24: the prep

A western standoff.

That's what this is, thinks Lili. Kashira on one side, the rest of the crew on the other. Auren's brows are crossed and his bottom lip is slightly jutting out, while Ysh'vanna's fingers are knitted and resting in front of her. Avett is standing with his arms folded; his attention is clearly elsewhere.

And the girl of the hour, Kashira Hellsborne, looks about as pale as a red-hued individual can get.

"My name is Kashira," she says with her eyes glued to the table. "My specialisation is casting, and I can do both front and backline, though I wasn't able to get my license before all of this happened…"

She gestures to the air vaguely, allowing her hands to waver for a split second too long before dropping them back to her sides. Lili tries not to grimace, but Avett catches her thinned-out lips anyway.

He shoots her a look. Just as bad as you, princess.

Lili isn't going to bother with giving him a second glance.

"That's fair." Ysh'vanna nods. "We could use a bit more manpower at the back."

Auren coughs. "I beg your pardon?"

The captain turns to her backline caster, her eyes filled with both apology and hard-set steel. "It'll be healthy for you in the long run, Draksparrow. You've always needed a helper back there."

He looks to Kashira, then leans into Ysh'vanna's ear and lowers his voice. "She is not Eldrakian, and I have gotten by with your presence quite fine."

"Keyword is by, Auren." Without a care for subtlety, she projects her voice over the table for the little caster to hear. "Now you'll have someone to watch your back and to teach in our downtimes."

Auren opens his mouth to object, but one more glare from Ysh'vanna sets him straight and silent.

"Moving on," she continues as she shifts that absolute gaze back over to Kashira. "The IRC's got a strict eye on who passes through Earth's inter-realm portals, and you don't seem to have a license. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything just yet, but how'd you get through?"

Doe-like eyes meet cold, hard steel. "School trip."

"S-school trip?" Ysh'vanna tips her head in incredulence.

"Yes."

She turns to her crew with a nervous chuckle. "They're letting kids go sightseeing on Earth now?"

Avett shrugs. "It's true. Visited in my second year."

Ysh'vanna sucks in a breath through her clenched teeth. Lili doesn't blame her. Earth is a hellscape that serves to remind the off-landers of what they could lose should they fail to defend their respective realms from the Migration—to bring vulnerable, young people to such a desolate world feels tasteless, like the equivalent of taking fourth graders to a slaughterhouse.

"Explains where our fifteen percent’s going,” Ysh’vanna mumbles, but her smile is sardonic. She lets the warmth reach her eyes once she notices the worry on Kashira’s features. “Don’t worry, you’re fine. It’s just housekeeping to know where our colleagues come from.”

“Colleagues,” Kashira says, coughing, “but I don’t have my license yet.”

Avett steps forward. “Neither did Lilith here. Plucked her right from a broken down shack in the middle of the Hive wilds. You’re far from unqualified, believe me.”

Lili expects the girl to heave a sigh of relief, but she fixes Avett with a genuine grin instead. “That’s amazing,” she says. “You’re all amazing.”

“Uh, right. Thanks.” It’s Avett’s turn to grimace now. It’s slight enough for Kashira not to notice, but obvious enough for Lili to know that something’s up.

Following Kashira’s initiation is a steaming platter of various Therian roots for lunch, of which the girl scarfs down with gusto. Midway through the meal she bites down on her tongue in her excitement, and though she tries to hide the accident, it doesn’t go unnoticed by Lili. She wonders how long it’s been since Kashira’s last, tangible meal. She wonders how she’s been fed for the past few years for that matter.

Lili doesn’t ask, because that would be rude.

After showing Kashira around the layout of the Winnow, Lili decides to mess around a bit before bed and to sit against the outer wall of the ship with her bottle of Gallian blue wine. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it—the liquor flows down her throat like she’s drinking hot sand, and the taste is sweet enough to induce a headache in one sip. It’s all she’s got right now though, and at this point Lili isn’t sure if she’s looking to get drunk or if she just likes the taste of alcohol.

She snorts. The taste of alcohol, really? She uncaps the bottle, pinches her nose, and tilts her head to the sky. It tastes like shit, and she has to fight the urge to immediately hurl.

