Auren leads the two frontliners between two towering piles of shipping containers. Aside from the occasional flicker of an overhead lamp welded into the wall, there's no light to guide them through the makeshift alleyway. It's only when Lili stumbles over a stray obstacle for the second time does Avett turn on a torch from his GlassLink and point it at the ground. There's a garbage can that's rolling slowly across the floor. Dust floats into the air and resettles on the walls.
He grins and points at her eyes. "Hu—man."
"Avett," Auren warns.
Lili looks on ahead. The door Auren had told them about is a plain grey, made out of plastic and—unlike the rest of its surroundings—is not coated in dust. Someone's been using this door.
Avett is in front of it in seconds. Auren observes it from a distance for a moment before asking, "What sort of door is it?"
“It’s… certainly not for construction purposes." Avett touches his hand to the surface. "It's old. You can tell from the scratches that people transport things—probably very large things—down here all the time. And they're not very good at it. But that's just a guess."
Lili stills her body. This is knowledge that anyone would know on their first glance.
Avett bristles. "What? Don’t look at me like that, guys. I’m not here often enough to say what it's for.”
Auren strides up to the door and rattles the handle. It doesn't budge. He stands in front of it with his eyes narrowed.
Avett pushes him aside. "Step back. Me and princess are gonna shoulder bash this wide open."
Lili is about to object—she can't fathom how incredibly shady that would look to onlookers—when Auren does it for her with a shake of his head. He floats a finger across the handle instead, and his features twitch ever so slightly.
“It is cursed shut."
Avett studies the handle. "Palerian?"
"Not quite Palerian, thankfully.”
She glances at Auren. “Does it make a difference?”
“Yes,” he answers. “There is something within the average Palerian’s body that causes the ether they expel to be… significantly heightened. They are able to weaponise their signatures, turn their little jinxes into mind and body altering maledictions. Fortunately, no one will be suffering from intestine bunions or inverted lungs today.”
Lili flinches back. She tries her hardest not to recall her encounter with the Palerian enforcer from last night, how he had given her something akin to brain worms in that cockpit. A mere scrap of metal could do so much worse to her.
Auren runs his fingers over the handle again. “I will require my curse dispeller's kit from my ship. I would not attempt to break any curses without the help of my external tools, Eldrakian or not."
He fixes Lili with a stern glare before stepping away from the door. She shakes her head. Now that she knows exactly of the harm that Auren is capable of inflicting, she would never.
Satisfied, he saunters down the alleyway. Avett's trying and failing to look stoic; there's a shudder in his shoulders when he turns back to Lili.
"My gear's back at the Winnow," he says. "Might as well head back; don't know what kind of trap'll spring on us the moment we get down there…"
Avett is about to follow suit when he turns around and gestures to Lili.
“Coming?” he asks.
“My gear’s all here,” Lili answers, beckoning to the wings on her back. “Couldn't I just stay?"
Something floats across Avett’s features, and Lili isn’t sure whether to call it worry or gratification. Whatever it is, it’s gone the moment he starts to talk again. “Alright. I’ll let Auren know. Don’t touch that handle, Lilith.”
“My hands are tied.”
He snorts. “I wish.”
He’s off before Lili can ask what he means by that.
She slumps to the floor and rests against the door, basking in the rare minutes of solitude. Working aboard has stripped her introverted self of alone time. She can't even get a good night's sleep without someone barging into the armory in the morning, that someone being either Ysh'vanna or (on the rare occasion) Avett on their way to search for a random battery before dawn has even cracked across the sky. Years of living as a hermit has spoiled her. She’s just glad that Auren’s a little more aware of those boundaries.
She chews on the insides of her cheeks. Her face still feels cold.
She searches the door's handle instead, desperate to distract herself from the fear that had come with angering Auren. There's just the faintest of ether signatures on the handle, one that tastes of apple and hot smoked woodchips; it’s not unlike Alexei’s, she thinks. Absentmindedly, she feathers her hand over the handle, as Auren had done.
If this were a Palerian curse, she would be withering away where she stands. All she's getting instead is a brief tingle like she's sat on her hand for too long, and now it's gone numb.
