20: the hearse

 "Wow." Ysh'vanna places a hand on her hip when the coveted girl of the hour walks out of the armoury. "You look great."

Truthfully, Lili feels and looks stupid. Ysh'vanna's collection of various and questionable toys—yes, Lili can't stress that enough, toys—actually had its uses in the form of a pair of synthetic cat ears and a strap-on tail that fastened around her waist—her waist, not anywhere else. She'd borrowed one of Avett's pants too, because she found that her tail had to go through somewhere, and her tail-holeless skirts and jeans just weren't cutting it. The opening is snug—tight enough so that her undergarments won't show through even with vigorous movement, but loose enough for the faux-fur on her new appendage to breathe.

Her ears twitch when her eyes fall on Avett, who's giving her one of the worst shit-eating grins he's ever had to offer. The ears are linked up to her brain or something—in full honesty, she'd merely skimmed over the manual and slid them onto her head without a second thought. Her tail isn't as technologically advanced, as evidenced by the yank Avett so thoughtfully gives Lili upon seeing her. It stays limp in his hand.

Pleadingly and desperately, Lili looks to Auren for help. This is a bad idea, this is a terrible idea, and surely, surely the resident forty-year-old will recognise that with his elderly wisdom.

He gives her a thumbs up. "I do not see the issue. She appears to be Kattish to me."

Ysh'vanna gives a whoop and hooks an arm around Lili's neck, bringing the latter into an uncomfortable hunch. "See? I told you it'd work, I totally called it!"

In record time, they're shoved off the ship and left to their own accord. And Avett's accord, apparently, is to mercilessly tease Lili about her new appearance all the way into the main hub.

By the time he's brought up her lame tail for the tenth time, Lili's already thought of fifty different things she could be busying herself with right now, and they've arrived in the thick of New Therius. There's obviously not a single Human in sight, but the observation scares her anyway. The main square is huge but dull—the ceiling is a lame and flat grey, and the buildings that mantle the edges of the area are actually piles upon piles of shipping containers, no doubt repurposed from Melbourne's import piers. The only thing that really sets New Therius apart from the other sanctuaries is the total lack of security; even in the Afflatus there had been the occasional officer, tucked away between the pedestrians.

Here, there's nothing. No safety net. But that lack of security goes both ways—if she so desires, she could punch a racist and leave the sanctuary with nary a mark on her record.

Avett breaks his sulk with a long winded sigh. "I know you're thinking about it," he says, "but people here hold grudges like a Kattish male in rut. I wouldn't punch anyone if you could help it."

Lili feels her ears droop. In the distance, there are two off-lander men in their forties standing near an open hanger. A ship with a boot large enough to fit at least two commercial rentables is reversing into the room; one of the men taps his pen into his clipboard in response at this, his grin growing wider by the second. For a lack of a better term, they all seem so Human—and yet they would balk at the mere idea of a Human walking amongst them. Lili turns away.

She catches it not a moment later, like a poorly wired lightbulb that won't turn on. "Rut?" she echoes.

Avett tilts his chin up and smirks.

He's messing with her again, she just knows it. Lili shakes her head. "There's no way."

"You have no idea." He's moving around her in circles now, making her back straighten involuntarily. "We males just get so, so pent up for a week; our eyes go all big, our tails get sensitive to the point of sensory overload, and we gotta take these pills every so often or else we'll start getting all hot and bo—"

Aiming low and striking swiftly, Lili goes for his shin right as he's passing her for the second time. It lands true; Avett bounces away from her, hugging his leg in pain and throwing out profanities like a kid hurling toys during his first temper tantrum.

"You're dressed up like me," he manages to spit out between swears, "so at least learn the culture!"

He's just having her on. Some pedestrians stop to watch, but most pass by with their curiosities sated for now. They can smell a good fight from a mile away, and this is not one of them.

By the time Lili has made this observation, Avett’s already recovered from his well-deserved love-tap. They continue to wander down the barren halls of the sanctuary. Avett's limp is slight enough to slow them down. Before Lil can bring it up with him, he starts to talk.

"I'm gonna be real, New Therius hasn't been under construction in ages; they’d have removed the eyesores—containers by now if they were renovating. That said, haven't been here in ages either. The only ramps I know of would be on the top floor." He folds his arms.

“Did he mention if the ramps headed up or down?”

His focus snags on a faraway cart. The way the crowd parts to give way reminds Lili of pepper in a dish of water and detergent.

"What is that?" she asks.

Avett doesn't say anything at first, only looking away. Then, with a cold quietness to his voice, he says, "A hearse."

Her attention whips back to the cart. It's a shuddering, tin-and-metal thing—its wheels rattle like toll bells against the planked flooring, and if she squints she can see the near lifeless look on the driver's face. It's the look of a man unable to save the dead from their untimely fates, only to deliver them to their graves. Lili shudders when she realises that it's far more likely that he's on his way to the furnace, judging from the lack of headstones outside.

The cart clatters by. Avett is deathly still, and Lili doesn't dare look up, lest she catch the glassy eyes of a corpse.

She chews on the inside of her cheeks. If her ears fall off, if it somehow gets out that she's not actually a Kattish, she might just end up on that hearse later today.

Lili sneaks a glance sideways towards Avett. His skin is alabaster-pale, but his features are a picture of pure apathy. "Sometimes, fights don't… end neatly. And fights break out a dime a dozen here."

Lili scraps all thoughts of punching a politically-charged off-lander and instead sets her mind on their objective.

"Any maintenance areas?" she asks, desperate to drive the conversation elsewhere. "We could start looking in the industrial places."

"Bold words, considering the entirety of New Therius looks about as industrial as a sanctuary'll ever get, and that's including the Hive." He stretches. His eyes are fixed elsewhere—on a food stand, Lili recognises. A daring, neon sign of what appears to be a stylised bowl of noodles stands boldly against the backdrop of dull shipping containers.

He turns back to Lili. "Ysh’vanna told us to enjoy ourselves."

"Please, no," she begs. "I've had enough of spicy. My disguise might fall apart."

One of Avett's ears twitch out of playful mirth. "Some Therius-born Kattishes can be complete bitches too. I wouldn't worry about it."

She's reminded of that time he'd simply taken her bowl and finished it in front of her without shame. His metabolism must work overtime if he's able to consume that much without feeling bloated after.

"Avett…" Her ears are drooping. This is terrible. The moment she's out of New Therius, she's ripping these right off.

Avett returns her pleading with a nasally parrot. "Lilith…"

His ears wiggle earnestly. A deluge of violent thoughts involving her hands and this absolute bastard’s neck assaults her mind. She chooses to act on none of them.

"Fine." She grits her teeth. "Go have your stinking noodles."

"Aw, you're too kind."

Not surprisingly, the storekeeper is also a Kattish. What immediately takes Lili's attention is her appearance. Most of her left arm has been inked with swirls of layered rivulets; each layer is more intense in both form and colour than the last. If it's proof that she's allied with a specific group, she's not afraid to show it—she's wearing a spaghetti-string tank top, revealing the better half of her shoulders and back.

She whirls, and when she does, her platinum-blonde shock of hair fans out before hitting her neck again. "Heya, boys. What can I getcha?"

Avett jumps onto a stool; Lili follows suit. "I'll get an extra spicy and a mild for the lady," he says.

The storekeeper makes a face. Lili thinks she's about to start ragging on her for not being able to handle anything spicier than garlic bread when she says, "You know, us 'ladies' can handle a lot more than what you'd expect, considering all the shit you pricks throw at us."

Avett blinks. Her retort has left him confused and helplessly open, which is enough time for the storekeeper to turn her attention to Lili with all of her sauntering grace.

"As a word of warning," she says with her ladle swinging haphazardly in the air, "if you can't handle more than mild, don't let this ass pressure you into anything higher. It will suck. My noodles aren’t gonna mollycoddle you, and if you're not prepared for it, it'll burn coming out—one way or the other."

Her diatribe goes through Lili's head and comes out through her ears. The Kattish woman is staring at her, almost right through her like a needle through a pincushion. Two things then dawn on her. First and foremost: Lili must be way too tall to pass for a female Kattish, even with her long hair, and her boyish frame certainly isn't doing her any favours in this woman's eyes. Secondly, and more importantly: Lili's eyes are round, full, and most definitely not slitted. There's just the briefest notion of curiosity about the woman as she fixes her slitted eyes on Lili's own.

Fear grips her heart as she remembers the wailing of iron against iron against wood. Lili scrambles to find anything, any excuse that'll save her sorry ass from an untimely trip to the incinerator.

Carefully, she says, in her coolest voice: "I'm rutting."

Avett coughs and swiftly administers a kick to her shins. She doesn't budge.

The storekeeper's ears flutter slightly. She's obviously titillated by her response, so titillated that Lili thinks she might have some kind of undiagnosed humiliation kink. "You don't see too many men brave enough to go talking about their reproductive cycle these days," she says as she ladles soup into a bowl of golden noodles. "Don't blame 'em. Apparently Kattish men aren't just horny all day, what a shocker."

Lili is learning more and more about the Kattish with each passing day. The woman serves her bowl first, then Avett's. A thin layer of bright-red oil floats on the surface of his broth, while hers is just plain old brown.

She laps at the soup from her spoon with a tentative tongue. Though the broth is scalding hot, she's actually able to taste the subtle nuances of a pork bone base and the sweet, bulky aftertaste of onion and soy. This is what soup tastes like without the added jazz of Kattish spices, she reminds herself.

"So." The woman leans against the counter on her forearms. "Never seen you guys around before. What's your deal?"

"Mercenaries," Avett answers smoothly between huffs, which is impressive considering that he’s trying to cool his broth to eating temperature at the same time.

"Ooh, both of you?" A catlike grin spreads across her face. God knows what she's thinking about the two of them. "Stars, it probably sucks having to go through a rut while travelling abroad. Normally I just take the week off. I've already got the monthly womanly wiles to worry about—why bother with one more?"

It occurs to Lili that she hasn't the faintest clue of how anything works in a Kattish body. She flashes a sidelong glance to Avett, but he's either deeply engrossed in her mounting discomfort or he can't hear her, because he's still blowing on the soup like his life depends on it. From the way his ears are swivelling in place… likely the former.

"Can I grab a name, boys?" she asks. "I'm Hilli'na Tei'il. And you are?"

There's that dread again. Lili has no idea how naming conventions work, let alone how the nuances of Kattish naming cultures work. Hilli'na's name sounds a lot more like Ysh'vanna's name than those of Avett and Auren's, but she's from the same culture as Avett, so what's the deal and how the hell is she going to get out of this mess?

Avett nods. "So you're from the motherland. I'm Jaret Ironsturm." He reaches across to give Lili's shoulder an affirming squeeze. "My cousin, Lilic Ironsturm. He's a little awkward—don't mind him."

Lili tries hard not to squint at Avett, like he can't just add a hard c to the end of her name and expect it to sound masculine. And why bother with changing his own name?

Hilli'na eats it right up anyway. "Ironsturm boys, hm. Heard you guys've got beef all over the family line because of a certain someone."

Lili gives Avett a curious glance. His hand stays on her shoulder, but something's tensed in the way he's holding her.

"Is she here today?" he asks, his tone distant.

"Fuck if I know. The Lion Lady comes and goes as she pleases." She shrugs, then testingly, she adds, "Heard her son's one hell of a mess because of her."

Avett’s grip on Lili's shoulder tightens, and for a second she thinks he might pop out her joint. His voice drops to a low, pin-prick precise growl. "That's none of your business."

The two stare each other down for a bit. Then, with a slow nod, Hilli'na apologises and turns back to the sink, content on scrubbing away at the oil on her growing pile of dishes.

Something tells Lili that she might just be sitting next to someone's hell-of-a-mess son right now.

