happen to him. 

Avett just sighs, throws his head back, and narrows his eyes. Lilith should be discussing her childhood traumas in a therapist’s office, what with all of this constant apologising and weak posture—but instead, she’s on the field, and she’s gobbling down traumatic experiences like a starved kid at a buffet. It’s a surprise she hasn’t collapsed from the stress of it all. Which is good. 

He looks back at Lilith. Relic engagement protocol: if the relic goes rogue during retrieval, start off by introducing yourself and building a rapport with it. Since she seems to know the relic so well, he’s kindly allowed her to give it a few shots. Her eyes—blank, dark, rounded things, like a Gallian’s stare without the occasional flicker of light—are fixed to the relic. Her gloved hands tremble ever so slightly. 

“Feel anything, princess?” he asks. He likes the name he’s given her. In another world, the name would’ve been a romantic pet name, but in his hands, it’s a weaponised insult. The way Lilith hovers around instead of standing like a normal person, the way she’s simply afraid to do anything without asking a billion times if she’s doing it right—he’s seen her stutter like a teen on her first date before, except she’s far from being a teen, and that she was talking to a damn cashier. If she’s not some otherworldly princess from a higher plane of existence, then at the very least she’s sheltered. 

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“Looks like this relic and I might have a lot of things in common.” 

Lilith visibly bristles. Her cheeks pink for the briefest of seconds before she forces her features behind a grey slate. “Good. That’s good. Wouldn’t want—” She cuts herself off with a discontent sound from the back of her throat. 

He raises his eyebrows and folds his arms. “I’m glad you share the sentiment.”

She falls silent. The snow inside the globe settles on the plastic lawn. It’s a cute, antique thing; the snowglobes in Therius are infinitely cooler with their tiny string lights and moving parts.

“It’s gone cold,” she says.

“Then bring it back.”

“I’ve been trying. It doesn’t like me.”

Ugh, what a hassle. Avett grabs the globe from Lilith and sits down on a nearby chunk of concrete. Fuck the protocol, and fuck the pleasantries. “Hey, shit head. We fucking need you to stop your weirdo fairy spell-glamour-magic or whatever so we can leave and trade you in for fifty-hundred currencies. Please.”

Surprisingly, the globe starts to glow again. It’s a nice, lukewarm feeling—despite the fact that he’s wearing gloves, he can still feel the heat of the glass against the pads of his fingers. It’s kind of like being pressed against someone’s body.  

Until it isn’t.

A hot wave zips through his fingers and up his spine like a feverish chill. The sensation isn’t unpleasant, but it isn’t entirely friendly either. Like a love tap two old friends might give each other upon meeting again, there’s a feeling of separation that he can’t quite place his finger on. It’s an awkward gesture; one meant for him, yet also meant for someone else. 

And then the feeling stops. No—it hasn’t stopped, rather it’s gone. Distant. Beckoning Avett elsewhere, down further into the shifting shadows of the department store with tendrils of fragrant mists. Lilith’s head jerks towards the same direction, and it becomes apparent that she’s having the same experience as himself. He blinks, tosses the globe into the air, and catches it again. A smirk graces his features. 

“Think it likes me,” he says. “Try not to be too jealous.”

“That’s not exactly a blessing…” She shuffles from foot to foot, her hands hidden behind her. “I—I feel like it could be a trap. I don’t trust this thing at all.”

“Look, just because you’ve had a bad experience with this thing doesn’t mean I won’t.” The globe pulses warmly at that, as if encouraging him to go on. Avett obliges. “Besides, we’re not getting out of here without interacting with it—so what if it is a trap? You’d rather aimlessly wander around this old mall? Be my guest, Lilith.”

The person in front of him shakes—out of pure anger or hesitation, he’s not sure, nor does he care—but the frontliner stands her ground, her eyebrows crashing down onto her eyes. “No. We’re staying.”

“No, we’re going.”

“Staying.”

Avett leans in. “Going.”

“Avett—please.” Lilith takes a step back.

“Beg more, princess.”

She looks like she’s ready to throw herself to the ground and kiss his shoes until they’re squeaky-clean. And she probably would have.

Were it not for the solid thump of something hard and sharp piercing the concrete next to Avett’s feet. He looks down—there’s a small, see-through thorn embedded into the rock, about as long as his forearm and as wide as the bones inside of him. It’s hardly visible against the terrain. He looks up at the source, sees nothing—but manages to catch the blur of another arrow wizz past his face. Something of that size, of that shape, should have made some form of sound when it was travelling through the air. Avett shakes his head. He’s slipping. 