And then she hears it.
A cry, a muffle, a sob from a creature that's learned life through pain. It shrieks through the air, and Lili has to clap her hands over her ears and sink to the ground. None of this works. It lacerates through her head like a migraine, kicks at the insides of her skull like a wailing baby.
She finds herself panting hard once the sound goes away. She looks around for the source. Peeks around the corner of the building for any sight of the creature.
Off-landers and crowded markets greet her back. Life in New Therius is continuing on as usual, and for a moment Lili wonders if this is another 'quirk' of the sanctuary. If it's anything like the hearse or the incinerator, it won't be good for Humans in their dollar-store Kattish disguises.
She squints at several passing Kattish men. They're swaggering around just fine; they’re not clutching at their ears or anything. They've even got the constitution to stride right up to her and ask her what her problem is. Lili has to make up some hand-wavey excuse about how she'd mistaken one of them for a friend.
Her heart's still beating fast from the encounter once they've left her alone. She whips her head towards the door and plants herself firmly in front of it again.
"Never again," she breathes. "Fuck that."
Several heartbeats pass. In the bright gap between the storefronts, Lili watches the lengths of legs pass like dark twigs in a musky forest. Her thoughts fly freely through her head: Avett would have done better, Avett would have struck up a casual conversation and left amicably. Avett’s too stubborn headed, too ethereally unattuned to even hear the shriek in the first place.
She catches herself mid-thought. The shriek wasn’t sound—it was ether.
Lili hesitates to touch the door again. Her cheek is stinging like crazy, and she’s trying hard not to relive the visceral headache of the initial screech. It’s just another relic, she tells herself. This is how relics are supposed to react to trained casters.
She presses her head into the door. They had to hide such an entity, such power behind lock and steel. What does Alexei have in store for the relic anyway? What if he’s not the good samaritan that he’s painted himself out to be, what if the relic’s actually some kind of—Lili struggles to even conceptualise the thought—super weapon that’ll spell the end of the 4th Consortium?
She’s being stupid, of course. This is a door, and this is an artifact.
Until the sound comes back.
It’s louder this time, a conglomerate of sharp prods. This isn’t an artifact’s work, she realises. It’s too trained, too precise and targeted to be the remnants of a dragon’s aura. The scream is too mortal to be immortal.
Lili freezes in place as she regards the door in all of it’s forbidden glory.
Then, with renewed strength, she starts to ram her shoulder against it. She can feel her body bruising with each push, but she soldiers on anyway. She is blood and bone, instinct and muscle. The scream had come from someone, and she’s not about to let that someone down.
On the fourth push, she feels the surface give way. The door swings open, and she hangs for a second in the air before she falls onto the floor.
For a moment, she doesn't move. Her ether eddies inside of her in agitation; her stomach feels hot like she's inhaled smoke and gulped down a litre of acid.
Lili grunts and picks herself up. Auren is going to kill her.
—
The ramp turns into stairs about two metres down. The climb down is still super steep, and Lili’s worried about slipping on a step. The stair hall is so narrow that if she did fall, she’d bounce between the walls on her way down like a rubber ball.
Her legs begin to shudder. She takes extra care from here on out, even hobbling down sideways during the last few steps.
With her cheeks stained red and her lungs heaving for air from exertion, she pushes open another door, unsure of what to expect. She hovers several facets of a shield at her fingertips and peeks around.
It's bigger on the inside, to say the least.
Once Lili's sure that she's alone, she shuts the door behind her and makes her way through the bunker. There are aisles upon aisles of these glassy vats, and though they come in various shapes and sizes they all have one thing in common; they contain a blue, luminescent liquid, and there's usually a dark organic specimen floating in them. Lili observes the label of one such specimen: "scaled eyes." Another vat with something that looks like suspended black mist reads "B6 blood." She pulls away from that particular vat quickly.
The aisles seem to form a maze. She wanders through the haze of blue and black one step at a time. Ceiling-tall glass containers give way to jars of scales and nails. Concrete flooring flows into tarp and patterned linoleum. The sodium lamps flicker to life overhead as she meanders through the facility; when she stops to check the integrity of her shield, she notices that her hands glow orange from the intensity of the light like she's radioactive.