Avett leans back and spears his chopsticks into the bowl. He pierces through a slab of marinated pork and finishes his meal so quickly Lili wonders if he’ll be ok later. Feeling pressured, she does the same; the broth’s still hot, and it stings while going down, but it won’t compare to the sensation of being watched by both the shopkeeper and Avett if she doesn’t hurry and finish it off. Soon enough, she’s also met with the fulfillment of an empty bowl.

Hilli'na tidies up while Avett pays with his mercenary ID. They’re just about to stand up and leave when the woman clacks down a glass of tap water onto the table in front of Lili.

“...What?” Lili regards the glass of water with stilted curiosity.

Hilli'na folds her arms. “For your pill.”

Lili’s breath catches in her throat. Her pills. For what? Oh, fuck—her ‘rut.’ Her mind feels like a chalkboard that’s just been scrubbed clean; her words stay hooked against her teeth and don’t come out. All she can do is stare down the shopkeeper, her dilated pupils meeting a slitted stare.

Something bumps into her thigh. When she dares to break eye contact with Hilli'na, she finds a packet of half-opened pills jabbing into the fabric of her pants. A muscle flashes in Avett’s jaw.

Without any further questioning, she takes the packet and pops one out. It’s small—hardly larger than the pad of her pinky, but slightly thicker than her nail. She could bite this clean in half and it’d snap apart in her mouth.

Lili laughs. “Sorry, I normally take my pills dry. You know, just swallow ‘em.”

She gulps down the pill after her mouthful of water anyway.  

Hilli'na settles back, clearly satisfied by Lili’s discomfort. God bless the female Kattish, Lili thinks, as the two of them thank her for the service and leave the canteen. Once the path widens and they’re back in the comfort of the square, Avett trembles and curls over himself, arms clutching at his sides like they might split.

“What’d you give me?” Lili asks, slowly.

Her companion snorts—then lets out a wild bark of laughter, one that reminds Lili of the fit she’d thrown back in the mall after his not-so-charming tale of how he’d managed to get away with rubbing one out in the detention room. He’s still laughing when he takes her to a park bench, and by then he’s even started tearing up at the edges of his eyes.

Irritation settles in her jaw in the form of a clench. “What did you give me?”  

Avett just holds out his hand. It takes a bit for Lili to realise that he’s asking for his pills back.

Dread settles in her stomach. “Avett, they’re laxatives, aren’t they—they’re laxatives, and you’ve just fucked me over—”

“No, no, fuck, they’re not.” He sniffs and takes the pills from her. “I would never. Why would I have laxatives on me at all times?”

“Then what are they?”

“Don’t get mad at me,” he says. With his hand in his other pocket, he tosses over a rectangular object; Lili catches it in both hands. When she goes to examine it, she finds that it’s another glossy packet of pills.

Avett twirls his finger in the air. “Turn it over, come on.”

Lili does so with oily anticipation. It’s probably the off-realm equivalent of Viagra or some other male virility-boosting medicine, seeing as how it came from Avett’s own pocket. When she sees the first word on the other side, bolded and clearly marked in strokes of sickly yellow, she immediately smacks it back down. A blush creeps up her cheeks.

She reads the instructions on the back to really make sure it is what she thinks it is.

It is.

“Truthfully,” Avett starts, his mouth still curved with a lazy smile, “I didn’t think she’d actually believe your lie at first. People’ll talk about their cycles, sure, but no one’s actually bold enough to admit they’re on one at the moment. Especially not people like you.”

“Thanks.” Lili slouches back in the seat and hands back the packet, not caring to meet his eyes.

Avett goes on, “You know they can smell you, right? You know the only reason why she didn’t call out your bullshit was because she scented it from—”

“How come your pupils look normal? You said earlier that they dilate.” she retorts. “As in… slitted.”

He rolls his eyes. “Earlier I was spouting the same shit Kattish fetishisers spout when they try to explain a heat or rut. Not everyone’s eyes expand. Mine don’t. Some Kattish don’t even have to take the pill, they just walk around, and their hormone levels don’t spike for a second. Come on, Lilith—we’re not all carbon copies of each other, you know.”

"So everything you said earlier—"

Avett actually shifts uncomfortably at this. "All an exaggeration. It's not that bad. We just have to take pills sometimes and it's fine. Kind of like periods."

Fuck this conversation. “Do I have to throw it up or anything?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Probably not. You might get a little dizzy after, decreased libido levels—the worst part’s the acne, supposedly, but look at me, I’m clear as day. You’ll be fine.”

Lili idly brushes a thumb over her cheek. She’s been acne-less for at least ten years now. This is going to really fucking suck, but the acne’s just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to the deluge of new information that’s just been thrusted upon her.
 
“Ok, welp.” Avett stands up, his cheeks still flushed from amusement. “That’s our daily allotment of fun for today. Auren says he might’ve found a possible entry point into the lower depths of New Therius, and that he wants to meet up soon to go look at it.”

“Fun gone,” Lili replies dejectedly. “Thank god.”

“Yeah, I know you love fun. Try not to cry too hard.”

Lili tries to think of anything, anything at all, but nothing witty comes to mind. Avett’s already started off, and if she hesitates for even a second longer he’ll fade into the crowd.

—

Auren is sitting at a bench against the wall. He's flicking through some documents on his GlassLink; Lili can tell because he hasn't set his phone to opaque mode, so everything's filtering right through the screen. Maybe he doesn't have anything to hide. Lili knows Avett does.

Upon seeing them, Auren flicks off his screen and rises, his arms folded in front of him. "I take it you two have gotten nothing done?"

Uh oh. Lili flashes a glance at Avett for him to pitch in with something, anything, but he's just grinning up a storm to himself. She has to remind herself that he gets off on being at odds with Auren, and probably Ysh'vanna as well, now that she's giving it some real thought.

"Lilith learned a lot about the Kattish today," Avett mumbles under his breath, just loud enough for Lili to catch. She kicks at a stray pebble at her feet.

"You must remember that I am in my fifties," Auren says with his head held high. "Young by Eldrakian means, but not youthful in the slightest. You will have to speak up if you—"

There are gunshots in the distance. Auren’s impeccable stance slouches a bit when he catches it, like he’s tired of whatever New Therius has to throw at him and that he’d rather be on the ship with Ysh’vanna instead. As the three of them move closer, it’s getting harder to ignore the bitter clang of sword against barrel, nor the rowdy gathering of off-landers as they encircle the action and place bets upon bets.

Auren stops them at the edge of the crowd and clicks his tongue. “Shameless brawling. Our entry point is just beyond this area. Come.”

Lili gulps. She’s not sure if she’s ready to pass through the crowd right now, especially not a crowd that’s more focused on the violence in front of them and the money that’s passing between their hands. It’s debauche, it’s hedonistic—and she doesn’t like that, nor is she used to it. Worst of all, she might actually manage to catch the dregs of action through the tangle of limbs and heads, and that’s not something she’s keen on seeing.

“Keep your hands on your valuables, princess,” is all Avett offers when they approach the—now rapidly expanding—audience. “We spent a fortune to get you tested, and we can't afford to lose your ID in the crowd."

With Auren leading the way, she shoves past a pair of giggling and, once again, concerningly young Kattish girls. They’re holding their phones up to the action; Lili feels compelled to follow their screens, but her will is a leash holding her head back. A very narrow, paper-thin leash, but a leash nonetheless.

Another gunshot. They must be using some kind of altered energy blaster up there, because Lili doesn’t remember Avett’s gear being so obnoxiously loud. The altercation thrums above them, a clear indicator of the sanctuary’s savage lengths and the reason why there's a factory-sized incinerator just outside to the left of the hangar.

The scrape of metal on metal briefly stops Avett in his tracks. He glances up, his eyes searching through the crowd and no doubt catching the blur of competent fighters as they scuffle back and forth on the mosaiced planter boxes. Lili wonders if he's actually enjoying the show.

He's not, she realises. His ears have sagged to his scalp.

"Avett," she hisses, pulling on the back of Auren's cape to stop him in his tracks. "We gotta go."

Auren pauses, then gives the combatants a scan. He's at least a head taller than everyone here, owing to the fact that an Eldrakian would rather be caught dead than to be found in the thick of a New Therian brawl.

A gunshot sounds, and a masculine grunt heralds the end of the fight. Avett holds the sides of his arms protectively, but he's not looking at whoever's just been shot—no, he's paling at the sight of someone else.

Lili yields and steals a glance upwards. There, on the counter, is a surprisingly young Kattish woman. Her hair would be a mousy, pathetic brown on someone else, but on her it catches the sun and alternates between a deep hazel and a wondrous gold—kind of like what Lili thinks spinning wheat into riches would look like. She wears the arms specialist's jumpsuit, but the upper half has been knotted down onto her waist. Her blaster—to even call it a blaster is kind of stretching it—has a long, metallic barrel, similar to a rifle from Earth.

Auren is the first to speak up. As the Kattish woman's challenger limps away with a hand pressed to his side, he turns his attention back to Avett. "Quite the resemblance."

"Shut up, asshole," Avett says. Lili hardly catches the tremble of his voice over the frantic cries and gasps of the surrounding crowd.

It hits Lili like a delayed sucker punch. When she looks back at the woman on the planter-box, she realises that she'd recognise those defiant, copper eyes anywhere.

With a guttural yell, she turns her attention to the audience. She's asking them if anyone else is up for the challenge of besting her in dishonorable combat. Avett keeps his head glued to the floor and pushes on Lili's arm. "Come on. Let's go."

Not surprisingly, not a single member of the audience steps forward. GlassLinks are bumped, monetary bets are exchanged, and then the crowd is dispersing like starving ants finishing off a cookie crumb. At last, it feels like Lili can breathe again.

Until it doesn't. Auren stops in his tracks, and so does she.

Somehow, the woman has managed to get in front of them, and she's got a stiff expression on her face that just screams confrontation. The people move past and around her, keeping their safe distance as if she might start violently lashing out at any moment. Maybe she's done something like that before, who could say? Lord knows what she's gotten away with in the safety of New Therius.

She's got her eyes fixed on the poor soul that's standing behind Lili. Auren moves to block her line of sight, but it's too late because she's already started to stride forward, each of her boots clicking into the wooden panelling with purpose.

The woman stops a short distance away from their single-file train arrangement. "Come on," she says. Her voice is soft, yet calculatingly cold. "Can't a woman see her son?"

Even though Lili can only see Auren's back, she catches the slightest hesitation in the way he normally carries himself. He's—not scared, not really. More like he's wondering if Avett's dignity is worth becoming an unofficially registered menace in New Therius for.

Avett pushes past the two of them. His hand lingers against the small of Lili's back before he lets go.

Auren hisses under his breath. "We do not have the time for this."

The woman doesn't run up to Avett; instead, she stands there, her smile turning callous in a matter of seconds. "Avett Earlstone, how very nice to see you."

"I'm not your son," he spits. The way he's looking at his mother right now reminds Lili of the way he'd looked at her back in the old ship. He looks vulnerable, like the reddening skin underneath a dried scab.

"I named you and taught you how to fire that thing." She jerks her head at his holster. "If I'm not your mother, I don't know what I am."

A spark of ember in her stomach prompts Lili to step forward, but a steady hand on her shoulder keeps her in check. Auren says nothing in response.

"You left dad, Eltia. You lunged at the opportunity to leave Aurores to go aboard as a merc again, because you did not give a shit about any of us." Avett shifts his weight, not breaking eye contact for a second. "You literally sat everyone down and screamed about how we forgot to close the kitchen curtains again then left the next morning. You're not a mother."

Lili clenches her fist.

Eltia merely braces a hand on her hip, her voice smooth like bodily oil on skin. "Avett, I haven't seen you proper in ten years, and this is how you greet me?"

"Fuck you," Avett snarls.