Another thing. Just standing around the thorns makes him dizzy, as if it’s actively sucking out the air and replacing it with carbon dioxide. Or like being in ammonium fumes for too long. His chest squeezes, his head gives a lurch like he’s losing air, but he isn’t—in fact, he’s fully able to breathe. He’s not sticking around to find out why though. He slings his crossbow over his shoulder and yells, “Move it, princess!”

“Always feels like we’re running.” Lilith is already way ahead of him. 

— 

It’s definitely been a while since they’ve last stopped running. The blue thorns—or arrows, considering their flared ends and tapered arrowheads—have been a constant pelting downpour. It’s safe to assume that it’s not someone that’s firing at them from behind, but something; Lili is willing to bet that it’s another extension of the relic’s reality-altering powers. 

She’s proven right when she realises just where the arrows are luring them—forward, into the yawning abyss of the mall. At least they won’t be ending up cornered anytime soon, but that’s about the least of their worries. The floor’s starting to get crumbly again, the ceramic tiles dislodging from their slots like someone’s slammed a fist onto a scrabble board, and there aren’t even any store fronts to hide in. No counters to crouch under either. 

Lili doesn’t want to slip, but at this rate she might as well be running on ice—everything her feet finds purchase on gives way immediately— 

The floor comes reeling in fast. Her forearm hits the ground first, followed by her thigh. It’s supposed to hurt—her disorientated head can figure that much out—but all she can think about are the arrows. And how there’s going to be rips in the gear that Auren’s just bought for her.

Mum’s voice floats through her head. “Of course you would waste such a nice gift.”

Grit embeds itself in her hands as she braces herself against the floor and rolls onto her front. A grunt comes up out of her throat. At least the pain’s finally catching up to her. 

“Fuck, Lilith—” 

Something strong hoists her up by the arm, nearly pulling it out of her shoulder socket. The only thing keeping her from teetering over again is Avett Ironsturm’s firm, Kattish grip. Disgust settles in her stomach, followed by shame, followed by the acute realisation that they’re still being chased from behind, and that there’s a blue spark of an arrow that’s aimed right for his back.

There’s not enough time to call out. Her ether roils through her arm, her core. It’s not enough to simply pull down on his mass, she soon realises—he’s far too strong, a testament to his hard-headedness, probably. But she’s seeing everything in slow motion right now, so with all of her pent up anger, she yanks his arm to the side, kicks his ankle— 

Avett’s eyes flash with anger, then knowing. The arrow whistles as it sails over him.

Then he faceplants into the ground next to her. He stays there, eating ceramic shavings for a hot second before rolling over, a light groan on his lips as he gives Lili one of the worst glares she’s ever had the pleasure of receiving.

“S-sorry.”

He scoffs. “Sure.”

She waits for the second arrow to go flying above their heads. Nothing comes. She doesn’t need to feel her pocket to know that the relic is burning away. Probably laughing at them while it’s at it. “What now?” she asks. 

“That relic,” he starts, “is the fucking bane of our existence right now. And I’m willing to bet that it’s because of you.”

Alright. Lili slumps back to the ground. “So we split up?”

“As much as I’d love to leave you in the dust, I’d hate to be the cause of your passing. Get up.”

She nibbles the inside of her cheeks with her molars. With her now stiffening muscles, she leaps to her feet and stays at a low crouch. She doesn’t dare breathe.

Nothing. No arrows, no sparks of blue in the distance. Maybe the relic’s given up. Even when she decides to fully stand up, there’s no sign of them. 

Avett still takes his sweet time getting back on his feet, dusting off his pants when he does. “Now that that’s out of the relic’s system…”

Lili flicks her hand, forming a small shield in front of her. Then she steps to the side, behind Avett— 

Her shield dissipates. The arrow sails right through. 

Sharp, blinding pain pulses through her shoulder. The arrow feels cold. She’s always read that the sensation of cold metal meeting hot blood was akin to a kiss—but now she knows that particular passage had been a large romanticisation. This shit stings. She’s been bitten, mauled, even singed, and for some reason nothing compares to this. It’s like she’s being eaten alive from the inside, her body being the catalyst to her own demise.

