Searching for Avett in this strange, new location proves easier than imagined; his deep blue jacket stands out like a sore thumb amidst the sea of concrete chunks. She recalls the blob of white flesh taking root against the flooring back in the warehouse, and she heaves a sigh of relief when she confirms that there’s nothing of the sort stuck to Avett’s skin.
But then she turns him around, and she sees the patch of dark, spreading liquid on his back. She swallows.
A hiss slips out of his mouth. He clenches down on it afterwards in an attempt to hide his pain from Lili, but the damage has already been done. Lili kneels and reaches around, her breath catching in her throat as Avett shakes his head and half-heartedly attempts to bat her hand away.
"I'm fine, it’s not blood," he says. She's not touching him, not yet, but he's still reacting to her proximity by jerking away from her hands and into her body. He’s not fine, and it’s blatantly obvious.
"Your voice cracked," she points out.
Avett exhales upwards, but he doesn't have enough strength to blow his bangs out of his face.
Without wasting another second, she turns around and eases him onto her back. She's brought onto her knees almost immediately; any attempts of picking herself back up are met with strained muscles and shaky legs. Avett isn't even that heavy—in fact, he weighs less than her. She's seen his files.
What's worse is that he's not bothering with a snappy quip at her lack of fitness or even a stupid laugh. He's breathing shallowly at her back instead, so shallowly that he's already taken ten breaths in the time that she's taken four. She grits her teeth.
"Don't worry," Lili says. "Auren's gonna fix you right up. We're going back now. Just hang in there."
Avett mumbles something in response.
Lili lets her ether flare to life in the pit of her stomach before she sends it careening throughout her entire body. It sends wave upon wave of sickly sweet energy through her limbs, and she's up and running across the road again in no time. She’s running like she's been forced into a ball for her entire life, and she's only just relishing the other parts of her body now.
She’s not thinking straight. She doesn’t even know where they are.
The farmland smudges past her, and the mountains in the distance crawl by. It feels like she's inhaling spikes of iron into her lungs instead of air, and if she keeps it up she'll end up piercing through the skin of her throat. Her muscles aren't doing so well either, and neither is her mind; where is she running to? Does she have somewhere to go other than a vague "anywhere but there?"
Avett mumbles something again. Lili recognises it immediately. Her name.
She rests him upright against the road. His eyes are squinted and unfocused, and his grip on her shoulders is light. He's hardly there at all.
Her heart hammers in her throat. "Avett," she says. She hates how her voice pitches at the end, hates how she could've said anything and yet had chosen to say his name, but she swallows down her bile. "What should I do?"
He glares at her in pure, unadulterated annoyance. Lili shrinks back.
"Left pocket," he says. He jerks his hip at her to emphasise his point.
She reaches in and retrieves a small, hard-backed bag. Unzipping it reveals a literal smorgasbord of tubed creams and bandages. She feels a little stupid for running now.
Lili is about to twist off the cap of a random tube when she realises that they all serve different purposes. The one she's got right now is for burns. The one next to her other hand is for ethereal burnout. She gulps.
"Which one?" she asks.
Avett groans. He reaches into the pile, takes out a clear tube, and smacks it into Lili's hand. She looks down—a natural aura dispeller. She squeezes out a pea-sized blob of it on her finger, and finds that it smells like she's just been punched in the nose. Once the initial shock of the scent hits her, it dissipates into something less offensive.
Her partner jerks awake as well. With renewed strength, he seizes her hand by the wrist and guides it under his singlet. Lili has to stop herself from flinching back, though it doesn't take much self control to do so—Avett's grip is iron-tight and vicious.
He presses her to his bare back. Holds her there.
"A-Avett—" she stammers.
"You can think about fucking me," he says, with his voice cracking like splintered wood, "when I'm not in severe pain."
She rubs uneasy circles into his back in silence, making sure to move slowly, though he hisses again anyway. Leave it to her field partner to crack jokes while half dead.
“Is this ok?” she asks.
“Good.” He’s gone completely limp in her hands now.
Lili looks at the road in front of her. It spans for eons in a straight line, and though the surrounding farmland has started to seep into the gravel and the paint has started to fleck, it shows no signs of further wear. No cracks, no lumps, no bruises. The road goes on forever.
But what strikes her as peculiar is the sky. There are paper-thin lines of light that streak through the air, arching and curving in a way that makes Lili feel like she's inside a glass dome looking out. It reminds her of the ward they made back on the ship.
