"On my count." Auren raises his hands into the air. Kashira and Lili do the same. "And… now."
Lili reaches out to the sky with her ether, crystallising it, weaving each hexagonal facet into a beehive formation. The shields click into place, flicker once in the harsh sun, then disappear from view. A testing wave of Auren's hand causes the wards to waver again, signifying that their shield remains solidly above them.
A week has passed since Alexei's heinous proposal to the crew of the Winnow, and now they're undertaking the very mission that had them up in arms about their futures in the first place. They've been practicing their shielding technique, and though it took some time to adjust to working with other casters, Lili feels like she's got the skill down pat. She takes one last look at the shield—or where she assumes the shield is—and heads back inside with Kashira. Auren stands on the deck, his concentration fixed wholly on maintaining the integrity of their wards.
"Nice work, casters." Ysh'vanna doesn't take her eyes off the navigation interface for a second. "It'll be about four hours before we reach our destination. Buckle up, grab a few drinks, do whatever.”
Lili follows her advice and cracks open the fridge. Her eyes immediately fall onto one of the side compartments where several cans of sweet beer lie in wait.
“Nothing alcoholic though,” Ysh’vanna adds. “That top shelf’s reserved for after the mission, not during.”
Kashira waves her hands profusely. “Oh, I wouldn’t think of it!”
"Wouldn't think of it." Lili picks her poison—a litre bottle of apple juice—and slams the fridge door shut.
A few hours pass without a hitch. Avett makes his way out of the engine room with an oil stained rag pressed against his gleaming forehead. He yells some technical jargon across the ship to Ysh'vanna, to which she responds with a confused notion of gratitude. The words that Avett speaks, sometimes, is a foreign language in itself, and Lili doesn't blame her captain at all.
In the following minutes, Lili leans against the window and observes the passing vistas. The Winnow is flying low enough for her to count the individual trees that have grown between the dimples of each street. Metal lamp posts—once proud knights standing guard against the dark—have crumpled down into crooked men, and their bodies have scabbed over with rust. The roads have been cracked like punched lips.
It's nothing new, Lili thinks. The Winnow passes more corporately stiff high rises, and when she peers inside through the shattered glass, she sees the evacuated bygones of various office cubicles. The papers have melted into the carpet, and the walls are green with fungi. Maybe something good came out of the Migration after all, because she can't see herself being willingly choked by a white collar while working her miserable way through a nine to five. She's never wanted to.
Every so often, Ysh’vanna clicks her tongue and sends a display hovering to her side. This screen shows an empty radar field, and once she’s observed enough of it, she sends it away again, exasperated. After five more repeats of this, she mumbles, “So we may have a problem.”
Around six hours have passed since they left the Hive’s region, and not once has Ysh’vanna requested for her crew to retrieve the artifact, if there is an artifact to be found at all.
"So what's the plan now?" Avett asks. He's leaning on a wall with his arms folded, but Lili knows that his confidence is all just for show—he's just leaning to keep himself from shaking like a twig in the wind.
Ysh'vanna chews on her thumbnail. "Guess we've got no choice but to pilot the ship into one of these… nests." She motions to a nearby warehouse, and her voice turns grave "That particular building looks like a squeeze, but I'm sure I can make it. Getting tons of hits from that one."
At that, Avett immediately perks up. "No way. Send us in on foot, stars, maybe even abandon the mission—you're not piloting the Winnow through one of these death tubes."
"Concurred." As if on cue, Auren enters the ship; his hair and robes are tousled, but his features and stance remain absolutely still. "Now is not the time for aerial demonstrations, Captain O'Raal."
She grits her teeth. "Fine. We'll head close, check if there's a prominent draconic reading, and if all we're getting on the radar is artifacts then we drop our frontliners in. There's a chance it might be at one of its other nests, and I'm not giving that chance up."
Lili senses the softness in Ysh'vanna's eyes. From the looks of it, she might know a whole lot more about Avett's prior employment than she lets on, and she's compensating for that by offering to fly the ship through. Or it could be all a coincidence, because she assumes that no well-meaning captain wants to send their ill-prepared fighters into a death trap. Ysh'vanna especially.
Kashira says nothing. Auren nods at Ysh'vanna slightly before returning back to his post outside. Avett grips the material of his jacket and remains absolutely still.