At least, it seems, that the arrows have stopped for good.

By the time Avett’s pushed her off and half-carried, half-dragged her elsewhere, Lili’s not quite there anymore. One minute she’s wobbling over the same tiles that had sent her flying a moment earlier, the next she’s slumped against an upturned chunk of painted asphalt. She finds that she has to lean on one side more than the other, because, well, she’s just realised that the arrow’s pierced all the way through. And even though she wants to stay awake, wants to just get this mission over and done with, she finds that each blink of her eyes sends her closer to that delectable release of unconsciousness. 

“No, no. Come on.” Avett is in front of her in seconds. “Don’t fucking close your eyes.”

Lili is… so tired. This is the perfect place to nap. Just for five seconds— 

A bright sting of pain on her cheek brings Avett’s face back into focus. His hand is red and outstretched. “Shove some ether into your body to keep yourself awake. Do literally anything that isn’t shutting your eyes while I bandage you up.”

She’d love to. But when she dives deep into that pool of personal ether, her arms outstretched as she readies herself for the resultant explosion of consciousness, she finds that it’s not there. Her wings aren’t responding to her either. It’s like she’s reaching out and grabbing at the air. And to top it all off—the suffocating air of dread is back. 

“I’ll have to wrap the bandage around the arrow, okay?” His voice is calm, soothing—a far cry from the aggressive asshole he enjoys painting himself out as on the daily. “Try not to move—FUCK me!”

It’s Avett that snatches his hand back, a hiss leaving his clenched teeth as he cradles his fingers. Lili can’t quite piece together what’s happened until Avett slips on his leather gloves again and gingerly reaches for the now vaguely glowing arrow.

“So that’s what they were. Ethereal weapons.” He narrows his eyes. “Saps your ether and severs your signal between the soul and the environment. Cruel and slow.” He glares at Lili. He doesn’t need words to ask, in no uncertain terms, what the fuck was she thinking when she took that arrow?

Lili’s breath comes in shuttered, broken parts. “You’re not trained. If you took the arrow,” she croaks, “you would have probably died. Before you hit the ground.”

Avett’s ears wiggle in obvious distaste.

“Bad decision on your part, but… thanks.”

Lili lets loose a breath. She squeezes her eyes shut until white flecks explode behind her eyelids. Anything is better than the dread. “You’ll take the arrow out though, right?” 

“I guess. I owe you now or something. Ugh.” He shakes his head, reaches down, and rips open a velcroed pocket on Lili’s leg. He looks like he’s about to throw up, or pass out. When he takes out one of her BluEther packets instead and knocks the entire bag back like a shot, she realises that it’s not the grotesquery of her wound that’s making him queasy—but rather, the thing that’s in it.  

With clenched teeth, Avett reaches then behind into his back pocket and pulls out a utility knife. He’s going to saw it off, bit by bit, then slide the rest out of her. Assuming that his knife can cut whatever material this is. It seems more crystalline than wood. 

The knife sinks into the arrow all the same. 

The first cut makes Lili groan. She’d thought herself numb to any further external pain by now, but the motion of Avett’s knife has her re-experiencing the whole initial injury. The arrow is a living, breathing, pulsing thing. It doesn’t want to leave her. It has to. It’ll eat her up if she does, and she’ll lose her mind in that swallowing, ever-empty pit of— 

“You know,” Avett starts, his eyes not leaving the arrow for a second, “I used to be a pretty rebellious kid back in middle school.”

Not surprising. Lili manages a weak laugh. Something at the back of her mind slips away, like she’s standing on soft sand and the wind’s just blowing it out from underneath her feet. 

“Alright, smartass. I got into trouble with the teachers all the time—stellar grades though, so they never really had the option of expelling me. They did however—” he draws in a shaky breath and exhales hard enough to blow his hair out of his face, as if fighting back another wave of nausea, “—put me into the detention room on multiple occasions. I don’t know what kind of detention rooms you had on Earth, but we had this singular, one-by-one room for the worst of the worst. Like solitary confinement, but for shithead children instead of felons. It had one chair, one desk, and a shitty light that sometimes didn’t turn on. No windows. Really drove home the idea that school was pretty much prison for kids whose parents wanted them to learn long division.

“So I’m in the detention room for the fourth time that week for calling Ms Goldsbury a ‘morbidly overweight manticore’ for giving us way too much homework. I was thirteen, I was a shithead kid, and I wore detentions on my sleeve like badges of honor. Four times a week? That was like winning the fucking lottery. Naturally, I had a, uh, victory lap. In the detention room.”