Avett pushes away from her. He’s steadied his breathing again, but his eyes focus elsewhere. He looks like he’s stuck between two states of consciousness, neither passing out or awake.
“What should we do?” she asks.
He scowls. “Wait for the ointment to work.”
"Will it take long?"
He doesn't reply. Instead, he draws his knees up to his chest and groans into his lap.
Then he starts talking again. "You're hopeless."
"You were unresponsive." Lili doesn't look up from the ground. "I didn't know what to do with you."
He curls into himself even further and mutters a brief ‘thank you.’
“You’re… welcome.”
He snorts and passes a transparent slide of glass towards Lili. Her GlassLink—She must’ve dropped it somewhere on the way.
Meanwhile, Lili’s still shaking from the ordeal of it all. She checks her GlassLink; the ship’s blip is nowhere in sight.
“Where are we?” she asks to the sky.
“Beats me. This is your world. Figure it out.”
She surveys the surrounding farmlands, the tufts of non descript bushes that line the roadside. "Looks way too hot here to be Austra—the Afflatus landmass."
"Mhm. Keep talking."
"I—I'm gonna call the ship. What should I say?"
Avett doesn't respond.
Lili doesn’t like looking at him when he actually looks his age, but she offers him a glance anyway just to check on him.
Her eyes widen. The patch on his back is… smouldering. Was it smouldering while they were running? He doesn’t look that great.
She crawls over to check on his wound, but she finds that her eyes slip over his back like oil on ice. She can’t quite focus on him, can’t quite remember what he looks like until he starts to hiss in pain again. He’s saying something—the two staccato syllables of her chosen name. Lili.
Panic spikes through her skull.
Moving towards him is like moving her body in molasses. She grabs his shoulders; they're trembling like leaves in the wind. Like he might blow away at any second.
“Avett,” she says. “What’s happening to you?”
He clutches at the sides of her arms wordlessly. His nails are starting to dig through her caster’s cape, and his teeth are chattering like he's been caught in a snowstorm. For once, he’s scared. Properly scared, like he’s all too aware of the multiple ways his body could break. Lili is also aware.
She drags her focus to the wound. It’s glowing around the edges, but she can’t tell if that’s because she’s straining her eyes or if it’s because of the dragon. The patch is darker around the centre, like he’s bleeded out into the fabric of his jacket. He hasn't, but Lili's not so sure anymore—she can hardly look at him without tearing up from exertion.
He’s not wrong. He might really die here.
She skims her hands over the surface of his jacket. Avett groans out loud, presses his head to his chest, and butts her body hard enough to send her teetering onto the flats of her palms.
“Avett.” She flexes her fingers inside their gloves and reaches for him again. “I’m going to heal you.”
Avett doesn’t have the strength to complain. Lili has never healed anything before, and she’s not willing to start experimenting on her partner on such short notice. She’s not even sure if she can heal him, what with his ether circulation being so out of sync with the rest of his highly trained body. He’s unfit as hell in there—she’s sure that she’ll end up hurting him more if she tries.
But she has to try.
The blood in her fingertips feels like it'll burst out of her skin at a moment's notice. It's then that she realises her ether is reacting to the wound.
She looks down at her hands. The world seems to shift around them, rippling away from her skin like she's dipped herself into a body of clear water. Everything is starting to click into place. The globe. The village. If she could replace the dragon's aura in his body for something else, something harder and stronger, she could forgo healing him altogether.
It's a bandaid solution over a deep, gushing laceration, and she has no idea of what'll happen to Avett later, but until they get back into contact with the ship, it's all she's got.
Avett says something again, and Lili realises that she can't recognise his voice anymore. It sounds like there are hundreds of children shouting to her, and yet it also sounds like he's another person. A woman. A man. A boy. Lili doesn't know because she's forgotten the way his voice sounds already. She places two hands against his back and remembers the way the globe had stretched its aura over the entire village, hugging it snugly within a fishnet crafted from the stars. She's seen her aura, and she's not made out of stars. It's hot, it's harsh, and if she breathed it in she would never stop coughing.
She sends a fine smoke of ether into the small of his back and allows it to spread down his spinal cord.
Avett screams. In his normal voice.
Lili steadies him again. She doesn't know what to do, but she has to keep going. She offers a shoulder to him. "Bite down, if it helps."
He obliges. And he obliges hard.