A sigh. Eltia reaches into her jumpsuit and pulls out a standard blaster.

Auren freezes at her side. With a click of the blaster's energy barrel, she raises it to Avett's forehead with all of the casual grace of a natural killer.

Lili must look like she's about to pounce forward, because Auren's digits are digging into her shoulder and he's hissing, "Do not," into her ear.

What a terrible fucking situation. She squeezes her eyes shut as she wills herself into docility, but even as she sinks deeper into that reverie of apathy, she finds that the spark inside of her still incessantly burns—a bright sun amidst a vacuum of void and dust.

Eltia steps forward until the barrel bites right into the skin of his forehead. "A mother wouldn't shoot her son."

Avett trembles slightly. Eltia continues, her voice reminding Lili of the wailing wheels of the hearse, "So call me your mother."

The Gallian caster's already pulled the ribbon from his ponytail, letting his golden-white locks splash around him in a wave. His fingers flex behind his back as he prepares to ward Avett. The tangy smell of the sun wafts from his hair when it's ready.

With both hands outstretched, he sends that impeccable, Gallian power forward.

Avett releases a breath. Eltia, without warning nor prompt, lowers her gun and closes the distance between her and her son.

As she watches Eltia pull Avett into an unnatural embrace, Lili feels a part of her break. She can't help but grind her jaw together in pure, unadulterated anger. She's seen this happen before. She's been right here before. It's sad to see that this moment in time is universal even across alternate realities, but this is the truth: shitty families transcend the boundaries of realms. This is eraless.

When Eltia pulls away from the embrace, Lili takes advantage of Auren's busy state by storming right up to Eltia and—with ether surging through every fibre of her being—striking her cheek with an open palm.

It takes a moment for Eltia to register the pain. Lili takes this moment to just start fucking screaming at her. She doesn't care what the hell's going to come out of her mouth, only that she has to say it, and she has to say it now.

"You'd fucking point a gun at your own son? You'd point a gun to your son's head and ask him to call you your mother over it? You're scum. I don’t care who you are. You're fucking scum."

Her hand grazes the tender mark on her face briefly before she raises her blaster again, this time to Lili's head.

"I haven't got the slightest idea who you are," Eltia says, each word a calculated stab, "but I'm sure that you are well acquainted with who I am, and that I will not hesitate to kill you should I find your existence intolerable."

"Wait, let her go," Avett stutters from behind her.

The pound of adrenaline soars through Lili's veins like an oily drug. She should be scared, should be backing off with her tail between her legs, literally—but her rage is like scaffolding, and it keeps her standing and steady against the turbulent waves of her adversary. Lili feels incredibly lucid, like she's never been so aware of herself before. The settling of the crowd. The tapered whisperings of the curious. The kiss of the barrel, its power at the mercy of the woman standing behind it.

"You're a shit mum," Lili says. "Shoot me. Prove me right."

She hears Auren's ether whirl to life again, but he's not fast enough. Eltia's fingers are already on the trigger, and she's about to fire—

It’s a trickle at first, the first of many droplets down a glass pane. Ether is rushing to her head, and for a moment it feels like she might explode, or pass out from the pressure of it all. Lili recalls the moment she’d broken through Alexei’s half-draconic armor, how liberating it had felt to finally be free and powerful. She’d snapped right through it, like a dog breaking from its leathery leash. Lili grabs onto that feeling and wraps it around her fingers, her wrists, like she’s pulling herself up from a cliff face with nothing but her nails and sheer will.

The bullet is hot. It burns more than it hurts.

Lili stumbles backward. That’s it. That’s all there is to it—it burns more than it hurts. She’s still shaking as she takes two tentative steps back, the gift of adrenaline having faded from her limbs only just now. Eltia looks just about as shocked as her.

A faceted shield wavers into existence in front of her. When she looks back, she sees that Auren has one of his arms outstretched like he’s pulling back an arrow. He’s got something aimed at Eltia’s head too, she realises.

“The next step forward,” Auren breathes, in that dangerously low rolling tone of his, ”will be your last.”

Eltia rolls her eyes. She puts on a huge show of putting away her blaster, spinning her finger around the trigger guard and slotting it in her holster mid-turn. Her hybrid-rifle folds away neatly underneath the knot of her jumpsuit. But when she looks back up, it’s not Avett she’s looking at—no, it’s Lili.

Her copper eyes don’t catch the light when she says, “Next time, I’m shooting you on sight.”

Then she turns, and within seconds, she’s faded into the crowd. Lili feels like she might drop to her knees at any second, but she stands, watching Eltia Earlstone saunter out of existence. The crowds also disappear, their interest sated in turn. Good riddance.

Lili’s heart is still pounding, pounding; a war drum pumping to the beat of the absence of violence in peace. But then she perks right up again. “Well, that was cool. Where are we going, by the wa—”

She stops in her tracks when she catches the eyes of her crewmates.

Auren has always looked cold, but he’s never looked this cold. It’s like he’s taken off his mask only to reveal an adamant skin of iron underneath. Avett, on the other hand, looks like he might just detonate on the spot.

Lili finds herself swallowing down a bubble of air.

The spark’s just about reached the end of the fuse for Avett. “What the fuck were you thinking?” He stomps up to her, his fists quivering at his side.

“Avett.”

He stops, his fist a breadth away from Lili’s face.

Two of Auren’s fingers are pointing forward, and his hair is fanned out again. Both frontliners look back at him, both as equally confused as the other.

With the tall stride of a true Eldrakian, he closes the distance between himself and Lili in two, easy steps. His chin is uptilted, not that he has to do anything to appear taller to her—he’s already got at least a head on both of them. No, it’s a show of dignity. He’s not going to bother with looking down at her; his energy’s better spent elsewhere.

Like socking her in the face.

The blow ripples out from her cheekbone. She goes skidding across the ground—where on Earth had Auren gotten all that strength from? It doesn’t just feel like she’s been punched, it actually feels cold, like her bones have been replaced, joint by joint, with molded icicles. Lili is about to get up when the site of impact flares into a chill. She scrambles to get her fingers over the site of impact, attempting to warm it up with her palm, but it’s no use, it’s like someone’s captured the pure vacuum of space and held it up against her skin, that’s the only way she can describe it. She’s writhing on the floor, and she might, might just be groaning out loud in pain.

Their voices sound fuzzy. Hell, they look fuzzy too, and the frigid burn at her cheekbones isn't helping their visages. Avett’s looking up at Auren, his eyebrows slanted in disapproval. “I think you got carried away,” he’s saying, but Lili is sure he actually sounds mildly satisfied. What an asshole.

She holds a hand against her cheek and pumps hot, raging ether into her veins. It works, thankfully—the heat returns to her bones, and soon she’s seeing the two of them properly again.

Then she realises the shit she’s put herself in. Avett’s biological mother, Eltia Earlstone, wants her dead. But worse: Auren punched her.

What was she thinking?

Sheepishly, she gets up to her feet. Neither of them offer their hands. Avett actually steps back and away from her when she goes to stagger past the two men. The Gallian, however, has other plans. He steps in front of her while he still has the chance.

Lili doesn’t look up at first, but Auren grips her cheeks lightly and forces her to tilt upwards. Now she knows why Avett’s backing off, at least.

He brushes a blunt finger over her forehead; the place Eltia had shot her. Lili winces because the skin around the impact site is still fresh and raw, and from the feel of things, it might be swelling up into a nasty bruise soon.

“We will discuss this later,” he says. Then he moves his hand away and starts heading towards the other end of the hallway. She’d dispelled Auren’s chilly curse a minute ago, but now it seems that it’s returned to settle at the pit of her stomach. He’s got a little bounce in his step.

She gulps—holy shit.

Avett appears next to her with a low whistle. She whips her head around so fast that her hair splashes into her face not a moment later. “What, are you going to punch me too?”

“Please. Auren’s punched you hard enough for the both of us.”

Her cheeks heat in embarrassment. For a moment, it looks like Avett has more to say than just a throwaway joke, and he opens his mouth in preparation for that. But then he shakes his head and steps away.

“Come on.” Despite his physical distance, he sounds a bit closer than before. “It’s just ahead."

19: the long talk

Their landing had not been easy. Not the act of doing so, the autopilot handled all of that, but because Lili had to mentally prepare herself for the epic highs and lows that come from greeting the authorities. When the ship does land, it’s on a strip of sandy grass near what she hopes is Melbourne’s CBD, though with how generic the shattered city looks she supposes that they could be anywhere. There’s one thing that she’s sure of; the iconic dinner plates are nowhere to be seen, meaning that they’re not in Sydney, and certainly not within range of the Afflatus.

“You seem to have experience with breaking laws,” Lili mumbles to Avett on their way to the door. “What do you suggest?”

“Don't assume I’m someone who likes breaking the law,” he says, and he says this with enough force to knock out a small dragon. “Just because I know my way around the enforcers doesn’t mean I’ve gotten caught. I’m just well studied on what happens when you get caught.”

“Should we walk out with our hands on our heads?”

“We’re not fucking playing a schoolyard game.” Avett’s ear flicks. He looks to the side and out the navigation’s windshield. When Lili goes to follow his line of sight, she sees a singular IRC vehicle hovering above the sand, not having landed yet.

Avett pulls Lili into him by the arm not a moment later. “A little secret for you, princess.”

“Hm?”

“That ship’s the only one out there—I can’t hear any others. They lied about the convoy.”
 
She regards the ship with uncertainty. The voice that played over the radio had seemed wiry and unsure of herself, as if she was reading off a script rather than reciting her speil from memory. Something doesn't quite fit in here properly, but Lili's not sure why. Maybe the rest of the convoy's watching from a distance, ready to strike from the air at a moment's notice should they prove themselves to be more than a handful.

This sentiment isn't lost on Avett, who notices it on Lili without her having to say a single word. "There's only one ship, Lilith. I would've heard them if there were more. And if there are more, then they're clearly way too far from us to be a threat." He grits his teeth when he stares out the window again. "It doesn't make sense. We probably could've beelined it if you hadn't landed."

Lili is about to apologise when the radio crackles back to life, interrupting her. The woman on the other side only manages to get halfway through her slog of a recitation before Avett storms over to the counter and slams his fist into one of the panels, shattering it into millions of virtual shards. It works. The voice cuts off with a mechanical screech.

Avett stands in front of the counter, his fist still submerged in the sea of digital dials. The morning sunlight streams through the windshield and directly into his eyes; he shuts them, but goes no further than that. Something's churning behind those eyelids, and it seems to be some wild jungle juice concoction of wrath, realisation, and shame. When he snaps open his eyes, he's already made up his mind about what he's going to do next, and Lili's sure that it's not going to be anything constructive.

Lili winces as she regards the shattered radio interface. "They might add years onto our sentence for that."  

"They won't." With purpose in his step, he strides up to the door and pounds against the emergency release button. "I've got a pretty good feeling about who's in that other ship, Lilith, and I'm about to give him a piece of my mind."

There's no way it's Alexei, she thinks.

She watches Avett pass her and stomp down the stairs. The other ship is parked a bit further away; everytime the shore rushes in, it meets the bottom of the roll-out stairs and leaves a wet trail of kisses on the metal. Avett pushes his way through the puffs of toetoe and stands on the sand, alone, waiting.

Then he starts screaming. “Is this fucking funny to you?”

For a moment, all Lili hears is the gentle hush of the tide, the ploying cry of gulls in the distance, and Avett’s laboured breathing. The other ship’s doors remain shut, but that doesn’t stop Avett from lacing his fingers around a stray clam shell and hurling it at the windshield. It doesn’t crack the glass, thank god, but it does springboard off and splash into the ocean.

“Fuck you! We flew out here because we thought we were fucking criminals!” He kneels and picks up a sea-smoothed rock. "Is that all we are? A fucking joke to you?"