“That’s really pathetic.”

Someone snatches the bottle out of her grasp, and Lili has to squint through her teary eyes to see the perpetrator. His blue jacket and cat-like silhouette gives his identity away.

“What is—?” she tries to spit out, but the stench of alcohol is acting as an impromptu gag order on her. Avett sighs and drops down next to her. He examines the bottle with narrowed eyes.

“Gallian blue…” he says. “You’re really just going to chug this by yourself? It’s literally syrup. It’s disgusting.”

“Auren gave it to me.” Lili swipes at her mouth with a sleeve.

“Of course.”

“There’s a lot of history behind its taste.”

“History doesn’t matter if you’re sitting out here, moping around by yourself and drinking the candyman’s ejaculate. What’s up?”

Lili keeps her mouth shut. By now the alcohol should have settled into her head as a steady thrum, but it’s as if she’d never had it in the first place. She jerks her chin at the bottle in Avett’s hands.

He groans and fills the cap with wine. “Fine.”   

She watches him swallow and wince. Then he pours another cap and hands it to Lili.

They take turns pouring each other the wine. Around the twentieth pass, Avett holds his hand out to stop her and coughs into his sleeve. Lili puts down the bottle, and it touches the asphalt with a clack.

“I’m fucked,” he gasps out. “Put that shit away.”

She does as he says and screws the cap back on. He is indeed, as he says, totally ‘fucked’—his face is flushed beyond belief, and his breathing has turned sporadic. Lili’s not sure why he’d chosen to have that much—getting drunk fucking sucks in the long run—but she knows he’s probably got several reasons as to why his mood’s in the gutter. She knows how much Avett despises the mere idea of having to potentially meet with another A ranker. She knows that the money Alexei is offering to them is nothing to scoff at either. Avett has been left with a once in a lifetime opportunity worth ditching all morals for, and that leaves him in an awkward position.

Lili is scared too—rightfully so. She’s felt the presence of an A rank before, has bathed in its power like a child at a hot spring. There’s no need for her to remember the encounter—her body can recall the meeting with startling accuracy, as if that power had already been engraved into her DNA from the very beginning.

“H-how?”

She looks back at her partner. He’s blinking at her slowly, like he’s trying to comprehend the incomprehensible for the first time.

Lili asks, “How what?”

“You’re not drunk…”

She touches a hand to her cheek—there’s no Asian flush, and there aren’t any red splotches on her hands either. “I told you, ever since Ava di—”

“I fucking know you’re tolerant,” he snaps. “But this shit isn’t normal. Look at me, then look at you. We’ve been matching each other drink for drink, and you were drinking before I even got here.”

Lili falls silent.

He continues, “You know, when we flew over to the Hive after the mission, I caught Alexei drinking… fuck, probably rubbing alcohol or something. It was green, and all he did was smile at me and hide the bottle under his desk like some fucking chronic drunk. Smelt like shit, but it was potent, I could tell.”

Absinthe. “Drinking from the bottle?” Lili asks.

“From a glass. Prick’s too up his own ass to drink from the bottle, but he’ll chug it if it’s in some fancy glassware.”

Same difference, she thinks. “What are you getting at?”

“What was Ava?” he asks, his voice soft yet demanding.

She shrugs. Friend? Foe? Has Lili ever known?

“I don’t mean like what she meant to you, dumbass. I meant biologically. I meant if she shat from the same hole she pissed from or if she had scales or anything, because I’m starting to put two and two together and it’s all adding up to five. I’m missing something.”

“Why do you care?”

“It’s not a crime to want to know things, princess.”

“You’re nosy.”

"Bet there's a reason why you're not answering with a simple 'Human,' huh."

Lili coughs. Despite Avett's intoxicated state, he's still managed to catch her in one of his verbal traps. A single moment of hesitation is all the confirmation that he needs.

"She did this to you," he mumbles, "didn't she? She's the reason why you're never drunk, why you're an overseer. Just like Alexei."

Lili doesn't respond. Avett isn't a mind reader, but he might as well be one. She wants to tell him all about her past, she really does, but that would mean sewing together the chasm between the spoken word and the unspoken traumas of Ava's untimely death. Lili doesn't know if she can cross that gap yet as she is now, let alone if she ever will. Hell is to lose your tongue in the presence of your caregivers, and she'd gotten rid of her lips a long time ago.