The tip of the arrow comes off. She’s not sure if she’s finally getting used to having someone jostle around an arrow in her shoulder, or if Avett’s story is actually taking the edge off her mind, but the dread’s gone. Lifted, like a streak of sunlight breaking through a cover of mist. Lili gives Avett a curious glance. “Victory lap?”

He flattens his lips. With one hand on her uninjured shoulder, the other gripping the flared end of the arrow, he pulls it out in one, fluid motion. Then he stands up and throws them far over the asphalt chunk. Lili's hand rises to meet her wound, her teeth clacking down as the pain flares again. It's white-hot, it's like nothing she's ever felt—

Avett pries her hand away, his roll of bandages hovering at the ready. He leans in close, and then Lili feels the weight of his confession pounding against her head.

Her reaction is so violent that he has to hold her down. What a thing to admit. She can’t tell if she’s bucking because of the pain or because she’s in possession of a new fun fact about her partner.

“No fucking way,” she says. This isn't something she should know about at all.

“I was thirteen—alright?” He unbuttons her caster’s cape and tunic until she’s left in the standard military black tank. In her delirium, she finds it all exceedingly ironic that he’s discussing such a tasteless topic while undressing her, but she doesn’t bring it up. “Stars, I’m starting to regret telling you this story. Apparently thirteen-year-old me thought it was so great that he just did it again. And again. I was pretty much the only kid that ever got detention that often, so it wasn’t super weird for the other kids.”

“No, that’s… still just really weird,” Lili corrects him. She can feel her personal ether pumping through her body now so she sends a healthy amount of it up to her wound. It won’t accelerate her healing, but it will help staunch the blood if the bandages aren’t enough.

“…So anyway, I graduated top of my year and left for my specialist school of choice with plenty of scholarship money to fund my eventual downfall into alcohol and gold diggers. But I digress. Midway through my second year, they asked me to come back to the middle school to give a talk. They were holding some sort of top graduates session, though that shit never really matters in the long run. So I went in and filled this room full of early overachievers with hope that their future would yield riches and decadent mansions and hot chicks if they kept up their studies.”

He’s forming loops around her arm now after having fastened the bandage across her chest. Lili raises an eyebrow.

“…Heavily paraphrased. Out of curiosity, I visited the detention room, just to relive the good old days. After school, I snuck in, opened the door, and lo and behold—the same fucking singular chair, singular desk, shitty lamp. I don’t know why I even bothered. But I spent a good few minutes pacing around the room, wallowing in—”

“Wallowing,” she repeats.

“—In nostalgia, dick-for-brains,” he says, giving her bandages a particularly rough tug. “Was pretty good—until I turned to leave. Until I saw something above the door.”

Lili looks up at him. “What was it?”

For a second, Avett seems to pause, as if merely recalling the conclusion of his story unleashed an immense, indescribable deluge of regret. “A fucking camera.”

“Oh, god.”

“If I hadn’t deliberately looked upwards at that specific spot, I would’ve missed it. I don’t know if it was there back when I attended. The absolute sense of helpless dread I felt upon leaving that room…” He secures the bandage. “I did not sleep well that night.”

Lili has to sit there for a bit; she can feel her ether sputtering to life inside of her. It’s circulating, and it’s there, but she’ll need a moment for it to start adjusting again.

“Jesus,” is all she can say to his story. “That’s…”

She looks up at Avett. And then she collapses into chest heaving guffaws.

“Okay, it’s meant to get a chuckle out of you, not be the funniest thing you’ve heard.” He folds his arms. “Can you walk? Or consult the relic again, see if anything’s changed after we did what it—can you stop laughing?”

She can’t. Every laugh is wheezing through her like she’s coughing up her insides. With her limbs feeling like lead, she latches onto the upturned concrete, stumbles over to the other side, and throws up on the asphalt. Her hair sticks to her mouth in strands afterwards, but all she does is hold her hand out when Avett steps forward to help her. When she straightens back out, her face is perfectly still. 

“Lilith?” Avett quirks his head as he peeks over the chunk of asphalt. 

She slaps the other pocket on her pants with a hand, and her worst fears are confirmed.

“Relic must’ve fallen out.”