Avett's aim is especially impeccable today—Lili expects no less from a Kattish arms specialist. He hits the frame of the door this time. The rock bounces and tumbles back into the wet sand with a thud, sending a splatter of seawater and mud into the air.

Lili wonders if she should stop him. She only manages to make it to the second-last step when she feels the presence of someone else behind her.

"He's rather snappy, isn't he?"

She whirls on her heel, expecting Alexei to be standing at the top of the staircase. She finds no such miracle. He's actually on the ground next to the stairs. His smile is gentle, and he's got his arms folded across his chest like he's a proud coach watching his players score.

Lili says, "I don't blame him."

"For a Kattish, he's not very spatially aware of his surroundings, is he? Quite prone to tunnel visioning."

Avett's insults have devolved into mindless profanities. He’s shaking his fists in the air, having run out of ammunition from the beach a long time ago. The water laps at his shoes, the wind splashes his hair into his eyes, but he doesn't give a damn about any of it. He won't let himself give a damn until Alexei's in front of him and grovelling.

Lili calls out to him. "He's here, next to me."

With gritted teeth, her partner whips around on his heels hard enough to leave hollows in the sand. He’s an approaching storm incarnate, and when he stops in front of Alexei, he’s seething with such tension that he looks like he might start throwing punches again. He’s got his fists clenched to the point where his gloves have tightened around the knuckles like a second skin.

Alexei doesn’t move. “Do you want to hit me again?”

“Fuck you.”

He shifts back, satisfied with Avett’s response. “Good. You’ve gotten it out of your system—”

“Like hell it is. Fuck you.”

“—And now we can engage in civil conversation, as most mature adults do.”

Avett watches Alexei, his breathing coming in both loud inhales and deep exhales. Then he pins Lili down with that same glare. “Don’t tell me you’re with him now.”

Even though he’s on the sand and Lili is on the second to last step, Avett overpowers her to the point where she feels like an ant that’s chosen to look up at a mountain. She’s new to this whole thing, this whole deal about getting what she wants by forcing her way through other people. It scares her. In the same way that it has scared Humankind from the allure of space, it scares her.

Thankfully, Alexei lets out a noisy sigh, ridding Lili of all and any responsibility. “Cold, Mr. Ironsturm. Very cold. Lili here has the right idea—you would be better off listening to what I have to say.”

“You’ve gotta be at least thirty-five.” Avett lunges for Lili’s wrist and tugs at her gently when he says this. She doesn’t budge. “You chip a nail while you were filing your taxes? I don’t fucking care. You set us up and you lied about it. What makes you think we’re interested in what you’ve got to say?”

Lili echoes him. “You set us up."

Alexei nods. "Indeed I did."

Avett groans, slaps a hand over his eyes, and runs it down to his mouth. She continues. "Why?"

"Because I was interested in you."

She blinks. In the distance, she catches a familiar aircraft in the corner of her eye; when she breaks eye contact with Alexei, she realises that it's the Winnow. Auren and Ysh'vanna are safe.

Lili turns back to Alexei. Steps off the stairs to stand with the two men on the sand. "What does that mean?"

"I'm not a normal Human, Lili." He holds her gaze for a bit before pacing forward with his arms behind his back. "I can see into other people's memories. I can block punches without lifting a single finger. There is not an Eldrakian alive that could rival nor replicate this technique to the same amount of aptitude."

The Winnow whirrs as it floats down onto a patch of fenced-off grass. It's kicking up puffs of dry sand everywhere, and Lili has to squint to defend herself from tearing up on the spot. They've been tricked, she realises. She wonders if Auren and Ysh'vanna are in on it too.

Despite all of this, her voice still manages to drop into a low grit. "You looked into my memories."

“To say that I looked into your memories wouldn’t quite cut it.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Your surface memories, they filter in unintentionally. I’m acutely aware of the people around me… and how they might react to certain actions.”

Avett jabs a finger up into the taller man’s face. “You knew how badly we’d take your bullshit, and you did it anyway. You’re the best kind of person, aren’t you?”

“My sudden onset of telesthesia would have you to believe that I am more sympathetic to others.” His eyes, though still ringed with that decadent gold, darken to the shade of deep umber. “But the opposite is true. There is too much to give a shit about these days, and I don’t need a sob story to know when to hold back.”

His words hang like frigid icicles above their heads. Avett is to Alexei as a cat is to a tigress. Only God knows which corresponding animalistic comparison would be appropriate for Lili.

Avett doesn't care about where he stands on the animal kingdom food chain, it seems, because he's up and at Alexei again. "You lashed out at us, end of story. Go back to filing your sanctuary taxes or whatever and leave us alone."

"Ah, about that. I did have a motive, of which I was about to explain before…" Alexei eyes Avett; his gaze isn't harsh, but it isn't welcoming either. "I riled you up, Lili, didn't I? I wanted to."

He glides past her partner towards his ship, and for a moment, Lili thinks that he might actually leave. The sea soaks into his cloak at the hem, but the fabric doesn't darken at all.

"Lili, you shattered my shield. No mere mammalian is capable of this. I have reason to believe that you and I are one and the same.”

And in that same moment, Lili doesn’t know what to say.

Alexei continues, “I could sense it from you the second you came into my view. I just had to prove it. I apologise for the nerves that I’ve inadvertently tripped.”

Before Lili can ask what exactly 'being like him' entails, the door to Alexei's ship gives off a mechanical whirr. The entrance slides open a second later, revealing a Draconian woman who Lili assumes is Alexei's “IRC representative.” As she makes her way down the steps, her floor-length white coat lingers on the steps behind her—Lili can't help but notice the way the ends of her coat have discoloured into a sickly yellow from wear. When she reaches the bottom, she makes her way over to Alexei with several shuffling steps. She can't be any taller than Lili's shoulders.

"Alexei," she calls. He leans his head over to the side, and the woman has to stand on her tip-toes to even whisper into his ear. He nods to her once she pulls back.

“Right. I’m getting sick of the Melbourne shoreline, and it’s rather gusty out here, so why don’t we all take a break inside my aircraft while Kata’lana here, my acting assistant, pours us a spot of Earth endemic tea, hm?”

Kata’lana raises a hand in greeting, though she hardly acknowledges Avett outside of a droll side-glance. Her attention is entirely on Lili, and she’s watching her like she’s a guinea pig who might just scamper out of her rat cage once she’s left unattended.

Lili swallows. She hopes all of this attention will ease up and off her soon.

—

Kata’lana’s eyes, Lili realises, are like dinner plates. They’re wide, very wide—they dominate her face, they’re at least a third of her overall visage, Lili swears on it. It doesn’t help that they’re a dazzling orange, and it certainly doesn’t help that she’s still staring at her from across the table. There’s a whole two teapots and an over-the-top display of satin flowers in between them, and she’s still somehow observing her. She’s not like a hawk; she’s the fucking panopticon. The moment Lili tears her gaze away from her is the moment her paranoia sets in.

Avett. Right, Lili should watch Avett instead. He’s sitting just one seat over, and instead of sipping his tea he’s slumped over the table and around his cookies. Now that he's had time to calm down, he's started mumbling to himself; Lili isn’t sure about what. It could be about a pay raise, or it could be about how he hates Human tea, or it could be that he’s just expressing how he hates tea in general now that he’s come to associate it with haughty overseers and two-day long conflicts.

There’s not much else to do while they’re waiting for Ysh’vanna and Auren to board the ship. Lili pats the back of Avett’s hand in an attempt to grab his attention.

It happens far too quickly for Lili to react in time. He whips his hand back, leaving Lili’s to hover in the air for a brief, helpless second—then he slams his hand on top of hers, trapping her against the table.

She looks at Avett. He flexes his fingers against her in response.

“Yeah?” he asks. “You wanted my attention?”

Lili drags her eyes back to the Draconian scientist. It actually hurts to look at her again. Avett follows her line of sight, winces, sucks in a breath and shoots Lili an apologetic glance.

“Guess it comes with being special,” he whispers.

“She looks like she wants to kill me,” she hisses back.

“No way. I’m so much more handsome than her.”

She slides her hand back—or tries to, at least, because Avett doubles down and presses his palm into her fingers at the last second. He grins at her, even waggles his ears at her. Her features scrunch up in annoyance.

“Since you're so special, I'd like to see you practice throwing me off,” he says.

Ah, right, of course. That’s all there is to this. There’s no way anyone, not even a chronic romantic such as Avett, would try to flirt with her in the presence of a glorified panopticon. And if she’s being honest with herself, he probably doesn’t even need the ever-looming threat of someone like Kata’lana to dissuade him from flirting with Lili.

Calling ether into her veins, she remembers how it had felt to hoist Avett away from the navigation panels: pretty damn satisfying. Yet no matter how hard she tries, she just can’t seem to shake him off because it’s one thing to summon a deluge of ether through her entire body, but it’s another to pin-point it directly into a single appendage. This is getting pretty damn old.

To rub it in, Avett quirks his head and asks, “You sure you’re trying?”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder?”

“This is my harder.”

“Bet you're terrible in bed.”

She gives him one last squirm before giving up entirely. "I wouldn't know."

At that moment, the doors slide open and Ysh'vanna comes barreling into the room. She gives the two frontliners a weird look, like she can't decide on whether she's supposed to scream at them or kiss their foreheads silly. She opts for a neck-crushing hug instead. "I'm so glad my frontliners finally decided to elope and do unspeakable things without me!" she says as she smothers Lili's neck in the crook of her elbow. Avett isn't any better off.

Auren and Alexei come inside much, much later, and from the way Auren slots himself between them to sit next to Lili, she wonders if they just so happened to have a conversation regarding herself.

Once they’re all seated and three biscuits into their tea, Alexei claps his hands and says, “As you are all aware, I am a serious pathological liar.”

In a rare moment of genuinity, Auren chuckles.

Alexei continues, “I'll cut to the chase. In lieu of my previous statements, I would like to propose to you a deal. I told you all that you would be decommissioned; this was a lie. The truth is that the IRC hasn't caught wind of your current situation—yet. Though from here I assume that it will only be a matter of time."

He lets his words hover in the air as an open invitation of sorts. He dumps spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his tea during the silence. Avett pulls a face at this.

Finally, Ysh'vanna decides to speak up. "And being a sanctuary overseer, you've got a deal for us."

“It's more of a zero-sum gain. I would kill for the opportunity to dismiss an entire mercenary ship. Alas, you have something that I want, and so here we are.”

He’s not wrong. Lili would kill for the opportunity to fire an entire battlement of ships if it ever came to that. Who wouldn’t? Administrative power is probably one of those things she’ll admonish until she’s gotten ahold of it.

“And what is it that you want?” Auren asks.

“Money, power, fame.” Alexei isn’t drinking from his cup anymore. Lili isn’t sure if he’d even taken a sip in the first place. “But most importantly, the artifact that they’ve hidden away in the depths of New Therius.”

She watches Avett's ears sag to his head—concentrating hard on something, she guesses. He's dribbled a fair amount of milk into his tea, and now he's watching the way the white marbles into the browns. The silence smothers them wholly. Kata'lana's stare drills right through Lili's soul.

Ysh'vanna clears her throat. "Like a dragon's artifact?"

"Something like that." Alexei shrugs. "Do my bidding, and I suppose that I'll just have to keep you around, hm? And if you don't, I'll have my deepest darkest fantasies to look forward to."

His threat of blackmail hangs over their heads like a tunnel spider's web.

“That’s not legal,” says Avett.

“Neither is smuggling an unverified Human around and committing tax fraud, but I digress.”

Avett slumps back into his chair. He makes a big show out of letting go of Lili’s hand by propelling his arm into the air and letting it swing by his side like a pendulum.