And Lili… Lili doesn't know what to say to her friend, so she says nothing at all.
—
It's better to be slow and methodical than to scramble through a job, but Lili just wants to get the hell out of here. Behind her back lies an infinitely white exit; in front stands Avett—a pale, jittery mess of a man—and a yawning, gaping maw of a bygone warehouse.
They'd left Kashira on the ship despite her insistence to roam the warehouse with the two frontliners. There's a time and place for risks, Ysh'vanna had said, but this mission's already suicidal—we don't need to add another factor to this mess.
What she'd meant was, I'm tired of having to worry about more people. A pilot's job, as Lili's come to know from Avett's overtly epic retellings of his past crew, is to sit at the helm and bark orders from the comforts of their ship, but Ysh'vanna aspires to be more than just talk; she wants to be a tangible part of their safety. And so Kashira stayed on the ship.
"Just us two again, huh," Avett says. His voice warbles, rising a semitone above his usual pitch, and he coughs to stamp it back down. "I guess first dates could go a little worse."
Lili steps over a box of dusty, rusted nails. There's a lot of these lying around; she assumes that this place was once some kind of hardware store. The faded oranges and lackluster greens on the signs above each aisle suggest Bunnings.
She replies, "It's been worse."
"Oh, you tease…" He trails off and fixes his attention to his GlassLink's internal radar application. Nothing so far—nothing yet.
Lili gulps. All too suddenly, she's reminded of their first mission, of how Avett had presented himself as this jaded hero. He had been afraid of nothing, terrified of nothing but Lili's incompetence, and now he's just what he is: a raw bundle of nerves. A dog that bites the hand it feeds in order to appear stronger and bigger than his true form. A mess.
Lili's not sure about this vulnerability. She's downright terrified herself, and she needs a wall, a stoic body of support that'll push her back upright when she tries to lean on it. Avett's too kind.
She swallows a bubble of air. Avett checks his GlassLink again.
"What do you want the credits for, Avett?" she asks.
He jumps at the question. "Stars—I don't know. I don't even want the money at this point, honestly, but back then I was thinking…" He pauses, and his eyes avert to the side. "A house. I wanted to own property back on Therius. There."
Lili blinks. All this for a house? Maybe he's got priorities in disorder, or maybe the average Therian really, really values owning property. Whichever it is, his goal is both surprisingly shallow and mundane, but she doesn't bother with arguing against it.
Instead, she says, “You won’t really get to live in it, though. Not until you retire, or change careers…”
His ears flatten. “Look, princess, in these trying times, I'm scrabbling over any win I can get."
"That's true. A house is a house."
He stays silent. Then, his GlassLink begins to sound. A quick check of his screen shows a green bubble of activity to their left.
"Weird," Lili says. "I haven't felt the artifact yet."
Avett darts his eyes to the right. Lili looks with him, but aside from the odd metallic glint of spilled nails and toppled shelves, she can't see very far in the dark. And from the looks of it, neither can Avett.
He checks the radar again. The reading is gone.
He swears. "What the shit?"
"Maybe all the metal's blocking the signal," Lili suggests.
"If metal could fuck up the radar, we'd be dead a long time ago." Avett shakes his GlassLink and hits it into his palm to no avail. He swallows, observing the screen in an uneasy silence before heading off again.
"Wait," Lili says. "I think something might be wrong."
She waits for her partner to stop with bated breath, and thankfully, he does just that. He says, "State your case."
"This isn't right. I should've felt the artifact by now. Maybe it's not in this building—maybe it's somewhere else. We should go."
Avett gives his radar one last glance before swiping away to call Ysh'vanna. "Last call, Lilith. You sure there's nothing here?"
"The reading must've been a fluke, I'm sure of it."
While he waits for Ysh'vanna to pick up, Lili can't help but examine her surroundings again. It's been years since her last visit to a Bunnings, and simply being here is enough to dredge up all sorts of forbidden memories. Something is compelling her to meander further in, like a child smelling a sausage sizzle on the fizzy, summer wind.