Avett resumes staring off into the abyss of Alexei's makeshift hangar. "Bear with me for a second longer. I need to drop my sorrows off somewhere as well."

She leans against the ship. Go ahead.

"Think the new recruit… has a crush on me."

"I think you're delusional."

"Ok, hear me out. Have you seen how she looks at me?" He shivers; Lili wonders if he’s shivering out of disgust or if it's the alcohol. "Big, teardrop eyes, over-friendly disposition—"

"I think she just looks like that."

"I'm not trying to convince you that she's got the hots for me, and that I want to get with her. I'm trying to tell you that she's seventeen and I'm twenty, so it's weird as shit, and she's also a bit overbearing."

She bobs her head in acknowledgement, though she’s definitely still skeptical.

Avett snorts. "Just because you've never had someone fall in love with you, doesn't mean that it can't happen to someone else. Don't be so bitter."

"Wow, aren't you the love expert."

"With this face? Of course I am."

"Bet you've got people pining after you all the time too," Lili mumbles under her breath. "Lucky cunt."

Her partner straightens himself quickly, his ears swivelling into formation as a wide grin stretches across his face. "Did I just hear what I think I just heard?"

"What?" Lili grumbles.

"Was that a pickup line? For me?"

Her mood sours like a bottle of milk that's been left out in the midday January sun. She thinks of setting him straight, to defend her innocence like a man on trial, but she stops her outburst and clamps her lips shut, because that's exactly what Avett wants—to make a spluttering mess out of Lili.

"In your dreams," she manages to spit out.

"Lilith, I'm gonna be honest." He's wobbling on the spot now like he's forgotten how to balance himself. "If someone held a blaster up to my head and told me to fuck someone aboard the Winnow, I would take that gun and shoot me myself. But if suicide wasn't an option, well…"

Lili stands up. "I have to go."

"No—please!" He latches onto her ankle like she's just walked off with his precious GlassLink. "Don't go, please Lilith!"

She stares him down from her vantage point. He really is, as he's said before, 'totally fucked.' If his confession hadn't convinced her of his inebriated state before, his completely reddened face and drooling maw does.

Finally, a whimper escapes his lips, and he buries his face into the concrete. "I drank too much. I need you to hold my hair back."

Lili can tell that he needs all the help that he can get.

—

"You know, if you're trying to convince your captain that you two aren't romantically involved, you're doing a pretty bad job by sneaking out and drinking by yourselves."

Lili flinches at the touch of Ysh'vanna's sharp words. She'd caught the two of them last night on their way back from Alexei's bathrooms, and she hadn’t been pleased about it at all. She hadn't said a word as Lili and Avett passed her on their way up the ship, but Lili had known her stance on things by the way she'd asked for them to hand over the bottle of Gallian blue: with a hand on her popped hip, and a completely still face.

"I'm not like Auren, ok?" She quickens her pace in order to match Lili's stride. "I like shooting the shit and getting drunk. Don't drink without me next time, especially not by yourselves."

Lili doesn't even bother looking at Avett for help. His eyes have sunken into his face, leaving dark circles above his cheeks, and he's walking like a zombie that's seen his fair share of reanimations. Occasionally, he'd hold his head in one shaky hand and groan; a testament to his manic-fuelled binge last night.

And of course, Lili is absolutely fine. Just like the bona fide overseer that she is.

They round the corner into the main hall, where Kata’lana waits for them with what looks to be a clipboard in hand. On closer inspection, Lili sees various transparent windows floating on the surface of something that can only be defined as an enlarged GlassLink.

The Draconian taps a finger into her screen, and the board turns opaque. “Been waiting. About ten minutes.”

At first, nobody answers the plucky girl. Then Avett says, “It’s ten thirty. We’re on time.”

“I know. Just saying.” She turns before Avett can fire an answer back at her. “Follow. Alexei is in the basement.”

Ignoring the ominous subtext of what ‘the basement’ could possibly be, they trail Kata’lana to the door at the end of the hall, whereupon she slaps her ID against a scanner. The doors slide open, and she beckons to the others as she takes her first step down a zig-zagging line of steep stairs.