For a moment, no one else says anything. Ysh’vanna and Auren share an administrative glance as they weigh out the odds with the evens. Eventually Ysh’vanna asks, “Isn’t this something you could do yourself?”

“I’m a busy man."

Avett's hands clench under the table. "Busy enough to chase us out to the Afflatus area overnight? Bullshit."

"And a Human, technically.” He taps his ears for emphasis. "I've heard that they've stored the artifact inside a safe room only accessible through a ramp on the mechant deck. I wouldn't dare step foot in there."

Everyone seems pleased with that response; Avett relaxes his hands and sinks further into his seat, Ysh'vanna bobs her head in agreement, and Auren's gaze softens enough to suggest that his stone cold exterior is just a front.

Lili shivers in her seat. She remembers the way the shopkeepers back in the Afflatus had treated her when she'd failed to prove herself as a mercenary. "Are Humans not welcome in New Therius?"

"Oh, far from it.” Alexei continues to stir his tea. “They'll kill you on the spot."

Her cheeks chill to the point where she's not quite sure of what the temperature of the ship is anymore. Then she recalls how a certain arms specialist had wanted to take her there, and how that same arms specialist probably wants her dead on his good days and brutally maimed on his worst.

Lili turns, lunges for the collar on Avett's jacket, and pulls his torso down.

"If I wanted you dead then, I would've killed you myself,” he manages to say. Then he hastily adds, “Please don't hurt me."

He can plead his mercies in hell, Lili thinks, because at least making a deal with the devil would get him somewhere. Her sympathy well's all dried up, and she's feeling more parched than the entire state of Nevada right now. Fuck Avett.

In the background, Ysh'vanna asks, "Surely you've tried a disguise?"

"Racial insensitivity aside, my height and build would not allow me to pass as a Kattish male, nor a Draconian for that matter." Alexei lifts his cloak to reveal a bulky, scarred bicep. "A Palerian, perhaps, though my facade would quickly fall apart in the wake of an Eldrak Gallian's ethereal detection. Or in the presence of New Therius' own overseer."

"No sensible Eldrakian would enter New Therius," Auren says.

"Suppose I'm just lazy then. Besides, it would be uncouth for me to leave my sanctuary for so long. I have my dedicated menagerie of rabid Human alt-right facists to attend to, and I'm certain that they're simply up to no good without my goodwill presence." Alexei turns his attention towards Lili, then shifts his gaze over to Avett. She’s still throttling him when he does this.

She feels herself shrink. “...What?”

“You could pass,” he says. “You’re androgynous enough, and barring personality quirks, racial traits and general dispositions, you’re nigh-indistinguishable from him… it’s almost impressive. ”

“He noticed,” Ysh’vanna hisses under her breath.

Avett takes this moment to pluck Lili’s hands from his shirt. Even he’s puzzled about what Alexei’s just said, and he’s not the kind of person who despises how he looks; Lili’s caught him admiring his visage in a front-facing selfie camera more than once on their breaks. He’s checking himself right now, only he’s no longer doing it for the sake of admiration. She can tell by the way he’s grooming his fingers through his bangs and picking at the bags under his eyes that he's delightfully aware of his shortcomings—which leads to her briefly touching her own eye bags. They’re not that bad, are they?

She shakes herself out of her stupor. “I don’t have to go down there myself, right?” she asks.

“Oh no. You should. I have no doubt that the bunker will be armed to the teeth, and that conflict will be unavoidable.” He says this all with a smile.

“Unavoidable?” she parrots.

He nods. “So unavoidable, so confrontational that I doubt your backline caster and your specialist could endure it all on their lonesomes.”

Before either of the men can voice their disapproval, Ysh’vanna catches on immediately. “What else can you tell us about your mission?”

“They’ve hidden the access ramp in plain sight, if I remember correctly. Good luck discovering which of the many ramps it is, not to mention the excess of ramps behind locked doors. It’s also been a while since my assistant's last romp through the merchant deck, and I’m not entirely sure of its current layout.”

“So we’re going in blind,” Ysh’vanna says.

“Yes, but you’re off-landers and a half. You’ll have all the time in the world to scout out the immediate areas. Not so bad, is it? No enforcers, no law troubles, you’ll be free to do as you please.”

She narrows her eyes. “Why in the stars would they want to protect an artifact? And—armed to the teeth?”

He shrugs. "I haven't a clue."

Ysh'vanna's stare remains hard.

He continues hastily, "There is no elaborate ruse, no games to play, no traps to avoid. New Therius lies outside of the IRC jurisdiction, partially because it’s not an officially recognised sanctuary, partially because it’s a monetary hotspot by day due to its nature as a slaughterhouse by night. And why fix what’s not broken?” Alexei’s eyes darken once more, and he starts to drum his fingers against the table. “Whatever they’re doing down there, away from the public eye… I want to make sure that whatever they’ve got planned never comes to fruition. If the IRC won't get their hands dirty, then I will. Tangentially."

Ysh'vanna watches Alexei as he says this. Her gaze is piercing—not in the way an arrow might shoot through skin, but in the way a sunbeam falls through foliage. She doesn't need violence to see the truth and passion behind Alexei's eyes. It's not a lie.

She stands and pushes away from the table. "Alright then. We head for New Therius tomorrow morning."

Kata'lana stands from her seat, and Alexei himself is about to leave when Avett perks right back up. He slams his hands onto the table as well while he's at it.

Ysh'vanna sighs. She has to tilt her head up to even look her frontliner in the eye, but for some reason it gives her the impression of royalty rather than of weakness. “Is there a problem with that, Ironsturm?"

"We're putting a lot more on the line than just our jobs—this is a heist. A fucking heist! Since when are heists ever legal?"

"Escaping arrest isn't legal either, Avett."

He rolls his eyes and blows his hair out of his face. Defeated in word, but not in mind.

Ysh’vanna turns to Lili. “And our other frontliner’s on board with us, right?”

She nods, though it’s only to relieve herself of the stress her captain’s pinning her down with. It’s that same royalty-laced stare that’s doing this to her, she swears. Ysh’vanna is scarily competent at times, enough to make Auren follow in her plans suit without complaint nor question. Lili isn’t sure about any heist. She can’t fight people, let alone fight at all, period.

And yet Ysh’vanna takes her answer well. “Good.” Then she yawns, stretches, and pivots on a heel. “Let’s take the rest of the day off. Landing on terrain really took it out of me, and I could eat like a whole sanctuary’s stock of food.”

“Understood,” Auren says. They filter out of Alexei’s ship a bit later. Avett lingers behind them, and for a moment, Lili thinks he might be sulking, or at the very least, displeased with their current plans to rob New Therius of whatever it is that Alexei needs.

Lili is about to follow them down when Alexei stops her by the shoulder.

“You don’t seem all that certain about yourself,” he says.

She lets out a small, breathy exhale. “I guess. Never thought I'd be robbing a vault so soon at the age of twenty-three."

"Allow me to sweeten the deal, Lili." He motions at Kata'lana with a flapping hand, and she starts to pile the plates and cups on each other. "Do you recall our conversation on the beach?"

"A little," she mumbles.

He continues, "If you succeed, I'll tell you what we are. A hint: we aren't Humans."

Lili’s heart won’t stop pounding. She remembers the extent of Alexei’s power, the way he’d flicked Avett across the room with nothing but his forefinger and thumb. He’s not Human, and he’s not an off-lander either. He’s strong, he’s built out of not only flesh and bone but more—and so is Lili. Weak, meek, tender little Lili.

“I’ll try to come back alive then,” she says.

Alexei pats her on the back with a laugh as she leaves his ship. Her skin stings of ether and ash where he’d touched her.

—

The following morning, they congregate in the navigation room. Though Avett seems far more open today—he’d prodded at his root stew with a spoon during dinner last night and left without a word—he’s still keeping his distance in the corner. His arms are folded. The rest of the crew are sitting around the table. Every so often, Ysh’vanna checks the navigation display and announces where they are. At about a quarter to ten, she says, “We’re here.”

Lili takes her sweet time taking in the sights. New Therius’ structure reminds her of a windowed high-rise building that’s been exaggerated to the heavens—literally, because even though they’re hovering in the sky she still can’t see the top. It’s taller than the Sky Tower. There’s a dirty plume of smoke wafting around the upper stories, and when they round the corner towards the hangar, she sees that it’s from a small furnace.

Then she realises that she’s still totally Human. She passes a nervous glance at Ysh’vanna, then to Auren. They don’t seem like the type of people to have a pair of cat—Kattish ears at their beck and call.

“Um.” She motions to her ears.  

Ysh’vanna’s expression brightens up immediately. "Don't worry. I've got just the thing."

There's a smarmy grin on her face as she says this, and truthfully it scares Lili to no end. Even Auren is grinning to himself with his eyes cast downwards—that's how she knows that what's about to happen to her won't be good.

For once in her life, Lili has to look at Avett for support, but when she does she finds that he has nothing to offer her. He's diverting all of his attention onto Ysh'vanna instead.

"It's a little tasteless, sure," he says, flicking at a speck of dust on his glove, "but whatever'll get the job done, I guess."

"You should have gotten rid of those a long time ago," Auren mutters.

Lili is pleading now. She's looking up at her superiors, and she's giving them her best impression of an abandoned, starving puppy that's been thrown to the pound, but they're staring her down like she's just wronged their patron deities and they've got just the thousand-year long punishment for her. This feels morally wrong. This is morally and racially wrong, but no one’s bothering to correct anyone, not even Avett himself.

At last, Ysh'vanna decides to throw her a bone, though it’s painfully obvious where this is all leading to. "I’ve always wondered what you would look like if you were Kattish. Strip down, Lili."

18: Well, shit.

Lili's dreams are fitful and hardly chaste at all. Hardly chaste from the seductive wiles that come from rebellion, that is. She is whole and all-encompassing, and yet she is no bigger than a speck—if someone were to take a duster and a dustpan, they could sweep her off the universe with one quick scour. It was unbelievable how easily the taste of rebellion could rip you from the world and displace you onto a new layer of existence. She's never felt this great. She feels like she could eat the world, whole and uncooked, like a bite-sized canape on a clean, hot plate.

Something blares over the intercom. Lili knows that it's the intercom even in her sleep, because the voice is heavily distorted and sounds like shit. As expected of a commercial junker, she supposes.

She rolls over. Avett is covering his ears with his hands and groaning.

And then she really, really starts to tune in on what the guy over the intercom is saying.

"This is the IRC convoy, requesting that you land now before we are required to use lethal force. Once again, requesting Commercial Liner, license plate 09MK of the Hive sector to land. This is the IRC…"

Well, shit.

17.5:

On the occasion that Ava let Lili out of the shed, she would teach her the way of death. Not of how to kill dragons, should the need for it arise (it never did), but in the way of slaughtering her best friend. That was what she meant.

“When you want to behead someone,” she starts, and she takes the axe she’d pilfered from a nearby Bunnings when she says this, “you want to be quick about it. No second thoughts.”

Lili is nineteen. She’s never had to think about the possibility of killing her best friend, nor does she have the means to do so—Lili has never managed to use ether as Ava does. She hopes that she’ll never have to put any of today’s lessons to practice, but she knows that this is fruitless to think about. Ava had to kill someone out there just the other day; she puts people out of their misery all of the time, and now it’s time for Lili to learn the same.

Ava demonstrates her technique by swinging her axe into a wall. She’d chosen a neighbourhood close to them, one where the houses were old, weatherboarded and likely infested by roaches. The street runs adjacent to an overgrown soccer field, and over that field sits their makeshift home: a shed that struggles to stand even during the windless summers. Lili is never far from home; Ava makes sure of it.

She watches the wood splinter under her axe. The white paint comes off in flakes and sticks to Ava’s blade. Then she hands the axe by the handle over to Lili. “Your turn. Show that house who’s boss.”