— 

“Wow. Wow! Relic must’ve fallen out.” Avett throws his hand out into the void. “Relic fell out! Where? How fucking far back did you drop it?” 

“Don’t worry,” Lili mumbles, “I’ll just wait for the dread to settle in.” 

“Fuck!” A fist-sized rock shoots past her ear, hits the wall ten metres in front of her, and smashes into a million pieces. “Incompetent. Literally useless! How do you do this—you do something impressive, you disappoint me, you compromise the mission, then you somehow impress me again. We’re supposed to get to know each other on the field, princess. Not go through every fucking stage of post marital counselling, dammit!”

Lili flinches at that. Marital. It takes all of her mental power to not recall that particularly pleasant dream. She knows she should be feeling a hot cloud of shame right now for dropping the relic, but the truth is she doesn’t care what he has to say at all. Her pockets were sealed—and are still sealed—shut. There is no physically feasible way that the relic could’ve even left her pocket. It had, quite literally, vanished into thin fucking air. But she digresses. Avett’s voice is a low buzz of white noise against the constant hum of—no, not dread, not anymore. The constant thrum of indignation. Of wanting to do something, anything, so badly that it starts to gnaw at your insides.  

She locks up her discomfort. Locks it all away into a tight, iron-padded box and swallows the key. She needs to focus on the relic, not what it wants her to feel. 

Maybe the key to getting out of the mall is figuring out exactly what the relic wants from them.

She glances back at Avett. He’s red faced, panting, clearly enraged despite Lili’s disengagement from the conversation. Precisely because of Lili’s disengagement. This is the same kid who whacked off in the detention room seven years ago. Who somehow got into enough trouble everyday to practically live in said room for an entire year. And now look at him—a hardass, unforgiving egotist. 

She liked the story. It pulled her out of that dark spot, made her experience actually bearable. Hell, she’s even willing to bet that the relic liked it, considering it immediately released its hold on her upon hearing the first part of his… 

Hm. 

Lili glances back at her own hands. The relic hates her. Or, at least, in comparison to its relationship with Avett. She remembers the immense disappointment it had felt when she broke out of her dream. How it had expected her to not only experience the euphoria of starting a family, but also to see its dream to its end. 

How it had flashed in Avett’s hands not a moment after, as if it had found a home and a long lost friend all at once. 

“I can’t believe it.” Avett grabs her shoulder, digs his fingers into her bones like he’s a grave robber and she’s a corpse. “That went in one ear and out the other, huh? You really just don’t give a—”

“Did you, by any chance, know any A or S rank dragons?”

Stunned into silence, it’s all Avett can do to keep his mouth from gaping like a dumb fish. It’s enough for Lili to wrench his hand off her shoulder and say, “Friend, interest, romantic intrigue—it doesn’t matter what type of relationship it was.”

He doubles down on the violence instead, gripping fistfuls of her cape in anger. “What, suggesting I fuck dragons now? Is that what we’re doing? Because I could deliver a whole damn cargo bay full of targeted insults before you even get one out.”

“The relic. It knows you. By extension, the dragon knows you as well.” 

She watches with bated breath as his hands ball tighter in her cape before he lets her go and paces back a few steps.

Then he immediately whirls on her again. “Let me get this straight. I’m a merc. We don’t talk to dragons—we kill them. I don’t know what you did out in the field for six years—mighta’ fucked with your head a little—but you don’t talk to dragons. That’s not a thing that happens.”   

Even then, there’s doubt in his eyes. The pieces are all falling into place, and it’s starting to make sense why the relic had given him such a knowing flash when he’d taken it in his hands. 

She’s not so eager about this next part, but she powers through all the same.

“Tell me another story about yourself,” Lili asks. “We might not be able to find the relic—maybe we can entice it back.” 

For a second, Lili worries that he’ll brush her off again. That he’ll call her idea rubbish and start walking off, relic scanner in one hand, the Therian equivalent of a middle finger in the other. 

But then he looks behind and below him, throws down his crossbow, and sits.

“Couldn’t hurt to try, I guess.”

Lili takes her spot next to him on the ground. He shuffles slightly to the side, gives her a scowl that wrinkles the markings at his eyes.

“I have had at least six exes,” he finally settles on saying. 

A solid beat of silence wafts through the air.