For the remainder of the trip, Kata’lana is as silent as a brick wall. The walls hug the edges of the staircase tightly for the first few flights, but then the corridor falls away to reveal a large, open laboratory that's not unlike the one they'd visited in New Therius. All similarities end there, however—the interior is warmly lit like an old library, and instead of vats, there are rows upon rows of bric-a-brac. Lili can spot a tea cup, a plastic golden cane, and a bag of glossy marbles all in one corner. It takes a moment for her to recognise that these are artifacts.

Kata'lana takes them between a maze of tightly packed and towering bookshelves before they reach their destination. Like a clearing in a forest, the room opens up to a glade of worn-down sofas, scraggly rugs and time-weathered tables. Alexei sits in the midst of all this, reclining in a beige lazy boy with a hardback novel and his chin tilted into a hand, surrounded by all sorts of old tomes from the era of God knows when. Kashira is already sitting a good few metres away from him in her own chair.

"Bought them," Kata'lana says.

Alexei snaps his book shut. "Welcome to my true study, esteemed guests and Avett. Please, take a seat.”

“Classy,” Avett mumbles.

The crew find their seats around the central pile of rugs. The chair Lili’s sitting on is made out of faux leather, and it has already begun to flake off at the armrests, revealing their tattered insides for the world to see. It’s hard for Lili to get comfortable when it feels like a spider could crawl up her leg at any moment, but she manages to relax after fixing her eyes back on Alexei and Kata’lana.

“As you are aware, Kashira and Lili are the keys to liberating Earth and the rest of the realms, both discovered and undiscovered, from the threat of any further Migrations.” Alexei motions to Kata’lana, who nods in approval. All of Alexei’s information is gathered and sifted through mostly by the younger Draconian woman, Lili realises, and it is Alexei’s job to navigate diplomatic matters with his silver tongue.

“Thing is. It’s impossible for Kashira to channel the ether she needs to create the prophecy that we need concurrently. Even with Lili overfuelling Kashira with her unique ether, her body will only be able to hold an excess of twenty milliliters, for a total of roughly one hundred milliliters—the minimum amount of ether that she needs would be around five hundred.” Kata'lana rolls up her sleeves, then unfolds them again; Lili recognises this as a nervous habit. “However, her status as a New Order Gallian means we can give her ether capabilities a bit of oomf. And so I present to you: the Catalyst.”

She reveals a holographic model display on her GlassLink. With a flick of her fingers, she sets the model spinning. The Catalyst consists of several layers of round shells which rotate about a central object—further observation shows that the central object has yet to be modelled; this must be where the artifact goes. The other mechanisms are far too complicated for a layman such as Lili to grasp, but Avett seems to be looking intently at the model like he’s reading from an intriguing book.

Before Kata’lana can explain her contraption, Avett says, “You know that the chance of using any kind of draconic artifact as a battery without repercussion is next to zero, right? This thing is more likely to blow up in your face than to actually work.”

The scientist flicks her eyes at Lili, then back at Avett. “It’s possible to restore their functionality by using Kashira’s affinity. And from the scale of such a feat, it shouldn’t be too demanding for her. Not on the scale of ending a thousand year phenomenon that spans multiple planes of reality, no.” She motions at the rotating model, and it phases out of existence.

Avett sits back, satisfied for now.

Alexei picks up where his assistant left off. "As Kata'lana has garnered from the IRC's weekly reports, there appears to be a high amount of draconic activity surrounding the area between New Therius and the Afflatus. Though the Palatable yet remains in the area, it should not prove a threat to any well-versed mercenary team—as we've already stated, A07 exudes no aura."

Kata'lana taps at her GlassLink a few times, and another hologram bursts into the air. This one is a painstakingly created replica of the Palatable, and to the side is a comprehensive biographical analysis of its capabilities. Lili squints at the miniature dragon; though the mesh isn’t coloured, she knows that the Palatable has scales of hot white, and that its eyes aren’t black and beady like the Equaliser’s, but wide and vivid. She swallows and tries her best to ignore the sting of bile at the back of her throat.