It's not the best course of action, Lili soon realises, because Avett is strong enough to chew right through her bones. She has to pump ether into herself to keep him from doing so, and even then she's unable to completely stop him from drawing blood. And also, it hurts. A lot. But it's nothing compared to what Avett is going through now.
Every second spent holding him is a second spent in suspended agony. Avett is clutching onto her body, and his Kattish strength is causing him to nearly cave in her ribcage. The only thing keeping her body from collapsing outright is the steady circulation of ether that she's sending into both of their bodies. She can feel his nondescript reservoirs against the clumsy violence of her own, can feel the way he hurts through each sharp inhale and each whimpering exhale. His pain reflects itself in her own body like a bloody, cracked mirror.
She's breathing Avett. No—that's not quite right. He's breathing through her, and she's just along for the ride.
Eventually, he loosens his grip and stops biting into her shoulder. His breaths are coming in shuddering waves, and his hands are holding the sides of his arms like he's cradling himself to the beat of a silent lullaby. He spits out her blood onto the dirt and stares at it for far, far too long.
"Avett?" she asks.
He shakes his head, takes several, grounding breaths. Lili doesn't know if she's meant to hug him or not, or if he'd even like being hugged by someone like her. She tugs at a stray seam on her sleeve instead.
He shakes his head again. "Hold me. Please hold me. I don't care if it's you."
Lili reaches out and holds him by the shoulders stiffly. He lets out a soft grumble and barrels himself into the rest of her body.
They spend some time like that. Lili doesn't know how to tell him to get off her chest, or if she'd like him to get off her chest in the first place. This is uncharted territory and she's a kid that's managed to wander into the unknown. She'd pretty much embraced him earlier, but now that the danger's passed she feels like a deer caught in the headlights.
With a cheek pressed into her sternum, Avett says slowly, "I'm Avett Ironsturm, and I can't stand the taste of bread crusts."
Lili watches him pull away and stare at his hands. He balls both of them into fists and begins to count out loud, flicking his fingers upwards with each number. When he reaches the end, he balls both of them into fists again and starts over. He does this about two more times until he's satisfied.
He may be too far gone.
"What are you doing?" Lili asks.
Avett swallows. "IRC surefire memory loss examination and rehabilitation. It helps to ground you by trapping your mind in a cyclic thought process." He lowers his hands. "Cognitive observation of your hands is stronger than the remains of any aura. It… doesn't work if you've already been caught. Just helps you deal with the aftermath. You might be free, but you're still scared. And lost. The counting helps with that. Better to be trapped in your own thoughts than… something else's."
The silence is uncomfortable.
"Do you think about anything else while you're counting?" she asks. There's no way he's distracted just from counting.
He looks away. "Yeah. My mom."
"Oh."
He pulls a leg to his chest. "I look and act like the kind of person to have mommy issues, don't I."
Lili opens her mouth to deny it, but Avett catches her hesitation. "Nah. It's true. You're right. You deserve to know the truth."
She adjusts her posture. She knows—or at the very least, has the suspicion—that Avett's family isn't quite as happy as he makes it out to be. She just wasn’t aware that the degree of his fallout spanned realities and social circles.
"She's a nightmare. She left my family—my dad—in shambles. Everyone and their grandma knows her as this celebrated hero or whatever she goes by nowadays. No one cares about the truth; they know what she is. We changed our surnames, we became more Ironsturm than Earlstone, but to everyone else we're still the family that the “Lion Lady” ruined. I realised that in the noodle canteen with Hilli’na. That nothing's changed."
"You can't stand it," Lili says.
"If she's some bigshot A ranked arms specialist, then I just have to be better." His copper eyes stay fixed to the horizon, and his hands tighten into fists. "Earlier, I said that I accepted Alexei's request for the monetary benefits, that I wanted to own a house." He snorts. "That was a lie. My mother is why I'm here. She's my anchor. And what better way to make a name for myself than to go big?"
She trails her finger through the dirt. There's nothing she could say that would possibly make him feel any better. She would know.
The road before them has darkened into a dark mauve; they've missed the sunset entirely. Avett picks himself up and helps Lili to do the same.
"Food," Avett says. "Send a text to the Winnow now, and we'll call them for real once we've found shelter."
"Right." She does as he says.