When Lili does take up her blade, she drops the head of the axe into the grass and in between her feet. It digs into the dirt by the edge, which causes Lili to jump back a bit. Ava makes it look so easy.

She grits her teeth and hoists it back up—her core and biceps strain in protest. If she can’t even lift a weapon as small as this, then how is she going to defend herself when it matters? She should stick to kitchen knives and keychain-multitools, but she knows that only axes can kill a person with the precision and speed that she needs.

Ava speaks up again. “The world isn’t made for weak women. It’s a man’s world out there, and to be strong you can’t be a woman. So be a man.” She’s spent most of her free time reading feminist literature as of recent, and this is what she’s gotten out of it, that she’s been handed the short end of the stick by being born a woman.

“What does that have to do with killing someone?”

“Just be strong. Think like a man. Be angry.”

Lili hasn’t seen a single man in a year. The last one she’d seen, she’d seen from afar, and he was ambling around in such a way that made Ava place a finger to her lips before approaching him. She’d re-emerged with blood on her sleeves, and she’d told Lili that he’d lunged for her like a snake at a bird’s nest. Lili remembers that evening well—Ava’s fingers had still glittered with ether as they made the trek back to the safehouse. She later confessed that there was something strange about him, that his eyes had glowed like uranium in the dark, and that she was scared and wasn’t sure of whether or not she’d made the right choice in the end. This was one of the only times Ava was really vulnerable around Lili. She hasn’t been vulnerable since.

So in short, she has no idea of how to ‘think like a man.’ The midday sun makes everything all the more worse, and the outfit Ava picked out for her—a long sleeved undershirt and a loose knit cardigan—isn’t helping at all. She feels like she could drop the axe into the earth again. It can’t be like that. It has to weigh less.

Lili teeters back. Her legs wobble, her arms shiver—and then she swings the head of the axe into the house. She leaves a scratch and exposes the wood from the paint, but not much else.

“Again,” Ava says.

Her arms will be sore by morning, Lili thinks. She swings it again anyway. Then she swings it again. Again. Her arms need to be sore, they need to be non-functional tomorrow because that’s how it all works, because pain is the only way she’s come to know growth.

By the sixth swing, she slices cleanly through some sort of pillar that was resting inside the walls, and the house teeters on its foundations. Lili doesn’t quite remember what happens next, but Ava has her by the shoulders and by the axe—in fact, she’s holding the head with her bare hands, closing her fingers around it and catching her skin in the edge of the blade. “Lili, look what you’ve made me do,” she's saying, and Lili isn’t quite sure of what she’s done nor the scale of disaster that she’s inflicted upon this poor house, but she what she does know is that she’s smashed right through the wall and that there’s blood—Ava’s blood—on this person’s abandoned lawn.

The house doesn’t fall.

Lili looks back at Ava, hoping that for once in her life she’s done something right. But then Ava lets go of Lili’s axe, and she winces as the metal leaves her hand. “Nice work, Lili,” she says. “You could’ve killed us today. You’re useless and a fucking hack. I’m going home.”

Lili doesn’t bother staying. She patters behind her friend, making sure to step lightly as to not disturb her. When she stops to wipe the side of the blade against the grass, she notices that the axe is as light as a feather.

And Ava’s fingers, though they remain by her sides, are glittering with ether.

17: the turnover

Neither Ysh'vanna nor Avett attempt to speak with Lili after Alexei's departure. Not sincerely, anyway. Ysh'vanna hides her emotions behind a mask as she consoles the rest of the team about how she'll negotiate matters with the officials back on Therius, and that it's not Lili's fault in the slightest. It’s obvious that the former won’t work out.

Avett is a little more 'mask off.' He avoids Lili's gaze often, though the moment she takes her eyes off of him she can feel his smouldering stare on her back like a brand. The third repeat of this has him whispering to himself, "come on Avett, get mad at something else." Lili pretends not to hear. He excuses himself out of the ship at three.

It's around five in the evening when Auren invites Lili out into the hangar. He's got a bottle of green-glass wine in his hand; the label depicts a golden icon that swirls and curls into itself a thousand times over.

She says the obvious. “I thought you didn’t like drinking.”

Sitting on the asphalt with their backs against the hull of the Winnow, it’s hard for Auren to look taller than her in the moment. He gives up midway and slides the bottle over to Lili.

“You would be correct.”

She accepts it anyway. When she examines the bottle more closely, she sees the name of the wine that he bought her: Classic Gallian blue wine—blue? She tilts the bottle towards the overhead lights, and finds that the supposedly ‘blue’ liquid inside is black against the tint of the glass.

“A major export from Gallia’s Eldrakian regions,” Auren clarifies.

“You guys have blue grapes?”

He nods. “A slight discrepancy between realms, though the ‘discrepancy’ is more akin to an endemic plant. Not quite endemic anymore, however—Eldrakian grape plantations are commonplace on Therius in the present day. ”

Curious to see whether or not the wine is a true blue or a deep shade of purple, Lili twists the bottle cap off, tearing away the seal. She pours the wine out into the cap after, and sure enough, it’s blue—a dye-thick, sky-deep, midnight blue. It’s clear enough for her to see the bottom of the cap, and when she swirls it between her fingers she can see several dusty tannins suspended in the liquid.

She casts a look towards Auren. “Would you mind?"

He shakes his head. “Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary mindsets.”

Down the hatch then. She regrets it immediately after her first sip. Not only does it sting going down, but it’s also offensively sweet to the point where she’d prefer downing an entire cup of honey.

“Your expression speaks volumes,” says Auren.

Lili tries her best to smooth her features to no avail. “Was I supposed to mix this with something?”

“Traditionally, no. However, the mass commercialisation of such an exotic product resulted in the degradation of its taste over time.” He looks at the label wistfully. “Therian wineries are Draconian owned, and often share a facility with other wine types—there is not a single Eldrakian on Therius who would care to work in such an industry. And Eldrak… cares very little for the matters of inter-realm trade. In this day and age, you would drink your Gallian wines with tea and milk.”

“You said you didn’t drink.”

“I am a first generation immigrant from Gallia. It would be a crime for me to not know my realm’s history.”

She tips the wine back into the bottle and screws the lid back on. In the distance, the hangar gates rattle open slowly, revealing a stained sky and a stretch of cotton-candy clouds. A ship taxis out from the corner and onto the runway; Lili watches it take off with nary an effort. It leaves behind a blue trail of flame as it sails into the sky, further and further, until she can no longer see where it is. At some point in time, the gate shutters down again, hard and fast enough to shatter eardrums.

The hangar deck is now completely empty, save for the Winnow.

“Was that the C ranked crew Ysh’vanna mentioned?” asks Lili.

“Yes.”

“Overnight mission?”

“They are to act as bodyguards to the environmental workers that were displaced during our prior mission.”

She toys with the dirt in her nails.

“Will we be ok?” she asks.

“We—” Auren stops himself. It’s the first time Lili’s really seen him this disgruntled.

“No?”

He coughs. “There are plenty of residential districts for Humans on Therius. The housing is free, and they will give you various job opportunities should the need for extra money arise. You will be catered for in Therius as a refugee."

"What about you?"

"I anticipate a fine and a mark on our records should Ysh'vanna fail to convince them of our innocence." Auren picks himself up from the ground. When he does, Lili can't help but notice how stilted his movements are. "I must prepare for dinner. You should not worry about me."

"Should I help?" she asks.

"Your efforts would be better spent on finding our arms specialist," he says as he heads up the stairs. "You two have gotten notably closer within the past two missions. Spend your time with him wisely."

When the doors to the Winnow slide open, Lili can hear Ysh'vanna's aggravated shouts as she negotiates her crew's circumstances with the official on the other side of the line. These shouts become muffled again once the doors reshut.

Lili really doesn't want to be a refugee on Therius. She can't imagine herself in such a place, can't foresee a future in which she's expected to sit down and live out the rest of her years in gratitory peace. If she can fight, then she should be fighting. She doesn't know what she'll do to herself if she ends up sitting in a shoddy—by Therian standards—communal prefab, where she'll be doing nothing but living. She doesn't know if it'll be easier or harder. If she'll enjoy her days of peace at all.

She doesn't get up. Instead, she pulls her knees to her chest and buries her head in her hands. She stays like that for god knows how long.

Lili supposes that she could use a drink. But one look at the bottle in her hand is enough to drag up all sorts of unpleasant memories. There might be a bar down in the Hive if she's really desperate.

"I am really desperate," she says to herself. Besides, Avett is probably there, and Auren's asked very nicely for her to go down and drag him back to the ship in time for dinner.

She leaves the bottle at the bottom of the staircase and makes for the Hive.

—

Lili finds Avett at the first bar she visits, probably because it's the only bar available. 'Finds' is a bit of a stretch—she'd asked for an Avett Ironsturm at the counter, and the bartender had given her a weird look and pointed to the stairs. Those stairs had led up to the inn rooms.

Lili knows better than to poke her nose where it doesn't belong, so she orders a fizzy drink and sips it in the corner. In the time between making the decision to come to the bar to actually arriving, she's completely swapped sides on the matter of whether or not she should be drinking tonight. If she can't get drunk, she might as well drink something she'll like the taste of.

What is she doing here, if not to drag Avett kicking and screaming back to the Winnow?

It could have been hours, maybe even days, in that little sulk corner of hers, but when Avett makes his merry way downstairs Lili feels as if she might snap inwardly. She's expecting a signature upper-lip-upturned scowl, or a rightfully deserved lashing. So it comes to her as a shock when he slaps both of his hands onto her shoulders and says, with a bounce in his voice, “We’re gonna run away.”

Lili takes a moment to respond. “Auren said dinner is ready soon.”

“Who cares what Auren thinks?” His face is flushed, though not from embarrassment. He’s clearly toed the line between buzzed and smashed a little too enthusiastically. “We’re running away. They can’t catch us if they don’t know where we are.”

He pulls away from Lili, sending her teetering on her feet. He continues, “It’d be so easy. We grab a commercial junker, I dismantle the tracker, then we fly out to New Therius or the Afflatus or somewhere shady. You could cook for us, you’ve already got years of experience with living off the grid—”

Lili follows him as he spirals out of the bar. He’s clearly riding off some sort of high, or some kind of short-lived clarity. “The authorities will come for us tomorrow,” she says.

Avett stops in front of a sign. The Hive doesn’t have the same day and night functions as the Afflatus; even though it’s seven in the evening the flood lights stay on, and the starkness of the ivory-bright corridors remain. Everything here is so corporately white. Maybe this is what’s driving him mad.

He proves her right when he says, “Then we’re going now.”

“No—no.” Try as she might, Lili can’t think of a proper reason in the moment as to why this might all be a terrible idea. “We’re having dinner now.”

Avett doesn’t care. He starts off in a random direction with a decisive stride, leaving Lili with no other decision but to keep up. No matter what she brings up—“We can’t just leave Ysh’vanna and Auren behind, we’re gonna be in so much worse trouble if we go through with this, they’re going to find out, how are we going to rent a ship without using our IDs?”—he doesn’t stop walking, doesn’t stop until he’s standing in front of a storefront that’s started to pack up and roll down their shutters for the night.

The renter is a Draconian man of short stature, and when he sees Lili he looks like he might just faint on the spot. He has to put down his sign to stop Avett from storming right through the doors.

“We’re closed, sir,” he says. “You can’t be here—”

This actually does stop Avett in his tracks. Lili is silently pleading with the boy to straighten his back and call somebody, anybody to escort Avett out of this mess, but for all she knows her glances are being taken by him as a threat. Which can’t possibly be helping at all.

“It’s an emergency, kid.” Avett lies easily to this stranger, but Lili can tell there’s panic in the way his voice has hitched. “Urgent business. Our ship broke down, and we need something to rent quick. So if you’ll excuse us.”