Kata’lana continues, "We're using A07's artifacts because of this dragon's aptitude for ether storage and control. Research from the last Migration states that the reason why A07 doesn't have an aura is because of its acute command over ether. It has the ability to release its aura in controlled bursts instead, and thus, it would be logical to conclude that it would also be able to store large amounts of ether without straining its body for long periods of time. As such, each specimen is highly adaptable, and the specifics of their abilities vary to suit the demands of their environment. Traits such as these are something Kashira would heavily benefit from, but its precise control over its aura will likely have a hallucinogenic effect on your mind should you somehow alert A07 to your position." She pushes a strand of white hair behind her ear and falls silent again.

"You'll be heading into the contact zone within the week, and you’re expected to come back alive, so I would suggest studying up," muses Alexei. "Kata'lana will send all of this data to your 'Links; I highly recommend a thorough sifting. They're her own collated notes on the beast, afterall."

"Not a big deal." She shoves her hands into her pockets and looks to the ground. "Just got pissed that all the data I needed wasn't in one place. Did it myself instead. Am I done here?"

The overseer exhales a silent laugh through his nose and says nothing more. Kata’lana heads for a space between the bookshelves and disappears in seconds, presumably to either gather her wits or to return to her research.

For a moment, nobody dares to speak. They watch the model on Kata’lana’s GlassLink spin on the spot with their breaths held and their nerves frozen.

Something in Alexei’s coat pocket beeps. He curses, withdraws his GlassLink, and gives his display the stink eye. “Apologies, it seems that our meeting will have to be cut short.” He stands and adjusts his coat so that it hugs his neck closely, as if he’s protecting himself from the elements. “Just a bit of riot control.”

He smiles. He leaves the same way Kata’lana left.

Then Avett says, “So how are we getting past this… hulk of a dragon without getting spotted? It’s no B rank—this is big game.” He inhales sharply. “The improved senses are nothing to sneeze at.”

“Actually,” Auren says as he flits his eyes between Kashira and Lili, “I may know a method. Captain O’Raal, if we could borrow the ship for a quick demonstration and rehearsal.”

She gives him a thumbs up before turning to Lili and Kashira. “Have fun, kiddos.”

—

Along with Kashira and Auren, Lili stands on the Winnow’s deck. Her cloak whips around her, hugging her arms and legs skin-tight. Lili isn’t sure how she’s meant to be standing up here with the wind in her clothes and the clouds in her face, but Auren nods to Ysh’vanna and the captain goes to press a button at her side.

The tubular-like constructs that line each side of the deck fan out, revealing faceted crystalline cores—it reminds Lili of a sunflower’s disc in the midday sun. The wind stops immediately, and Lili teeters forward, her body flailing off-kilter from the sudden lack of pressure at her back. When she manages to steady herself, she catches the slightest smirk from Avett as he watches from inside the ship. It must be so easy to be perfectly balanced all the time as a Kattish. She scowls back at him.

“What are…?” She beckons to the tubes.

Auren opens his mouth to answer, but Kashira is faster. “Coppersilk—named after the Kattish mechanic who developed them, Captain Wick Coppersilk of the Bludgeoner. The highest rank any primary mechanic has achieved, and the most decorated man of his rank.” She eyes the ship’s windshield nervously, and it takes a second for Lili to notice who it is she’s looking at. “But we just call them wind blockers most of the time.”

Lili looks to the coveted man of the hour. As she’s guessed, Avett hasn’t heard a lick of Kashira’s tirade on the achievements of his race—no, that would be incorrect. A subtle flicker of his ear is all Lili needs to know that he’s choosing to ignore her. He can hear just fine. Better than fine, unfortunately.

And of course, Auren is oblivious to all of this. He picks up where Kashira leaves off. “What we are about to cast is an elementary technique that all Portal Keepers are required to master before their first excursion.”

Kashira’s eyes light up. “You’re a Portal Keeper?”

He coughs. “I was. Most Eldrakians were.” Upon seeing the confusion on Lili’s face, he adds, “Portal Keepers are, essentially, the sanitation workers who keep the portals connecting each realm in a stable condition. Occasionally the portals will misalign, just an iota, resulting in a misteleportation during transit—we remedy these anomalies.”