She’s probably made a huge mistake, but her feet are very clearly taking her somewhere; she's taking turns that she shouldn't be aware of, and moving through the gaps in the aisles like she's lived here her whole life. Dark, snaking tubes run alongside the vats and dive into the ground—Lili guesses that they all form some sort of underground piping system. Occasionally, she finds a tube flowing with that same blue liquid.
Lili ignores all of this. She's getting closer now, and nothing's even stopped her yet. No, that's not quite right; she should've stayed stuck at the first door, and yet she'd smashed through their curses like wet paper. If she had tried the handle, it would've swung open for her. That's how convenient this all feels. Lili doesn't like it.
Like an inebriated lost soul on their way back from the pub, she powers on. The artifact's aura feels thick enough here to catch her if she ever decides to trip forward. Her head throbs, her tongue aches with the mere taste of someone else's ether, but she has to go on. If not for her team's sake, then for the sake of whoever or whatever this artifact truly is.
She stops in an open area, breathless. At some point the tubes resurface from the ground, and they bunch up at a cul-de-sac before twisting towards a common goal. Lili can't think. She can't fathom what this is all supposed to mean.
At the end of her journey lies a vat bigger than any other she'd already seen. It reaches to the ceiling, and it glows too, though not in that shade of neon-poison blue she'd seen countless of earlier. The vat glows a bright blood-red; it's almost too harsh for Lili to look at. The tubes plug into this vat, and they're very clearly pumping blue into the container but instead of changing the liquid to a calm purple or serene violet, everything stays red. There's a single control panel at the base of the vat, and it beeps to the rhythm of a slow heartbeat.
Lili isn't looking at all of that. Because suspended in the centre of this brilliant red display, there is a girl.
—
Avett has probably made a huge mistake.
He follows Auren back into the crowd of off-landers. His 'superior' is a dark storm cloud, and Avett's sure that his drizzle has the potential to turn disastrous in several heartbeats.
"What do you mean," Auren had initially said when Avett broke the news to him, "you allowed her to stay behind?"
They'd just arrived at the Winnow and were preparing to leave. Ysh'vanna was lounging in her seat and cradling a bag of chips.
Avett had snorted. "Lilith couldn't find her way out of a pickle jar even if you tipped it over and shook her out. She's not gonna do your job for you—relax."
It’s been more than ten minutes, and the older Gallian is still silently seething in front of him. It seriously can’t be that big of a deal—Lilith is the Winnow’s certified incompetent, the greenhorn junior to their aged and wisened seniority. She can’t possibly do on her own what Auren can’t do in a few minutes.
His suspicions are quickly proven wrong when they arrive at the door. For one, it’s as wide open as a man at the pub on the night of his first divorce. For another, it reeks of ether. Avett can’t tell who’s ether it is—he’s not trained enough to distinguish between scents and he doesn’t plan on training—but one look at Auren’s clenched fist says it all.
Avett laughs awkwardly. "It—it sure smells like ether here. Could be anyone's…"
Auren says nothing. He starts down the ramp instead, allowing his back to do his scolding.
"She can look after herself." Avett grumbles. His voice reverbs off the narrow walls and throws itself down the steep ramps. "She's a big girl. She's twenty-four."
"Twenty-three."
He rolls his shoulders. "Big deal, I was a year off—"
"So you deem her not competent enough to break a curse, yet competent enough to hold her own in battle."
“I trusted her not to—”
Auren turns and hushes him. He obliges, but not without sending a scowl his way.
Avett already has a hand at his side when they make it to the bottom of the stairs. There's something in the air that makes the fur on his tail stand on edge, and he doesn't like it. Auren stops before he opens the last door; Avett wonders if he's actually scared for once.
"I've got your back," Avett whispers, just in case. “Lead the way.”
He yanks the hair tie from his hair free, allowing his locks to float gently over his shoulders. "I do not need it."