She stops in front of a gated play area. Sitting on the astroturf, in all of its former glory, is a weathered-down plastic tower, and extending from this tower are a tangle of various slides. Lili can just about feel the friction burn from sliding down one of these things in shorts. When she goes to peer up one particular slide, she's greeted with a faceful of six-year-old dust. She backs off quickly and whips around, her cheeks flushed with both embarrassment and an oncoming sneezing fit.
Avett's still moping around with his GlassLink behind her; he's not far enough for Lili to start worrying, but if she wants to wander any further she'll have to leave his immediate vicinity.
She's not dumb enough to try that. But she'll be lying to herself if she tries to feign disinterest.
Carefully, she looks around the corner. There are mountains and mountains of nails lining each side of this aisle, so numerous in their density that Lili almost mistakes it for grey snow. A path has been carved through the centre of these nails, creating the image of a dried ravine.
Her stomach sinks. It looks like a body might've dragged itself through these nails. And from the girth of this path, she realises that the body might have been Human.
She steps closer. Her heart is pounding in her chest, her throat, but she can't look away now. She attempts to recall the A07's notes, but her mind is a blackboard scratched clean, and her head's starting to float away.
Lili follows the path. She traces it down to a kitchen display. The counters are foggy yet perfectly marbled with black and gold. Hanging from one of the range hoods sits… she squints, because she can't tell. Her eyes slip over the thing when she tries to look at it, like rain on plastic, and when she does get a good look at it, she can't put her finger on what it might be beyond a vaguely cocooned object. She rubs her eyes and tries to look at it again to no avail.
Before she can determine what the object might be, she's tackled to the floor by something—no, judging from the elbow sticking into her back, someone. She hears Avett grunt as he picks himself and Lili back up.
And then she sees it.
Bone white scales. A shulking central torso. Its legs are spindly yet corded, its skin tightly packed against its muscle. And those putrid, sun-bright vivid eyes.
"You're a fucking handful of shit, Lilith," Avett pants. He launches into a sprint, and Lili, though dazed and confused, follows suit. "We've gotta go, gotta get out—"
"How did it sneak up on me?"
“Fuck if I know!”
They skid around the corner. Lili feels her shoes squeal against the flooring. Behind them, a terrible wail—like the metal saws grinding against a thousand bones. Something clatters to the floor: steel beams. But when Lili snaps her head back, the dragon isn’t there anymore.
“Exit—where?” Lili asks.
Avett doesn’t respond. Judging from the way Avett is scanning the vicinity, Lili thinks that it’s safe to assume that he has no idea where the exit is either. She gulps; neither does she, but she’s been in a Bunnings before, so if she follows the natural flow of the depot they’ll surely, surely reach the entrance in no time.
She drags Avett another way. Between the shelves, down a lane of rotting saplings, through the matted overgrowth, and into the main area. She looks to her right—the cash registers sit in unending rows, unused and unmaintained over the years. The exit should be right here, she thinks, right underneath the sign that thanks you for shopping with Bunnings.
Except it isn’t.
All too suddenly, she’s reminded of the cocoon-like object hanging from the range hood, how she could hardly stand to look at it without losing her concentration to her surroundings. Her eyes slip off the area surrounding the sign, and for a moment she forgets what she’s here for—a startling cacophony of nails falling upon nails in the background grounds her again.
“The exit should be here,” she says, but even she’s starting to doubt herself. Looking at where the exit should be feels like she’s trying to walk on oil, to swim against a current reaching out to sea.
“Shit.” Avett is shivering. “Shit—no, there has to be another way out—”
“Avett,” Lili says. “I don’t know what’s in front of me. I can’t see it.”
He curses. His attention darts back to the aisles, then back to the sign. He curses again.
“This is,” he spits, his eyes tearing from exertion as he stares down the wall, “the last fucking time I listen to anyone tell me to go hunt down an A rank!”
And then he lunges out in front of him. His hand phases through the wall, and Lili sees him grab something—though she’s not sure what until he tears it away and tosses it to the side. It lands wetly behind them. She spares a glance. She wishes she hadn’t.
White, smooth flesh. It wobbles like gelatin before rooting itself into the ground and disappearing again.