Lili winces as she imagines splintered ships and broken bodies, each construct and limb torn asunder by an obstructing mountain or building. Auren hastily corrects himself. “Just an iota, Lili. The dragons have been known to take control of these portals from time to time, and they will occasionally take control of them in an attempt to force a mass Migration to a previous realm. Therefore, the portals will align themselves to an area brimming with draconic activity, which often results in an unnecessary encounter.”

She shudders. His explanation isn’t any better than the alternative.

“That’s where the elementary technique you were talking about comes in, right?” asks Kashira.

“Yes.” Auren seems taken aback. “I am surprised that a layman as yourself would be knowledgeable about the training process. As it is impossible to know in advance if the portals are misaligned, it is protocol to cast a shield of sorts prior to allowing a ship through the portal, thereby masking their presence to any lurking dragons. When done correctly and with a sufficient amount of casters, the shield should be nigh-impermeable and will remain in place for another twenty hours before it will begin to show signs of wear.”

“So that’s what you do on the ship when we’re out,” says Lili. “Keeping up the shield.”

“Certainly not twiddling my thumbs.” He looks to the sky again—by now, the Winnow has reached high enough altitudes for Lili to skim her hand along the edge of the clouds if she wished to. To her surprise, the air isn’t thin; she supposes that this is due to the work of the wind blockers.

Kashira looks with him. “How long does the shield last with only three casters?”

The answer comes curtly. “Six hours, though with my constant presence it should last for as long as I wish it to.”

Lili asks, “What about the other part? The more workers, the less likely we’ll be spotted? We’ve only got three—”

She stops herself when she sees Auren’s steeled jaw and distant gaze.

“I do not engage with the practice of wandering into a lost fight,” he says. “Now, watch carefully.”

For the next two hours or so, Auren trains Lili and Kashira to their bones. As it turns out, creating a shield for the ship is just like warding a larger, far less precise version of Lili’s body. Auren encourages the same technique—the faceted make of the shield is what keeps it upright for longer, he teaches. Auren also explains that the procedure only works on inanimate objects, and that attempts to shield anything beyond an inanimate object are far less effective than shielding a ship or a building.

By the time the hour’s up, Lili feels like she’s been training straight for a year. Time seems to crawl by at a snail’s pace in the skies; Lili chalks it up to the fact there’s simply nothing to look at but a sea of white and blue. Kashira isn’t one for small conversation either, and neither is Auren.

Not that Lili would be any good at small talk. As the engines sputter out of life and the Winnow touches down in the hangar again, she finds herself actually craving the comfort of her more sociable colleagues. Mostly Avett.

She taps her ID against the scanner and walks through the sliding doors, only to find Avett and Ysh’vanna engrossed in what seems to be a… Lili squints at the text floating on the ship’s navigational display. What used to be indecipherable buttons and baffling iconography has been replaced by various items that Lili has seen before during her trip to the Hive’s supermarket. This is a shopping list.

Avett points at the list vaguely. “There. Sneak it in there, he’ll never notice it.”

“Roger, captain,” Ysh’vanna answers. She taps at her GlassLink, and sure enough, ‘vodka’ appears between ‘battery chambers’ and ‘wholegrain bread.’

“Who will not notice it?” Auren asks.

Ysh’vanna swipes her finger across her GlassLink, and her entry disappears from the list. “Changed our priorities around. I’ve just had a chat with Avett, and he’s agreed that five replacement battery chambers is a bit overkill on our finances. He only needs two, and he’ll barely notice it. The difference, I mean.”

Avett coughs, but Auren nods in approval. It’s too late—his fate is sealed. His vodka-less fate.

“I had better not catch you referring to the wrong captain again, Ysh’vanna,” Auren warns.

“Roger, cap—esteemed backline caster Auren Draksparrow.” Ysh’vanna grins sheepishly. "Anyway, we got some plans planned out for the relic retrieval."

At this, the Eldrakian's face lights up. "Oh? Do impart this knowledge upon us."

"Naturally." She swipes a finger across her screen again, and another image—the model of the Palatable—takes the place of the shopping list. "First off, this guy here prefers to sleep with a roof over his head. We'll likely find most of its artifacts indoors, where our ship won't fit."