After scouring the farmlands for leftover vegetables and foragables, she meets with Avett on the porch of a particularly dilapidated farmhouse. The floorboards have rotted in various areas, leaving patches of holes in the flooring. There's a wicker-basket chair in the corner; the cushioning has long since moulded over, and one of the legs has collapsed on itself. It's a miracle how it still stands.
Lili takes all of her findings and dumps them into the kitchen sink. There's a half-rotted turnip, several smooth oyster mushrooms, and a couple of barely sprouted potatoes. Avett manages to get the fireplace going while she prepares the vegetables for cooking. When she goes to chop the head of the rotted turnip, she winces instead and her knife stays lodged halfway through. Her shoulder is throbbing again.
Carefully, she makes her way over to the fireplace and sits on the rug next to Avett. He eyes her wound with curiosity.
"You bite hard," Lili mumbles. She slides off her caster's jacket and winces again. There's a neat crown of red spots on her shoulder, and each of those spots is dribbling blood over her shoulder and into the carpet.
"Why the hell did you let me bite your shoulder, of all things?"
She's about to shrug when she remembers the state her shoulders are in. Mustering up the rest of her strength, she clutches a hand to her bite wound and pumps hot ether into her veins.
"Do you need a dressing or anything?" he asks.
Lili lifts her hand from her shoulder, expecting the wound to resume gushing or to be open. She's greeted with the sight of dried blood and marked skin, as if someone has bitten her only lightly on the shoulder. She glances back up at Avett.
"I guess not," she says.
He doesn't answer, choosing to stare at her shoulder instead. Then he unzips one of his pockets and fumbles around until he's got some sort of disinfectant wet wipe in his hand. He touches it to her skin.
"It's not going to scar, is it?" he asks.
Lili shrugs. "I didn't even expect it to heal—I did a pretty bad job of patching myself up. So it probably will. Why?"
The question makes Avett flinch back. "Why what?"
"It's just a scar. I've got worse, and you've probably got even worser."
He drops the wipe and feathers a gloved hand over the bite. "It's not… just a scar if I gave it to you. With my own mouth. I… uh."
It's subtle enough for Lili to almost miss it, but Avett looks like he's about to pull her into some sort of embrace. Two hours have passed since their encounter with B15; she wonders if he's still delirious from it, or if he needs more medical attention. There's something different in the way that he regards her now—it's like he's starting to feel guilty for the things he's never had to feel guilty for.
"If you're feeling responsible, don't be. I chose this shoulder. I'd give it to you again if I had to."
"Lilith—"
She pulls away and returns to the kitchen. The knife is still lodged in the turnip. "Forget how I feel. What about you?"
She presses down on the handle with the rest of her strength. The rotted head of the turnip rolls off the cutting board and into the sink, leaving only the healthy white flesh behind.
Avett sighs. "I feel fine. Better than fine, actually."
"Do you remember what I did with the globe back in the village?"
"'Ish."
"I did the same thing with you. I managed to overpower the aura that was already inside you with my own, weird, half-dragon overseer aura. If that's… even a thing." She dices the potatoes into neat, smooth cubes. "Every aura has an effect, and I don’t think I’m an exception. There's no saying what'll happen to you."
He snorts. "I don't feel so bad about chewing into you now."
"Be serious."
"In fact, I'll probably do it again. Where do you want to be bitten, princess?"
Lili brings a pot full of sloshing water to the fireplace and hangs it there. Then she takes out her travel-sized box of cooking supplies and drops a slice of bouillon into the pot. It bobs on the surface for a bit, like a malformed boat, then sinks to the bottom.
Then she lifts a finger to Avett's mouth.
"...What?" he asks.
"You asked where I wanted to be bitten," she says. "I want to be bitten here."
"It—" His face goes red. He laughs it off a second later. "It wasn't serious."
She draws her finger back and drops the vegetables into the pot. That slight aversion of his eyes is what lets Lili know that she’s won this round. She takes her seat next to Avett in front of the fire.
“Don’t say you want to bite me then.”
The pot comes to a pattering boil. Avett makes a face but he doesn’t recoil, though he does adjust his legs in discomfort.
"Give me your GlassLink," he says. His tone's demanding, but his eyes are averted. “I’m calling the ship.”
"Gonna bite this too?" She unlocks it and hands it over.
"Shut up." Without hesitation, he selects a number from the call registry and places her GlassLink face up on the ground—there are numerous missed calls, no doubt all from Ysh’vanna earlier. "Bad joke."
