"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.
"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.