Asshole, Avett thinks. He wonders if all Eldrakians are as cocky as him, or if he gained this part of himself by migrating to Therius. Avett hopes it's the latter, because he can't imagine an entire realm, let alone an entire race, of Auren Draksparrows. He'd sooner swallow a sword.
The door opens, and Avett is greeted by a deluge of blue light. It takes a while for his Kattish eyes to adjust, and they need to adjust again once the sodium lamps start flickering on. He's helpless in this moment; he hears movement before he actually gets to see it, and that terrifies him. Avett hears the hum of the lamps above, the shuffle of cloth against bony limbs, the clack of heel against floor.
He freezes as he hears something else. Someone else. He whirls to face the sound, only to be met with complete darkness again; they’ve already moved, and unless Auren is on a shelf approximately nine metres behind him, they might just be a little fucked.
A bright shield wavers into existence in front of him. All Avett gets to see is the glint of a silver blade in the swallowing black, and the single, golden, trained eye of a killer.
—
Lili has clearly not thought this through.
Drenched and covered in bruises, she struggles to even hold the girl upright. She’d thrown her shoulder at the glass the moment she saw what was in it, and the neon-bright liquid had splashed all over her in the process. This girl is a Gallian, she knows that much. But that doesn’t explain the fragments of blackened scales that are scattered up her arms, and although they lie flat against her skin, they don’t look like tattoos.
What makes it worse is that she knows that this girl is the very artifact Alexei is looking for. She knows this because the voices have stopped calling out to her—they’re placated because she’s done her job.
Lili squints into the darkness. Aisle after aisle of lolly blue vats greet her, their glassy containers turning her sense of direction into slow mush. She struggles past a line of dragon eyes before realising that she has no idea where she should go from here.
Under the orange glow of the motion sensor lights, she shakes the girl gently. “Come on,” she finds herself saying. “Wake up. Tell me where I need to go.”
She doesn’t stir. Lili doesn’t even know if she’s dead or alive, but she’d prefer the latter. She presses a finger into her reddish, partially scaled cheeks, pushes a wet strand of silver hair from her eyes, but the girl doesn’t even move. It’s only after a few seconds of prodding and shaking does Lili get the bright idea of checking for a pulse.
Relief floods her veins when she hears the first beat. It’s painfully slow—there are at least ten seconds between each pump, and Lili isn’t sure if that’s normal for a New Order Gallian—but it’s there, and that means she’s alive.
The girl's deep, red skin glows like fire underneath the light.
Lili grits her teeth and slings the girl's arm over her shoulders. Her surroundings seem to repeat themselves as she tries to find her way through the bunker—she's seen this heart sample at least four times by now, she swears.
She’s stuck between an open bucket that's filled to the brim with some kind of blue syrup and an empty line of shelf when something flashes in the corner of her eye. It’s so fast that by the time she’s managed to pivot on a foot, the thing is already long gone.
Panic seizes up her spine. The girl is heavy, far too heavy for Lili to make a run for it now. There's another rattle behind her—she swivels around again. A vat wobbles on its circumference.
She curses under her breath. Then she says into the open, "Alright, fine. You've got me red handed."
If her assailant had heard her, they make no indication of it. Like a cat tailing its prey, they continue to circle around Lili instead. She gulps.
Her assailant speaks. "You thought you could fool me, didn't you?"
"No, really, I'm giving up." Lili thinks about putting the girl on the floor to accentuate her point, but that would be cruel. They've already practically killed her.
"You vixen," she spits. "You wandered through our laboratory so efficiently that I thought to assume that you were my sister."
"And what are you?" Lili asks, her tone desperate.
Her assailant steps into the light, and it takes every ounce of Lili's willpower to stifle her gasp. If she had found Alexei’s eyes to be out of the ordinary, then this girl’s eyes would be considered otherworldly. Her irises glow an aquamarine blue and don’t seem to be focused on anything in particular—closer scrutiny from Lili indicates that she has no pupils.
“Lethe Mnemosyne,” she breathes, “overseer of New Therius and its half-dragon defender. It would be in your best interests to put the artifact back where you found her.”