Lili squeezes her eyes shut as she recalls Kata’lana’s notes. Each specimen is highly adaptable, and the specifics of their abilities vary to suit the demands of their environment. She’s glad Avett is here, because she wouldn’t have figured it out herself: that the dragon is the cause of their momentary confusion, that this Palatable has the power of perfect camouflage—no, not camouflage. To blend in with your surroundings is one thing, but to evade cognitive recognition is another thing entirely.
Her hands buzz with ether, and her wings rise to their full width. “Stand back, Avett.”
He shakes out his wrist and hisses. “I’ll watch your rear. Respectfully.”
Ether coils around her palms, and it takes a momentous amount of self control not to unleash that power into the wall right away. Instead, she allows it to coil tighter and tighter, until it feels like her hands might explode from the pressure alone. She takes a few steps back to keep herself out of the blast radius. A single blow is all that it will take.
She hears Avett yell something; a warning. His voice is muffled—all she can hear is the roar of her own gaseous ether, condensed like crystals in the palm of her hand.
But her ether never leaves her fingertips.
A sharp pain reverbates from the base of her skull in icy waves—she stumbles, falters, and crashes to the floor, her eyes fluttering. The last things she registers is the hiss of Avett's breath against his bared teeth, the overwhelming sensation of being dragged under a torrent of viscous oil, and the fleeting moments of consciousness before the dark takes her in.
—
Ysh'vanna knows that money is the root of all evil, but even a fool wouldn't walk away from seven-fifty grand. Or maybe she's the fool all along—what kind of A ranking captain would willingly send their subordinate frontliners on a suicide mission? No, scratch that: what kind of person would give them the job in the first place knowing that they would inevitably fail?
Alexei. She clicks her tongue until the roof of her mouth goes numb. Alexei, Alexei, Alexei. Auren had told Ysh'vanna to trust him, that he wouldn't have sent his best chances of absolving the Migration to a suicide mission. Yes, Lili proves far too valuable to that man, and so is Kashira. He has his plan; he just isn't willing to indulge with them his elusive and luxurious secrets, not yet at least.
"You know, Auren," Ysh'vanna begins, with her eyes half drooping and her cheeks sinking into her hands, "I'm starting to think we were lied to."
"I dare not entertain the possibility," Auren replies. "If this is all a ruse to lure us to our deaths, he has spent a lot of time on this ruse."
Ysh'vanna exhales; her backline caster's just a bundle of optimism today, and though she normally accepts his grounded cynicism with open arms, even she's starting to think that it's a bit of a stretch.
"He's not a liar." Kashira stands abruptly. "He's a good person—he's tried to save me before, he can't be bad."
Forced him to save you with your affinity is more like it, Ysh'vanna thinks to herself, but she doesn't say that part out loud. The girl probably already knows, and she's just in denial. She's naive, not stupid.
She watches Auren patch up the ward again. His methods are languid yet systematic, and he folds the faces of the ethereal shell like he’s making delicate crepe flowers. He’s done this thousands of times, and has practiced a million times more. Meanwhile, all Ysh’vanna has to prove her money as a caster is a certificate proving the completion of her first year at Eulcred High, and a smattering of amateur spells any Gallian could cast with their wells fully depleted. She knows it's dangerous to compare captains and casters, that both are honorable professions with the same amount of utility on the field, but she can't help but think about the amount of money she's lost simply by being the captain of her own third grade ship. The credits she would have gained from being somebody else's backline caster fills her with both dread and restlessness.
A few minutes pass without much event. Auren slides back in and dusts off his hands before settling into a mug of cold tea.
Better nothing than something, she supposes. Then, feeling awfully lazy, she heads into the engine and starts doing part of Avett's job: maintenance.
Most of her knowledge regarding the inner mechanisms of the Winnow is based on instinct. Avett knows how a junction box might connect to the supercapacitors; Ysh'vanna only knows how to follow the red wires. They don't teach this stuff at the pilot's academy because 'that's the mechanic's job.' When it's a pilot's time to shine, they're judged on how well they can maneuver their craft and get the hell out of wherever they're trying to get the hell out of. Piloting is about making the skies your bitch, and maintenance is about being trapped in a tin box. Of course, these same rubrics don't consider the possibility of your frontliner and mechanic being one and the same.