The phone rings once. Twice. Lili holds her breath in anticipation, as if their captain isn’t waiting at the navigation panel with her own bated breath and her hand hovering over the answer button. She picks up after the third ring; her voice is muffled and weary, and Lili has no idea of how much time has passed but she’s sure that the hours can’t be good back in New Zealand.
“Hello?” she asks. “Sitrep?”
“I’m alive,” Avett replies. “I fought off the aura. We’re both safe.”
Lili hears a sigh of relief from the other side of the call. Then Ysh’vanna adds, “Thank the fucking stars. Things really took a turn for the worse, huh?”
“Oh, so you’re glad I’m alive now?”
A snort. “Always have been.”
Avett shuts up quickly. Lili takes this opportunity in the conversation to ask, “Ysh’vanna, do you happen to know our current location?”
“Ah…” Her voice falters. “About that. Yes, but you’re not going to like this.”
The two frontliners share a tentative glance before Avett demands, “What aren’t we gonna like, Cap?”
“We managed to trace your call—we’ve got a pretty good idea of your current location,” begins Ysh’vanna. “The problem… is that. Your current location. Somehow, you’ve managed to make it past the boundaries of the Chasm.” She falls silent and sighs.
Lili asks, “The Chasm?”
“Stars—if I knew this was going to happen,” says Ysh’vanna, “I wouldn't've agreed to this in the first place.”
Lili looks to Avett for an answer, but his face remains pale and still. Eventually, he taps the GlassLink and brings up a holographic map of the Earth.
She blinks. She blinks again. It’s like someone’s grabbed her lungs and wrung them completely dry of air. Her fingers reach out and trail across Brisbane’s coastline, down to Melbourne’s cranny, then upwards to the Queensland expanse.
That’s it. That’s all that’s left of Australia. A sliver of land; all that remains of Australia’s central mass is a smattering of islands left untouched by whatever had destroyed the world six years ago. And that’s not even the worst of it—North America is completely gone, and in its place is a crater filled in by sea water. The horn of Mexico leads nowhere, and what appears to be what remains of Canada lies malformed and incomplete.
Avett points to the area above a larger landmass—it takes a moment for Lili to recognise this landmass as Africa. This continent’s not as bad as some of the others, but Africa’s shape has been irreversibly altered to the point where it no longer resembles an upside-down triangle. As for the place he’s actually pointing to, well…
His voice is barely a croak. “Did this place mean anything to you, Lilith?”
“The United Kingdom,” she answers. It hasn’t changed a bit. “Not… really?”
“It’s the Chasm now. A ranks do this every time they Migrate; they select a landmass, they decimate an entire population's worth of civilians, then they encase it, patch up the place with ether so nobody can interfere with whatever it is they do in here." He circles around the island in a spiral and stops in the centre. “Somehow, we’re here.”
“How?”
Ysh’vanna begins to speak again. “The million credit question. The dragons use it as their own 'domain,' protecting their valuables by ensuring that the dominant species of any given realm can't enter the area… nor leave.”
Lili coughs. “What?”
“They don't live here," Ysh'vanna hastily says, "So you shouldn't have to worry about any attacks. But I’ve only heard of constructs and plant material being taken, not people.”
“So in other words, we’re treasure,” Avett finishes.
For a moment, nobody says anything. The fire crackles, the water in the pot comes to a rolling boil, and Lili goes to pour in a bucket of cold water to bring the liquid back to a gentle simmer.
“Forget the artifact,” her partner says. “How do we get out?”
“I…” Ysh’vanna falters. “I’m working on that part. We all are, Auren, Kashira, Alexei and Kata’lana. And this is something we want to avoid bringing up to the IRC, but if push comes to shove…”
Lili swallows, and Avett stiffens beside her. The outcome would prove to be less than stellar if the IRC's law enforcement ever caught wind of their exploits, no doubt about it. They would perhaps derank them, or even strip away their licenses for a while as punishment.
"Stars." Avett rubs a hand over his face. "Could give us some good news next time, Ysh'."
“Oh, absolutely," Ysh’vanna chirps. “Guess who’s an officially registered resident of Therius? No more tax fraud!"
The 'good news' sinks in like a bag of bricks that's just hit the water.
All of this won’t matter if they never make it out of the United King—the Chasm alive, but Lili refrains from speaking out of line. Avett mutters something quietly under his breath, and judging from the way he spits it out, Lili thinks that it might be some Casa-Ilgashian profanity.