“No reaction. Ok.” He starts counting on his fingers. “First I had Eri. Middle school. Forgot why we broke up. Then right after I had Aoife. Broke up with her because she had the same name as my sister. Then I had Bel—forgot her full name, but we dated in merc school—pretty much a specialised high school for mercenaries—she broke up with me over… something. Had something to do with grades. She came out the next year.”

The list goes on and on. Lili has always thought that relationships—romantic and otherwise—were a heavy investment of emotion, a grand opening of one’s true person to the other. Avett burns through women like kindling. He’s forgotten the presence they’ve had in his life already. Or maybe it’s just easier to say you’ve forgotten.

“…And then there’s Jasmina.” Avett toys with the relic scanner in his hands. “My father and her mother were good friends; naturally, we got arranged together. I was nineteen—already two years into bounty hunting. We broke up because… I’m a merc. And I only ever got to visit home for a month every year.”

He rubs his mouth with a hand. 

Then he catches himself and shoots a glance at Lili. “That enough for you?”

She shrugs. “I dunno, never been in a relationship.”

He chokes. “The relic, smartass.”

Right. Right. She shuts her eyes, searching for that thread of injustice. At this point, it’s hardly there anymore—faded into an insignificant blip, a wisp of carefully bottled rage. Disappointment weighs down her stomach before molding itself into shame. She’d been wrong after all.

But when she turns to meet Avett’s no doubtedly smug gaze, she’s met with something else.

A hot, powerful surge of energy, similar to the relic’s own—and entirely different. To compare these two would be like putting a tsunami against a wave at low tide. Same concept, same idea, different magnitudes. They had been lured here, all for this. She clutches her head. It’s going to overwhelm her. What should she do about it?

Something stirs inside of Lili. Don’t let it find me, don’t let it find me, it whispers. It’s dark, sinister, burns like charcoal and warms her soul from the inside out.

For the second time that day, she’s hiding. She grabs at everything and anything she knows about herself and swirls it all behind a curtain, away from the relic, away from the world like she’s always done. 

And it works. The energy passes over her like a hawk that’s missed its prey. She’s safe.

Then she snaps her eyes open again. What about Avett? She scrambles over the rubble, trips over the ground on those same damn tiles. Where is he? If he’s not trained, he can’t hide his soul, and if he can’t hide himself then— 

A groan, and then the slow crunch of ceramic material against concrete. Lili whips around. He’s behind her, crumpled up and twitching in pain, but he’s there. She heaves a sigh of relief.

“Avett?” Lili leans down and touches his shoulder. He shifts, then bats her away like a fly.

“I’m fine, don’t touch me.” He rolls onto his back, hand massaging his forehead. “Wait, where…”

“Huh?”

It’s then that Lili realises that their surroundings have changed. Instead of dull, paint-faded storefronts, they’re surrounded by shelves and crates of weaponry and ammunition. The walls are a shiny, metallic grey, and they’re close enough to make merely being in this room an unpleasant squeeze. A ship’s storage room. 

Avett jumps to his feet and immediately stumbles into the nearest cluster of boxes. Lili reaches out to steady him before he turns this entire area inside out, but he pounds a fist into the wall before he trips over himself again. The fluorescent lights flicker to life above them. When he lets his arm fall to his side, Lili can’t see any indication of a button there. For all she knows, he’s just slammed a wall and hoped for the best.

“Have you…” Lili trails off. She wants to ask if Avett’s been here before, in this specific room, except he’s already tripping over himself towards the door, his breath quickening as he fumbles with the handle. 

“We can’t be here,” he mumbles. His voice is a low drone, as if he’s reciting a mantra to himself. “We can’t be here—fucking—open!” 

The door gives a few adamant clicks before swinging outwards and slamming against the other side of the wall. 

This time, it’s Lili’s turn to stagger backwards.

On the wall in front of them, in no uncertain terms, is a bright splatter of blood.

“Holy shit,” she ends up saying.

Avett crumples to his knees, his eyes wholly trained on the sight in front of him. She wonders if he can smell the lingering tang of iron because of his Kattish nose. Or if he’s too shellshocked to even perceive anything other than the sight of… even Lili has to look away. She can't even begin to quantify the amount of violence that had to have taken place for blood to be spilled like that.

She steps past Avett. He doesn’t need her support right now—he just needs a moment to himself. Besides, he’s been swatting her away all day. What’s he going to get out of her comfort?