Now wrenches are her tentative acquaintances, and she's learned to tolerate the stench of oil and steel. Ysh'vanna can commit herself to simple tasks, such as replacing the fuel rods and oiling the engines, but she wouldn't dare crack open a supercapacitor even to dust off its innards.
Once the fuel rods have been replaced, she swipes a wrist across her brow and prepares herself for the mentally gruelling task of checking the junction box for any fried cables. Thankfully, it's pristine in there—she can thank the mechanic for that.
It's a quarter to one when the Winnow's user interface automatically powers back on to receive a—her breath catches in her throat as she sprints up to the navigation panel. A red alert.
Not from Avett's GlassLink, but from an unnamed contact. The location is intelligible at a glancel. Ysh'vanna hesitates, then answers the call.
Avett's voice comes crackling in. "Ysh', we fucked up. The dragon found us."
Her stomach drops to the floor. "Captain O'Raal to frontliner Ironsturm—" she begins.
"Cut the formalities," he groans. "I'm dying, Lilith's out cold, and we—we've got no idea where we are. I’ve already applied the anti-aura ointment, and it’s working—just, it might be wearing off though. I’ll—I’ll try put more on later."
Ysh'vanna powers on the rest of the Winnow, allowing it to whirr to life under her hands. "Describe your surroundings. Stay conscious. We're coming."
"No." Avett lets out a pained hiss. "I mean it. We're not… in the region. We're somewhere else. Lilith's GlassLink can't pick up where we are, and mine got crunched in the chaos. The dragon—fucked with the signal. Whole area… feels—"
Another seething gasp. Ysh'vanna leans into the communicator, as if she'll somehow send a warm embrace down the line if she does. "What do you mean, you're not in the region? Were you moved? Teleported?"
A shuffle of skin against cloth indicates that he's shrugged. "A ranks can do anything these days, huh?" he says.
"Stay on the line. Describe your surroundings."
"Road, long, straight, some grass and a shitty old fence." A pause. Then, "Shit, about staying on the line…"
"Describe the cloud patterns, maybe we're still in the same area—"
"No way," he mumbles. “Not a chance.”
He doesn’t elaborate any further after that. Ysh’vanna assumes that he’s fallen unconscious at best, and at worst… She looks back to her crew, then back at the interface again.
“Ether,” she blurts out. “The dragon’s scrambled their signal, either intentionally or unintentionally, that’s why it’s not showing up on the display. But maybe we can untangle the data with ether. Communication technology’s all ether based, right?”
“It is possible,” Auren answers. He leans into the navigation panel to get a closer look at what he’s working with. “I am rather garbage at handling machinery—I cannot promise that I will understand the contents of what I am untangling exactly, but I could give it a fair attempt.”
Ysh’vanna swallows. “That’s fine. Pass it over to me if you’re unsure after deciphering it.”
“Captain O’Raal, I apologise, but nothing would come out of it. To the untrained caster, ether samples are nigh intelligible to parse—”
He stops himself short. Ysh’vanna’s obstinate gaze is all she needs to convince Auren that she’s not as ‘untrained’ as she might seem. Despite herself, she cringes at his realisation; her rudimentary knowledge of ether is not something she’s willing to disclose often.
Then he nods. “Kashira, watch the ward.”
—
Dirt and dust.
Lili’s lips are coated in it. She drools a bit to catch the dirt with her saliva, then she spits it onto the ground. It lands on the hot asphalt between two bright yellow lines—road markings.
She launches herself backwards and immediately regrets it. Her head pounds with an unexpected ferocity, like she’s being punched with the light of a thousand suns. Once the pain subsides though, she’s in a state of shock.
Her surroundings have completely changed. Standing in the distance is a rusted transmission tower and several toppled utility poles. Tall pines straddle the sides of the road, their gnarled roots spilling out from underneath the grounds; the concrete has been hitched up in jagged chunks because of this. The grass lies in fields of gold on either side, their blades parched from dehydration; when Lili looks to the skies, she sees the sun, high and bright, like a summer star.
It’s been a while since she’s kept track of the date, but Lili knows that in New Zealand it should be winter right now. And yet the air here is hot enough to melt hair, and her shadows are harsh enough to cut skin. She sheds her cape instinctively and hooks it over her forearm.
Then her stomach drops. A single name races through her mind, and she scrambles to her feet.
Avett.