Avett steps past him easily. Doesn’t bother with payment either, because it’s an ‘emergency.’ At this point, Lili has given up convincing her partner otherwise. She hopes that this is all a phase, that it’ll pass once he’s gotten the ship above the clouds, and he’ll be heading back to the Hive when he’s done with himself.

She apologises to the boy as she stumbles past. He nods vaguely, as if dreaming.

Avett leaps over the counter and swipes a random cardkey off the rack. He throws it over to Lili, who juggles with it in her hands before she manages to get a hold of it. “Third ship from the left. Get to it, princess. I'm opening up the hangar."

She slaps the card against the lock panel of the corresponding ship. When Lili looks back at the entrance, she finds that the boy has already left. He’ll be contacting someone soon by the looks of it.

They’ve really dug themselves into a hole this time.

In no time flat, they’ve gone into the ship and locked the doors for good measure. Avett stands at the controls, his hands balled into fists as he looks through the navigation panels.

 "You know how to pilot, right?" asks Lili.

He grits his teeth and swipes at the panels. Lili hears a sputter from the engine room when he does, and from there she feels her stomach drop as the ship lifts from the ground.

"Of course." He keeps his eyes on the view outside his windshield. Save for a few runway lights, it's completely dark outside. Lili hopes that Avett's eyesight is enough to make up for it.

She looks at his hands. They're quivering in the air. "You’re sure?"

"It's a commercial junker. They're meant to be accessible." He releases a breath to blow his bangs out of his eyes. "Even a kid could pilot one if they wanted to."

Lili isn't satisfied with his answer. He's still trembling like a twig, and his hands aren't moving anymore. This isn't normal, and it's not like he doesn't know how to operate the navigation panel, because he'd swiped through them just fine earlier. There's something blocking him from doing anything more than turning on the engines. A mental blockade.

The boy could be back with someone any moment now. If they're planning on going ahead with their joyride they need to leave very soon. Lili can't figure out why Avett's decided to lock up now of all times; she can hear his breathing, can feel the way his chest is heaving from all of the extra panicking he's put himself through. He can't pilot jack shit. He's lied straight to Lili's face.

"Avett," she begins. "If you can't—"

"I can, ok?" His voice breaks on the last syllable, and he stops himself by slapping a hand over his mouth. He spends a few seconds like this as he tries to steady his breathing. It doesn't work.

Lili doesn't know what to do. "If you can't, it's ok."

"I can fucking pilot. I can." He braces himself against the counter. Lili can tell from his voice alone that he's started to cry. "What kind of mechanic doesn't know how to drive a commercial? I piloted a mercenary ship full of dead fucking bodies all the way back to headquarters. I know how to fucking pilot."

She freezes in place. Avett draws in a breath and sniffs.

"You have trauma," Lili says slowly.

"No, I don't."

"You do."

Avett doesn't respond to that. Maybe she can get through to him if she tries.

She takes a step towards him. "You need to breathe. Step away from the controls—"

He whirls on her, his features as fierce as a cornered animal.  "No. I. Don't. I don't have jack shit. Look at me; I'm fine. I'm not traumatized, because if I was I wouldn't be working, I would be fucking bedridden, or in a ward, or literally anywhere else but here. I'm not, I’m here, I’m an arms specialist and I’m working. So I'm fine."

She's heard those words before. He is not fine.

"Then go on." She rescinds that step forward and folds her arms. "Go ahead, I guess. Pilot your ship."

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what he does. He turns back to the counter, and though Lili can’t see his expression she knows that there’s all sorts of shit swirling in those eyes of his. His hands hover over the panel. They hang there for a bit longer. Until he balls them into fists again. Until he slumps forward against the counter, seemingly never to stand again.

Then he screams. It’s a terrible, terrible sound—one that leaves even the ship shivering in its wake. “Fuck. Fuck! Why?”

Lili stays where she is. Maybe she shouldn’t have egged him on. He’s on the floor now, and the only thing keeping his body upright is the fact that he’s refusing to let go of the control panel. And for the first time in a while, Lili is all too aware of just how old Avett really is.

“I just want to go,” he sobs. “We can’t be here. I’ve spent my entire life working just to get here. I even came back from therapy for this, and no merc comes back from therapy, not how I did. I’m not letting some fucking backwater Human, or some red tape bullshit, or—or this—ruin my future.”

When Lili tries to move closer, Avett fixes her with an ice-cold glare. “You know things would be better if you’d just stayed in that shitty shed of yours.”

“I know.” She storms forward anyway. There’s a rattling near the entrance; no doubt it’s the boy and his authoritative figure. Lili needs to make her move now. Even if Avett is going to hate her for it.

Without hesitation, she grabs Avett by the arms.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he screeches.

“Pulling you out of the way.”

With her ether roiling and rioting against her muscles, there’s not a lot Avett can do against her except struggle in vain. He’s strong, yes—but he’s not ethereally enhanced, brutishly strong. He’s not ‘punch-through-a-ward-with-nothing-but-his-rage’ strong.

When she finally puts him up against the wall, it dawns on him regarding what she’s about to do. “I’m getting a real sense of deja vu from this situation, Lilith.”

“Tell me how to pilot the ship.”

Avett scrunches up his face.

Stubborn asshole. "Do you want to get out of here or not?"

He grits his teeth. "...Set the thrusters to manual and put it on 50%."

Lili looks down at the panels. This is all white noise to her. Which one dictates the thrust? Why would she want to tamper with the thrust power in the first place? Is there a reason why she needs to give the ship such a complicated command if it's 'just a 'commercial junker'? Shouldn't it all be streamlined already?

"The blue button on the bottom to your left, princess."

Oh, bottom left. Of course. But when she looks down in that general direction, there's a cluster of tiny boxes and numbers blinking back at her in response.

"There's a million buttons here, Avett."

"Yeah, but one of them says 'thruster' on it. You press that one, princess."

"None of these say 'thruster' on them."

"There should be. Look harder."

"You've never had to work in retail, and it shows."

"Fuck you. Look harder."

She can't physically fucking look any harder, because if she could she'd have vertically slitted eyes and a pair of swivelling cat ears. There is no thruster button. It just isn't there.

Lili moves the goalposts. In a stroke of genius, she actually manages to flick the ship back into basic mode. The panels flicker out of existence before they return as one big rectangle in the centre of the counter. There are little icons for every option; granted, she's not quite sure what the icon with the man kneeling is supposed to represent, but she knows she can at least make use of this. At least, she hopes. Where's the button that’ll make this ship fly?

Avett grumbles in the corner. "Top right. Press it, slide it forward, and you'll send us flying out of here."

"Is that a good thing?"

Her partner lifts his head just high enough to see out of the windshield. "It's a good thing if you want to knock that sanctuary enforcer right onto his ass."

Enforcer? She peers outside. There’s a Palerian man in a smartly ironed uniform, and he’s yelling all sorts of nice things at the cockpit. At least, that’s what Lili thinks he’s doing. The thick glass ensures that Lili can’t hear a single thing from him.

“He’s not going to shoot at us, right?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, he pulls her down below the window. “Don’t let him see you,” he hisses.

Lili sucks in a breath through her teeth before slamming her fist into the topmost button. A slider appears; she lets it rise all the way to the right.

They’re still not moving.

She waits a bit before trying again. A bit too long. Something foul takes over her head, and she stumbles back from the counter. It’s like there’s a hand reaching inside of her skull, like someone’s taken their fingers and stuck them between her brain folds and wriggled them right through. They’ve started scratching around now—how can she feel all of this? Oh, god.

All of a sudden, it’s Avett standing next to her. He’s rolling down the windows and pointing his blaster outside. Lili can’t tell if he actually fires it, but what she does know is that the pain is gone, and that she has Avett to thank for that.

He flashes a glance at the counter before turning away again. “Auto pilot, top left. The ship’s still in manual mode, so your gear’s stuck on neutral.”

She presses that, and at last does the ship begin to teeter forward. 

They’re leaving.

They’re finally leaving.

Now it’s Lili’s turn to slump down against the counter. There’s a stupid, giddy little grin on her face as she watches the view change from machines and metals to night skies and milky ways. She releases a breath. The stars could kiss her silly, and she wouldn’t even give a damn. She’s always belittled Icarus for flying too close to the sun, but now she can see the specifics of why he’d done such a thing in the first place.

They’re free.

Avett sits down beside her. He’s close enough for her to feel his heat against her shoulders, but far enough for him to send a message. That’s ok. He can take as long as he wants, Lili thinks.

Then he shoots right back up again. “The tracker. I gotta take it out.”

Lili peers over as he rummages through his toolbelt and pulls out what appears to be a curved piece of metal. He sticks it between a gap in the counter and pries the surface off; the navigation panel automatically dulls to a soft grey.

More white noise for Lili to get confused over—or black noise, for that matter. The inside of the counter is a tidy arrangement of black wires and black boxes that mean nothing to Lili, but everything to Avett.

“Wow,” he mumbles. “Just my luck.”

“What’s wrong?”

He reaches into the counter and closes his hands around one particular box. “They’ve really upped their game since I last looked at one of these. They’ve started sticking the sonar trackers into the actual navigators, meaning if we don’t want them to catch us—”

With a grunt, Avett yanks the box clean off the wires. Sparks fly haphazardly from where he’s exposed the copper; he slams down the lid and hammers it back into place with his fist. “—We’ll have to pretty much navigate to New Therius in the dark. Shouldn't be too hard; the autopilot already had us in the right direction. I’m chucking this out the trash chute.”

When he comes back to navigation—thankfully—empty handed, he plops back down next to Lili. Same position, same distance… different demeanor.

“Why the fuck did you let me do this, Lili?” he asks.

She shrugs. “I thought it was a phase. That it’d blow over.”

Being ten kilometres above ground and having shot several warning shots at an enforcer, Lili guesses that it’s safe to say none of this will be ‘blowing over’ anytime soon. She slumps further into the ground. How she wishes that the floor would just swallow her up and spit her out into freefall.

Her next words quite literally tumble out of her. “And maybe I wanted to run away too.”

Avett breathes out hard enough to make his bangs flutter again. He’s not exasperated—instead, he’s smiling and biting back what seems to be a laugh. “Why is it that sometimes you feel every bit your age, and other times you feel… I don’t know. Fourteen?”

“What does that make you?” She gives him a lopsided grin. “Thirteen? Twelve?”

He rolls his eyes. “There’s no way you’re older than me.”

“I uh. I am.”

A snort. “Fucking get out. You’re twenty-one?”

“By four years, actually.” She holds up four fingers; Avett counts them with his eyes. “I turn twenty-four this year.”

He coughs and inches away, his ears drooping. “Now you really don’t have an excuse.”

Whatever. Lili goes back to staring at the wall in silence. They sit like that for a bit. The ground hums with energy at her shoes.

Lili is all too eager to rid the ship of that awkward void. "Do they have beds here?"

"Sleeping amenities should be on the right down that corridor. Pretty much the same layout we've got—just missing an armoury."

"Right. Right."

Thankfully, when Lili peeks into the sleeping quarters she's greeted with the delightful presence of two single beds. She flops onto the mattress, pulls out the sheets, and finds that they stick to her bare legs like cling film—these covers have not been washed in a while. At least there won't be any of that bed sharing nonsense, though when Avett steps into the room the first thing he does is—

Lili narrows her eyes. What the fuck is he doing?

He pulls his bed away from the wall, vaults over, then pushes it across so that one side presses up flush against Lili's bed.

"Wait." Lili tries to get up and stop him, but by the time she's sitting up Avett is already lying next to her with a grin that even a court jester would be jealous of. He's effectively caged her in like this.

"What's the matter? We're just two friends sharing a bed." He raises an eyebrow. "Nothing wrong with a little platonic bed sharing."