When she enters the corridor, she finds that the location of each room is similar to the Winnow’s. None of the lights are on, but the navigation room is lit up. A low, warm glow against the dim walls. 

She gives one last glance to Avett.

“Look if you want, I guess.” He’s curled himself into a ball against the wall, his knees tucked into his chest. “Whatever… gets us out of here.”

She’s not sure what she’ll be looking at all, but she makes her way down the corridor anyway. Slumped against the walls are two bodies, though thankfully, their faces have been blurred into obscurity. There’s a man mumbling something, and strangely enough, the closer she gets to it the further he seems to go. Like he’s fading. Time is just not on his side anymore.

Then there’s a familiar, soft yet harsh-toned voice. “Please! I’ll do everything right next time, I-I’ll stay on the ship, just—fucking stay with me, I’m begging you—”

Lili whirls around, expecting Avett to be there, sobbing his eyes out and acting weirdly out-of-character. No, the sound came from in front of her. In navigation.

She sneaks up to the entrance and peeks around the corner.

Avett is kneeling over a bloodied figure. He’s wearing the full arms specialist uniform; a bright splash of yellow against the cold bite of steel. The whole scene, in fact, seems far too saturated for the scene that’s unfolding right in front of her. 

The man below him is wearing the backline caster’s uniform. The blood blends in perfectly with his tunic, making it look like his clothes have simply pooled around him. He’s got a shock of white, cropped hair, and he’s also got a pair of mobile, animalistic ears upon his head. Kattish. Might have graduated with Avett. They’re both so young, Lili thinks. She can’t look away. She’s clearly infringing on Avett’s privacy here, and yet the scene is so deeply tragic that she can’t help but stand and remember her own tragedies. 

“It’s ironic, isn’t it.” The man touches a bloody hand to Avett’s cheek, leaving three red strokes. “You compromised the entire mission. You are incompetent—useless, even. But you’re alive. You’re the last one standing on this bitching merc ship.”

Avett doesn’t say a word, only takes his hand in a shaky grip.

“Don’t look at me like that.” The caster manages a grin. “Don’t look at me like I haven't just slaughtered two of our crew members.”

The bloodstain on the walls. The bodies she’d found on her way here.

Lili feels her stomach drop as she watches Avett shake the stilled figure over and over, his shrill cries blending and fading into each other until the room is dark once more. 

The figures have vanished. 

Lili turns, and sees that another part of the ship is lit up. The small room in front of the ship’s entrance. Avett is sitting down on a bench, still wearing his yellow jumpsuit, the three lines of blood on his cheek having dried into a deep brown a while ago. When she turns the corner, she sees two masked figures in long cloaks. Judging from their heights, both are Gallian. New Order Gallians, from the way they’re talking.

“There’s just a kid on this ship,” one mumbles to the other. “One traumatised, scared kid. Looks like the majority of his crew died fighting each other over A4’s aura.”

“Talk like he’s actually in the room, alright?” The slightly taller Gallian leans down, his large hands gripping Avett’s shoulders easily. “You’re lucky you got out alive. You and your crew are C rankers—pitted against an A rank. One that’s been stumping the IRC’s dispatch team for a good damn year now precisely because of what happened here.” He gestures to the bloodstain. The sheets of cloth thrown over the lumps of dead bodies.

Avett doesn’t follow his gaze. The first Gallian sighs like he’s got a warm bed and a cold dinner waiting from him at home. “Need your name, age, race, specialisation…”

“My ID’s here,” Avett says, a hand in his pocket already.

“Nope. It’s protocol. State your details.”

He pauses for a second before responding with, “Avett Ironsturm, seventeen, Kattish, arms specialist and mechanic onboard the Steelian.”

Lili’s hands stiffen against her sides. He was nineteen when he first arrived on Earth, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was also his first day working as a merc. This is something even Ysh’vanna, someone who seems far too aware of her crew’s private affairs, doesn’t know. 

“In what region did your crew encounter A4?”

“Eighth Quarter.” 

“Stars,” the taller Gallian says. “A4 overloaded the navigation panel the moment the Steelian came within a kilometre of it. He piloted this junker all the way to Central Therius manually.”

The shorter Gallian shoots him a glance. “What was that about talking to the kid, not at him?”

Further exchanges are made, words passed but nothing seems to budge Avett. He just sits, head down, hands curled lightly on his knees, and answers every question they throw at him. Lili doesn’t even realise that the scene has faded entirely until she’s left standing in the dark hulls of the ship again, the figures—and bodies, thankfully—now blinked out of existence. 