“So what now?” he asks eventually. “Sit tight and wait for rescue?”
Ysh’vanna hums in response. “Basically. Heard something boiling back there—looks like the food in the Chasm hasn’t gone bad yet… well, most of it anyway.”
“There’s an entire ecosystem here,” Lili says. “We shouldn’t be going hungry.”
“Delicious.” Their captain laughs. “Alright, just hang in there guys. Get some rest if you can. I’ll be checking in on you guys in around eight hours, so make sure to be up by then. “
They say their goodbyes. The holographic display dissipates into voxels, and the room grows a little darker. Lili scoops the soup into two old, ceramic bowls, and hands one over to Avett.
“Cheers,” she mumbles. “Sorry if it doesn’t taste like much.”
The fire crackles again.
“I’ll take the rug tonight,” says Avett. “The couch is yours.”
—
The two end up sleeping for only six of those aforementioned eight hours. Lili surmises that it's around five in the morning from the way the apex of the sun just grazes the horizon line. They briefly sort out their luggage and head out.
On the other side of the pines lies another straight highway—Lili opts to go through that forest while snatching up any miscellaneous edible mushrooms on the way there. Avett is trailing her like an aimless kid at the supermarket, only because he doesn’t have anything better to do, and because he’s got no idea how to forage. He doesn’t know his chanterelles from his jack-o’-lanterns, and Lili’s not about to let him go off and gorge himself on poison for breakfast.
Once they’re in the thick of the grove, Avett says, "You mumble in your sleep, Lilith.”
"And you moan," Lili replies. He doesn't, but she's going to do whatever it takes to keep Avett's ego down, lest he try to redeem himself from yesterday's blunder.
It's no use—he soldiers on anyway. "Are my moans sexy or cute?"
Lili shields her eyes and squints into the distance. Growing in clusters on a log is a brilliant display of orange shell-like fungi—chicken of the woods. "They're obnoxious."
"Rest assured, I'm not faking anything."
She waves a hand at Avett; it takes a hot second for Avett to realise that she’s asking for his knife. He hands it over.
"Might want to take a bath and get that checked out. You seem a bit too old to be having wet dreams."
Avett coughs. "Wet dreams are normal no matter what your age is."
"So you had—"
"No, I didn't, dick." He looks away with a scowl. "You make the sexual tension in the air rocket down into the negatives."
Lili grins to herself; it's two to zero. Then she struggles with the opening mechanism on the knife to no avail, and it’s suddenly two to one when Avett has to help her flip it open.
She cuts away at the mushrooms in silence. Her partner doesn’t have to say anything to assert his dominance; she can already feel him staring daggers into her back without having to look.
With their pockets filled with mushrooms, the two of them make their way out of the forest and count their yield by the curb. Avett handles his mushrooms with shaky hands, like he's afraid one might give him a nasty infection if he breathes in too much of its spores.
"Avett," Lili says, "it's not going to kill you. They're safe."
"Big talk coming from someone who can't get poisoned," he mumbles, but he manages to still his hand. "But I guess it figures that the guy who lived by herself in a shack for six years would know every mushroom by heart."
"I was only alone for three of those years," corrects Lili. "I wasn't immune to poison before that."
He thumbs through a cluster of gilled mushrooms, eyeing up their pristine skins, before saying, "Yeah, well, I was trying not to bring that part up."
"It's been three years. I'm over it."
Avett gives her a look.
She adds hastily: "Mostly."
Struck by a foul sense of shame, Lili continues to count; she counts at twenty mushrooms before she's satisfied with her yield. Normally she'd consider such a large bounty to be superfluous and unsustainable—nothing would grow back if she always took this much—but today marks an extreme exception. And any unwarranted guilt is immediately washed aside by the sheer amount, the sheer quality of the things she's managed to forage. The smell of dirt and organic material is more than enough to make her uncontrollably giddy. She collects a few dandelion leaves that have managed to worm their ways through the cracks in the pavement before they make their way back to the homestead, satisfied.
Lili's halfway through making her sauteed mushroom specialty when Ysh'vanna calls again. To no one's surprise, it's Alexei's voice that comes through the speaker. Judging from his tone, he must be well aware of their circumstances already.
"I believe that it would be safe to say that none of us saw this outcome," he begins. Each syllable is tapered, as if he's ashamed of himself. "I apologise for the lack of foresight."