"Friends."

"Nothing more, nothing less," he says. This is coming from the guy who has no qualms about having casual sex above a bar. Who's had casual sex above a bar, for that matter, while drunk and irrationally upset. It doesn't help one bit when Avett adds, with a bit of a guttural roll to his voice, "Unless?"

Lili flips herself over and presses her face into the wall.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Look, I'll pull them apart again."

The bed frame rattles against the floor. Lili looks over her shoulder, and, lo and behold, Avett is now lying a good metre or two away from her. He's not totally against the wall, but it seems like he needs the company tonight. She supposes that she'll allow it.

"After we're done at New Therius, is there anywhere else you’d like to go?”

Lili thinks on this for a second. “The Human village.”

Avett’s silence speaks volumes.

She continues, “They’re almost defenseless out there. I want to give them any edge against the dragons that I can.”

“You’re forgetting that they’ve got an entire warehouse of firearms at their disposal.”

“Still.” She curls into her covers. They’re too thin to provide any sort of meaningful protection from the cold, and they’re certainly far too thin to protect her from Avett’s overpowering presence. “I don’t want to leave them there. Not alone. Not like that.”

For a moment, all Lili hears is the shuffle of sheets against sheets. Then the lights flick off, and she’s left to stare at the wall in complete darkness.

“Problem with that plan is they’ll know we’ll be there too.”

“There’s no way we’re that important to them, right?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Avett crawls back into his bed. Lili can feel his gaze boring into her from behind. “The world cares a whole lot more about money than you’d think.”

Lili chooses not to respond. It seems that, as usual, she’s unaware of the scope of the crime that they’ve committed. That, and Avett had taken a few shots at an enforcer earlier—the world definitely did care about things other than money. Avett just doesn’t want to admit to his blunder, and Lili doesn’t blame him for that at all. Admitting to anything would start him down on a long line of dominos, would send him spiralling down regret after regret. He would be forced to watch his carefully constructed world crumble around him, and he would be helpless to it all.

Though Lili wants badly to talk to him about the events that had occurred in the cockpit, she thinks against it. That same helplessness rests in the eye of the beholder, and they’re one misaligned conversation away from total collapse.

Lili speaks to the wall instead. “Goodnight, Avett Ironsturm.”

And of course, he’s already asleep.

16: the blunder

 Alexei doesn't ask for tea, but Auren serves him a special Gallian blend anyway. This is served with a plate of synthetic milk biscuits that Lili knows that Alexei knows are dry as hell. Alexei accepts them and puts one in his mouth without hesitation, because as he's already established during their first meeting he's either extremely polite, or a psychopath.

Lili doesn't mind which one he is. She knows, however, that Avett—who is currently bouncing his shoulder against the wall as he sulks in his corner—does mind. And she's sure that Avett has already made up his mind regarding which one Alexei is.

The way Alexei puts his teacup back onto the table brings Lili back to his attention quickly. He'd done it with enough force to rattle the plate, but not enough to spill his drink.

“I’m rather impressed with your aptitude for ethereal manipulation, Lili," he says.

A flush spreads across her cheeks. "Th-thank you."

Avett groans loudly, but makes no further comment. Alexei continues his gushing unabated: "Hard to believe you're self taught. Most Humans fail to display an aptitude for ether. You're a breath of fresh air."

Good for a Human, but pathetically useless when it comes to the times that had mattered. She shrugs off his compliment this time. What good is being good if none of it applies well on the field? Or when you've lost nearly all capability for it? she adds as an afterthought.

It's here that Auren chooses to butt in. "She has trained under my tutelage for a period of time."

This elicits a chuckle from Alexei. "Sounded tough. Is Gallian theory easy or difficult to work with?"

Lili shrugs again. All Auren has taught her is how to manifest an adequate shield, one that won't pop moments after impact. Gallian theory doesn't sound so bad when she thinks about it in hindsight, but she feels as if she's only scratched the surface of centuries worth of content.

Her mentor doesn’t give in quite so easily, instead choosing to strike where he wants to hit. "You referred to your existence as a 'Human-Hybrid.'" Auren leans forward, his eyes inquisitive. "What would you be a hybrid of, specifically?"

"Chinese and Russian." Alexei's smile is impeccable. Lili tries to hide her own smile.

Auren’s features remain unchanged. It’s the resident sulker that refreshes his throat. "You know damn well that's not what he meant."

“Ah, you were referring to this?” Alexei lifts his hand into the air, and a thread of blue smoke twists out of the air and into his palm where it eddies around for a bit. Then he flicks his wrist, and the smoke dissipates into a fine, scented mist. Strangely enough, it smells of burnt lavenders and smouldering charcoals—not of the fruity aromas she’d expected from such an elegant display.

Auren’s features narrow as he regards the mist with caution. “I suppose that this is the technique you used on Avett, allegedly.”  

“Yes, but I would prefer not to disclose my ‘mixed heritage’ at this time.”

"This isn't important." Ysh'vanna hasn't touched her tea at all. "What's important is that you explain to us exactly why we're not getting our pay, and why it's so important that you have to talk to all of us at once."

Right now, the room is divided between those who enjoy the idea of Avett getting the shit hit out of him, and those who are vehemently against that very same idea. Ysh'vanna is sided with the latter, Lili thinks. This is the kind of response that’s expected after witnessing such nonchalant violence from a man who only knows his way around a smile.

And crap, he's smiling right now. Right at Lili.

Alexei says, “You’re all let off."

It takes a moment for the words to actually do Alexei's bidding. It's like they've hit the surface of the water too hard, and it's taking a comically long while for anything to sink in.

He takes this moment to continue. "You can’t have a Human working onboard like this. IRC licenses don’t count as official personal identification, for one, and that’s not mentioning all of the legal loopholes you’ve jumped through just to have her on board.” His smile turns feral as he regards the blank look on Lili's face. “Cashing in on that 20% Human discount for ship facilities, I’d imagine, hm?”

It's almost comical how quickly Avett jumps at the chance to berate Auren. “You said you got all the legal shit out of the way—”

“We have.” Auren pushes away from his chair, meeting Alexei’s eyes with ease. “We intend to take her back to Therius during our month of sabbatical.”

Below him, Ysh’vanna claws into her stomach, her eyes wide and glazed over.

Alexei doesn’t buy into it and remains seated. “So in other words, you ‘intend’ for her to work without identification nor tax for over two months. An apt idea.”

“Tax fraud? You're accusing us of fax fraud? I implore you to take one good look at that man—” Avett jabs a finger at Auren, who holds his chin just a touch higher upon realising that he’s on the receiving end of his colleague’s insult. “—And tell me that we look like the type of people to commit tax fraud."  

“Appearances can be deceiving. I’m sure you’re already quite well acquainted with that fact, Mr—”

“Ironsturm. It’s Ironsturm.”  
 
Alexei’s smile falters. “...Mr Ironsturm.”

The act of kindness bounces right off Avett; he looks like he might start spitting into the man’s face at any moment.

With a low voice, Ysh’vanna starts to speak again. “You said you didn’t have the money. But now you’re saying that you’re an IRC official?”

“I suppose I withheld the specifics of my position back there. Your team simply no longer qualifies for your monetary reward. I lied because I couldn’t have you throwing an even bigger fit than you already were in public.”

Ysh’vanna visibly shrinks as she considers his words. Avett storms up to the man himself. “So you were lying—”

“For convenience.”

“—Liar, filthy, fucking, Human liar—”  

Auren takes this opportunity to push him aside.

“Suppose we take Lili off our team,” he suggests. “Will you reconsider your choice of action then?”

Lili's heart skips a beat, but Alexei shakes his head.

“Unlikely. What the IRC demands is final. And as of late, they've been demanding quite a bit from me." He shrugs. "I can only ask for you and your crew to make it easier for me."

What the IRC demands. Lili lets the words sink in for a bit before she really allows herself to comprehend what they mean. She’s fucked up so badly that the IRC wants her—and her team—to suffer for it. She doesn't know how it might impact them, whether or not it'll leave an irrevocable marr on their records. They'll be jobless, sure, but what about the future? And how easy would it be for them to find work again? Avett could work for his dad’s friend again, but what about Auren and Ysh'vanna? Hell, if they gave in and threw them all into detainment or whatever they had on Therius she wouldn't be surprised.

As if this wasn't enough, Alexei turns to Lili and says, "A shame, truly. Had your teammates exercised even an ounce of caution, you would've made a fine frontline caster. Alas, this was not the case, and now you are the cause of your very team's disbandment."

Avett folds his arms tightly across his chest, his mouth opening and closing like he has something he wants to say. From the way he's glaring daggers into the general vicinity, she's willing to bet that he's trying his hardest not to choke both her and Alexei out on the spot. She doesn't blame him—she's the one who had to make a nuisance of herself when she begged the team to let her onboard. She's the one who did this.

And yet she still manages to splutter out, "This isn't fair."

"Not many things are, Lili." Alexei looks to the ground, as if basking in his self-mockery. "Not every ending receives a neat little ribbon. You should understand this better than anyone else."

It takes a moment for Lili to recognise who he's referring to. How had he known? She doesn't quite care. The taste in her mouth curdles into a sour tang, and she clenches her fists in retaliation. The way her nails dig into her hands hurts her in a way that keeps all that rising bile and rage in check. And she needs that control right now.

"Lilith," Avett breathes. He's next to her in seconds, but she puts up a hand, signalling for him to stop. As if she needs support from the one guy who hates her the most on this fucking ship.

"Go," is all Lili has to offer to this absolute creep of a Human.

His features turn deadly, but Lili knows that she could be mistaken; all she can see right now is red. "I can see why she chose to leave you that day, Lili."

She strides up to him until he's less than a metre away and, most importantly, within punching distance. She's not thinking straight, but then again, she doesn't want to; her rage rushes through her veins unbridled, sweeps through her arms like liquid ice against metal, culminating, naturally, into something Avett would pull.

A punch.

Her knuckles stop against that same shield. No matter how hard her ether strains through her body, she can't make it through. She doesn't need to, she thinks; she just needs something to exert her strength upon, something to hit without repercussion.

But then she catches Alexei's hardening expression. He looks as if he could start desecrating Ava's legacy at any moment. That's when she realises that hitting his shield isn't enough—she needs to knock that grin right off his face and into the flooring.

Lili's hand shudders against the invisible force. There's something sinister about wishing ill will onto another person, or another Human for that matter, but she shoulders on anyway. In fact, she welcomes this newfound darkness with open arms. Let them see how angry she is.

Let them know.

The barrier shatters to bits under her knuckles. Her fist sails through the air, whistling like a foam dart as it does, and lands squarely against Alexei's jaw. Lili stumbles, but regains that footing easily. Her adversary, however, trips back onto his ass.

Everything after that plays out in blurry stop motion. Alexei is cradling his face, but he's not making any attempt to retaliate. When familiar arms latch onto her from behind she catches the barest hint of black smoke at the edges of her vision, as if she hasn't just punched a hole through Alexei's defenses, but burned through it. It smells like it too, like she's heating coals in a kiln. What she would do to punch him again.

She manages to regain focus. Avett is holding her by the armpits, and he's screaming all sorts of nasty things into her ear, like "calm down," and "are you fucking stupid?" Despite his tone, Lili does find his presence to be soothing somewhat, and soon her heart rate starts slowing into a steady rhythm again.

Alexei is in another world entirely. He blinks at her. He mutters something under his breath about sending the legal specifics of their dischargement from the forces, but it's clear that he's mentally somewhere else. As if he's stuck in an alcohol-induced dream, he hobbles out of the ship and down the fold-out stairs.

The doors slide shut. And Lili realises, with a pounding in her gut, that she's just punched what could be an IRC official, and made him leave not in shame—

 —But in god damn awe.