She doesn’t know what to say. 

“Now you know,” a voice behind her croaks. “My dirty little secret.”

“I don’t understand.” Lili doesn’t turn to meet him, her eyes fixed to the ground. “Your crew… just collectively all lost it? Started murdering each other out of nowhere?”

She hears the awkward shifting of clothes, the all too attentive tug at the hem of his jacket. “That particular A rank… A04, had a particularly potent aura that reduced the inhibitions of every biological lifeform within a kilometre of it. Made us violent.” 

Hot blood splatters across the walls of her mind. “Did… did you?”

A sigh. Avett pushes past Lili and seats himself on the bench. “Could’ve approached the subject a little more tactfully, but no. I didn’t kill any of my crewmates. Figured out how to leave this place yet, princess? Because I’m really not interested in having you rifle through my memories like this.”

She falters. “I… this is all—” 

Something terrible snaps in Avett. Like a rubber band that’s been stretched for far, far too long.

“All what, princess?” He storms up to her, grabs her shoulders so tightly that she can feel his fingers stabbing into her skin. Her wound throbs. “You’re sorry this happened to me? You’re fucking giving me pity? You wouldn’t be the first—nor the last—fucker to do it.”

Lili blinks. Avett’s using her as an outlet for his rage again, and she’s doing fuck all about it. She’d always believed that being someone who existed, someone who swam with the current rather than against it, was easier than fighting back and making a place for yourself. But now she’s up against Avett, and she’s done everything to please him—but he’s still angry. It’s like he can tear right through all of those disinterested facades and guards and walls, and see her for who she really is. A nobody. A girl too afraid to care. 

Avett simply continues. "Know why it’s a secret? Know why this memory’s down here, instead of up here?” He stabs a finger into his head. ”To keep people like you, people who’d never fucking understand, from telling me just how sorry they are that something like this happened to poor old me, and how terrible everything is that I didn’t do anything to deserve it—”

She can’t stand it. Can’t stand being his punching bag. How had she endured eighteen years of all of this wall hugging? 

Avett is sent stumbling backwards until he hits the wall on the other side. Lili looks down at her hand.

It’s faintly stinging of ether and indignation. 

"You think I don't get it?" she shrills. Her hand splays against the wall, between his head and neck. "Everyone I knew is gone. Either they're dead, or I'll never see them again. My entire life before all of this—gone, gone, fucking gone."

He tries to push her back, but the pure, instinctual rage that's been boiling away at her insides ever since she met him is far, far too potent. Her ether flares as she holds him there. Forcing him to listen.

"That's not all, cunt—I spent three fucking years wallowing in my own filth after Ava died, and I watched it all happen in front of me. I was useless. She berated me every fucking minute she was struggling to stay awake, then after that she begged me to just end her sorry life. My childhood friend of eighteen years, someone who molded me into their perfect little bitch—and she's in a pool of her own blood, begging for a sweeter death while I'm trying in vain to save her. Everyday I ask myself if I care that I've lost her, and everyday I come up with another, totally different answer. I don't want to hear that, 'but you don't understand!' garbage. Because I do. More than you know."

For once, Avett is at a loss for words. Finally, he asks, “Did… you?”

Lili narrows her eyes and steels her jaw. Her arm falls to her side.

“S-stars.” He looks to the floor. “I’m… sorry that happened to you.”

Despite herself, she chuckles and folds her arms. 

Avett blushes. Hard. Even his tail starts wiggling out of discomfort. “Eating my own words, huh.”

“I was isolated for four years following Ava’s death, so nobody was around to ‘console’ me—but I don’t think there are words big enough to express sympathy at that level. But there are actions.” She folds her arms and leans against the wall next to him. “I’ll listen to you.”

Avett hesitates for the briefest of seconds, but it’s enough to make Lili’s breath catch in her throat. Maybe she’d been too hard on him, maybe what she’d said was absolutely irredeemable, and now he’s never, ever going to want anything to do with her again.

But then he bumps his shoulder against hers and whispers, “Thanks.” It’s a small gesture, and she almost mistakes it for something less than friendly. The mere brush of skin to skin contact, something she’d never taken as a necessity even in her isolated years, ripples through her body—makes her feel like she’s basking in the warmth of the sun in autumn.

And then he starts to talk.