It's not his fault, but neither Lili or Avett call attention to this. However, Ysh'vanna doesn't hesitate to buckle down and start digging into the overseer.
"Did you know what my frontliners were going to walk into?" she snaps. "Was this, at all, even the slightest amount, a possibility?"
Kata'lana's voice rings through the speaker, clear and monotone. "Dragons have never taken the dominant species of any realm to their treasury before. We weren't even aware that B rank mammalians could exist inside their domain. Romanov is correct; this outcome was unprecedented."
"I don't get it." Avett rocks back and forth with his knees to his chest; it's clear that, if not for Lili's presence, he would be breaking down on the spot. "So we're not meant to be here? We were taken by accident?"
"No other explanation," says Alexei. "However, that may be your only way out."
He lets the proposition hang in the air like a thick cloud of vapor. Lili shuffles uncomfortably.
"The way out is in," she mumbles.
"Correct, and therefore, you must make contact with the dragon that transported you here," Kata'lana finishes. "It will be back soon to check on its yield; you best be ready to confront it when that happens."
Avett slams his hands against the hardwood flooring. "No. No. A thousand fucking times, no. Why would you even suggest something like that? We just got out of one fucked up situation, now we have to go into another—and for what?"
"The dragon at best," Lili says slowly, her words hollow and afraid, "might see us as an accident. It might try to transport us back out of the realm…"
She doesn't have to explain the other outcome. Lili swallows, then asks, "Is that right?"
"Bang on the nail, unfortunately," says Alexei. "There is no other way; what brought you in here is your only ticket out. You have nothing to lose—unless you want to live the rest of your lives out in the idyllic English countryside."
Voices can be heard on the other side of the receiver. Lili can only imagine that it's Ysh'vanna and Auren chewing out Alexei for making such a crude joke. Eventually, the argument begins to fade away, and Kata'lana's comforting drawl comes through the GlassLink again.
"I wouldn't worry about your safety," she says flatly. They’re about to object when she adds, “Let me finish.”
Avett coughs. So does Lili.
"I heard about what you did to the Kattish male, Lili."
A good few seconds pass until Lili realises that she's referring to the incident with Avett. "He'll be fine, right?" she asks. "With my, uh, a-aura, inside of him—"
Avett spits, "It's ether, not cum."
“C-cum—”
Kata’lana says again, “Only if you want him to die. Or suffer. Personally, hate emotional pseudoscience, but it all comes down to how you’re feeling at the right moment.”
The frontliners fall silent. Lili swallows a ball of air that’s large enough to make her throat hurt.
“She could kill me?” Avett slowly raises a finger at Lili. “At any moment?”
“Technically, anyone could. She’s just got one new way to off you now, I guess.”
He grips the GlassLink with both hands and hisses into the receiver, “How do we get her out of me.”
“It’s ether, not ejaculate,” Kata’lana says. Lili can practically hear her rolling her eyes through the connection.
“Cum doesn’t kill people!”
“It’s not like she’s trying to kill you right now. Dragons exist to assert their presence on the food chain; the girl probably doesn’t. Again, not quite my area of expertise, but I think that she would have to be thinking incredibly hard to kill you with her thoughts alone.”
"It's weird," he continues, "I don't want some weird killing juice—from her—inside of me. Period."
"That 'weird killing juice' is what'll keep you alive when you inevitably encounter the Palatable again. A ranks and S ranks aren't territorial; in fact, they tend to form sudden alliances in times of great strife. These dragons would prefer to avoid conflict where possible, and so fights between A ranks have rarely been observed, much less have occurred."
"But we're not dragons," Avett begins. Then he side eyes Lili. "Uh oh."
"Uh oh?" she asks, but she feels like she knows where this is all going.
"The biological definition of an A rank dragon, frankly, is quite loose. Schematics have ultimately narrowed it down to their innate ability to inject and cast their ether around their bodies to various effects. If you have the ability to cast an aura, you are considered an A rank."
"It won't try to kill us,” Lili says, “because… I’m a dragon.”
"Not all overseers have access to this incredible ability, Lili. You would be the first that I've ever witnessed."
Avett shakes his head. "There's no proof behind that claim though. It's just pseudoscience—baseless conjecture!"
"Well then, I think it's about time we provided that theory with some, let's say, concrete evidence.” The scientist’s monotone drawl dips into something lower, something more savage. “After all, what do you have to lose?"