—
Avett's blaster shots go unanswered in the dark. Their attacker is fast—immortally so. He catches a rattle from somewhere behind him and he whips around to shoot at it. A vat bursts into shards instead. Auren spits out a long string of Eldrakian swear words under his breath, and another shield wobbles into existence behind him.
"Piece of shit," Avett hisses. “You either fight in the light fair and square or you don’t fight at all.”
He scans the room again, allowing his eyes to fully adjust to the darkness. Silver flashes in the distance.
"In front, Auren," he spits.
The shield takes on a spiked appearance, and Avett feels a surge of power collide with the ether in front of him. He blinks rapidly, desperate to fight off the resulting disorientation.
A grunt—feminine, he notes—and then the unmistakable sound of several retreating steps. Avett takes a good, long look at what they've managed to trip up.
He's surprised to find that his foe is not only a young girl no older than seventeen, but a Human.
Auren looks like he's about to start firing into the distance; there's no way Avett's letting that slide, not on his good conscience.
He raises a palm in the air. "Stop. It's a kid."
"He was quite dangerous for just a child," Auren says.
"She."
The girl scowls, but she doesn't make any move to attack again. "You two don't look any different from the mercenaries that frequent New Therius."
"Expecting someone else?" Avett asks. His blaster remains by his side.
She jerks her blade, catching a sliver of orange light against the tip before soundlessly sliding it into her sheathe. Passive, yet poised to kill. Not just a kid, Avett reminds himself, but it’s hard to see beyond the doe-like shape of her eyes and the slightness of her frame.
"Yeah, like that fox-faced asshole from the Hive that we had a run in with a few months back." The girl rolls her shoulders, tosses a stray strand of red hair behind her. “I don’t have to ask to know he sent you. All I want to know is how much this all matters to you.”
“Romanov provided us with a proposition,” Auren begins.
Avett cuts him off. “We were blackmailed. We’re just mercenaries.”
She groans and rubs her hand on her forehead. “And… how much do you know?”
“There’s an artifact down here, and he wants it.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Auren glances over at Avett like he’s just cut the wrong wire on a hydrogen bomb. He leans into his ear. “What are you doing?” he hisses.
“Saving our careers, clearly.” Avett says this loud enough to raise the eyebrows on the girl. “We got caught in some legal trouble involving tax fraud and identification, so naturally Alexei extorted us to do his bidding.”
“That’s annoying.”
“You don’t say.”
She turns around and motions towards the two. “I might not know my way around Therian law, but I could probably do something about your case…” She sighs. “Being the overseer and all.”
Avett stiffens; Auren physically recoils. They follow her back through the way they came anyway.
The girl continues. “They’ll listen to me—no idea why though. Granting a sixteen year old administrative power solely based on the fact that they happened to be at the right place at the right time is a bit stupid. But I digress.”
“You will not stop us?” Auren asks.
“Nope.” She pops the ‘p’ perfectly. “The best defense is no offense at all. What’s happening down here is far bigger than anything you could’ve imagined. Best to keep out of it. I’m Claire, by the way.”
“Claire. I’m Avett. The stick in the mud’s name is Auren.”
Avett shoots a totally genuine, totally apologetic look backwards. His colleague narrows his eyes and glances around the laboratory, taking in his surroundings with apprehension. Then he raises his chin at Claire.
“We arrived here with another Human—of similar stature and build to our irritative frontliner here. Have you by any chance seen her?”
“Haven’t seen anyone else in here, nope.” She steps between two shelves with ease. It’s easy for Avett to do the same, but not so much for Auren. They stop for a bit while the taller Gallian struggles to inch his way through the gap.
“She broke the curse on the door,” Avett elaborates.
Claire raises her eyebrows again. “My sister’s finest work. Hm. She’s been working on her seals ever since that larper from the Hive broke in all those months ago.”
“How did he get into New Therius without being caught?” he asks.
“He didn’t.” She gestures to the lab around her. “This all used to be in the city. We moved our base of operations to New Therius both for ease of access and so Alexei wouldn’t be able to enter without…” She shrugs. “You’ve seen how he looks. He’s lucky to even pass for an extremely bulky Gallian.”
Claire has a point. Auren can hardly push himself through the gap in the shelf, but Alexei wouldn’t even make it halfway before getting himself stuck for good.
And another thing; Avett looks back at Claire. “What’s a larper?”
“Forget I said anything. If anyone knows who comes and goes through this lab, it’s probably my sister.”
Auren is panting hard once he’s finally squeezed himself through. Avett’s never seen the man this pale before—it’s a far cry from the immaculate stillness he’s been acquainted with.
“Ethereal sensory,” he gulps out. “I was not aware that Humans could be capable of such a feat.”
She laughs. “As expected of a Gallian. How did you know?”
His nose scrunches up. “Your sister has laced the very walls of this laboratory with her ether. It is a crude method, but her range of power is impressive. I would imagine that her vision would be significantly impaired as a result.”
“Don’t need to see if you’re constantly tuned in with your surroundings,” she answers. “I can see why Romanov chose your team. You’re pretty good.”
Avett doesn’t need to look back at Auren to know that he’s smirking up a storm at him. “You’re milking compliments from a kid, dude,” he says, but he’s scowling at the ground anyway; a lost battle is what it is, no matter how stupid the wagers are.
They’ve walked a fair bit when a ringtone—the GlassLink default ring, Avett notices—starts playing out of Claire’s pocket. She groans before looking at the screen.
“Your sister?” he asks.
She motions at the two men to stop while she takes her call. “Cass, you can tell I’m kind of busy at the mom—”
The voice on the other side sounds like she’s already lost her temper and her wits. “Must I remind you to refer to me as Lethe in the laboratory? Were you aware of the intruder in our bunker?”
Claire looks to Avett and Auren. “...You mean the intruders, plural, right?”
Silence. Then, “I assume you mean the two readings by your side.”
“I’m just escorting them out.”
“Stars, look—I am rather busy, if you could perhaps lend a hand once you’ve finished with your escorting—”
Avett’s stomach drops to his toes. He composes himself as Claire whirls around with a hand on her hip, her eyebrows crossed and her features aggressive.
She says, “Get to the point.”
“Forget that—look up, look up!”
Streaks of hot blue light filter in from the next line of shelves over. Something flies above them and lands in a heap on the floor.
Avett can't believe his fucking eyes.
Lilith groans. It looks like she's got a body slung across her shoulder like a sack, and the body in question is another seventeen year old girl of New Order Gallian heritage. His partner is picking herself up, but she's not picking herself fast enough to avoid her attacker vaulting across the shelf to deliver a head-cracking blow—
Auren aims upwards, and his ward lands true. Light pours down from the ceiling, and when Avett squints to look up he sees a girl who looks exactly like Claire. Her irises are a flat blue. Her sister.
The girl whips back her hand, and the light cuts itself off. She lands neatly next to Claire, whose expression is the clear picture of blank realisation.
"That's the artifact," she says.
"Indeed." The new girl dusts off her cloak. "My sister, you've been had."
No, no, no—they're so close, so close to getting out of here alive and unscathed and legalised and Lilith's gone and ruined all of it in one fucking heartbeat. No, not yet. Avett can still save this.
He takes a step towards Lilith. "Lilith. We're going to be alright, these overseers are gonna help sort our shit out, it's going to be ok."
Her fingers dig into the girl's flesh. She's wobbling on her legs and she's shuddering like a twig in the wind, but her features are fierce and scalding. Avett bites into the sides of his lower lip.
"Lilith," he says again. This is like calming a tamed dog gone rabid. He looks to the girl in her arms, and then back at Lili’s sweat-soaked skin. Where’s the artifact? Who’s the girl? He doesn’t care. "Drop the artifact."
"Do as Avett insists, Lili," Auren adds.
Claire holds her breath. So does Avett.
But his partner gnashes her teeth together instead, her shoulders quivering in pure, hot white rage. "You were going to kill her in that vat by keeping her down here—she’s even the same age as you! What the fuck is wrong with you two?"
Avett can feel his hairs thinning already. "Lilit—"
"I'll never, ever hand her back." She snarls. "Over my dead fucking body."
Fuck.