The casters freeze. Lili can't even feel her fucking ether anymore, let alone her arms, and now her captain's telling them that their two hours of training won't be useful after all?

Ysh'vanna brings a hand up before Auren can speak a single word. "Not so fast. It's true that it keeps a vast majority of its artifacts in its nest, but take a look." The screen zooms up on a particular box of text. "While it doesn't need calories to subsist, as most dragons don't, it enjoys hunting wildlife for sport once in a fortnight. There's a good chance that it's left artifacts scattered around the area from these trips. We should be able to stay in the ship for the rest of the mission. Those shields should remain relevant."

Kashira heaves a sigh. "Thank the stars!" she says. Then she covers her mouth in shock. She apologises profusely and promptly stumbles into the bathroom, though not before throwing a yearning—and lingering—gaze at Avett.

Emphasis on the lingering. Lili watches the girl stop at the door for eons, just struggling with the lock mechanism and fiddling with her ID. It only slides open after an indeterminate amount of time.

Then she’s scurrying out of the room quickly, leaving Avett with the freedom to throw his own disgusted look at Lili. She raises and lowers her shoulders just a touch for him; it's a blessing to be socially awkward and relatively average in terms of looks, because she wouldn't be able to handle pining and crushes at all. She only pities Avett at this point.

23: the approach

Lili only remembers the preceding day in bits and pieces. She remembers the name of the girl who saved her and her otherworldly powers, but not of the battle that had ensued during their escape. She remembers the sodium lamps, the blue glow emanating from the vats, and the dark flesh of the organs within them. She remembers a high pitched shriek, long and piercing and hollow.

It confuses her to no end. Lili’s been sitting up in the bed with her hands balled into the velvet covers for who knows how long.

Another thing: she doesn’t know where she is. The room she’s in is a far cry from the industrial environment she’s been living in for the past few weeks; it’s heavily embellished to the point where Lili has no idea where to look. Every painting that she glosses her eyes over gives her a technocolour migraine, and even the carpet offers no respite—the pattern is offensive to the eyes and it confuses her in swirls and spirals.

Her stomach rolls. She feels her mouth growing moist, but she swallows down her bile and pushes herself off the bed.

A glint of reflected light catches Lili’s eye; she looks to the bedside counter and finds a transparent slide of plastic there. When she picks it up, it turns matte black and shows a faint battery gauge in the centre. The container is red and hardly filled.

She blinks. Is this Avett’s GlassLink? Upon holding the device up to the light, she sees no trace of his fingerprints on the screen, meaning that it’s brand new.

Lili cradles the device to her cheek. Is it a gift from Auren, Ysh’vanna, or Av—nevermind. It doesn’t matter, a gift is a gift. She’s just happy to be receiving anything at all.

Remembering how the GlassLink is supposed to charge, she slots the device into her pocket and makes for the door. She makes her way through a short corridor before reaching the main area, and when she does, she’s immediately greeted with a sorry sight. There’s paper strewn across the rugs and countertops, and in the middle of all this—like a beacon in the wasteland—is a single, velvet armchair.

Lili tiptoes through the mess, making sure not to step on anything. A glance at the golden nameplate on the countertop informs her that this is Alexei’s office. It’s a bit disappointing to find out that the haughty and royal overseer is a slob behind the scenes, but she supposes that it’ll have to slide.

She’s about to pass through to the kitchen when she catches a low murmur and a flash of white hair. She darts behind the wall again.

“It’s all so much to take in,” Ysh’vanna grumbles. “It’s just—this isn’t what I signed up for when I went to pilot school.”

“Nor I,” Auren answers. He seems to be deep in thought elsewhere. “It is understandable should you choose to abandon Alexei’s request, and Lili and I as a consequence.”

Lili’s eyes widen, and she covers a hand over her mouth to keep herself from gasping.

Ysh’vanna speaks slowly. “The pay… is pretty good. Better than good, actually; five hundred thousand for a single job is insane. But—”

“But?”

“We’ve got jobs and our own lives to get back to, it’s just a lot to lay down for someone we hardly know.”

“I understand.” Auren sounds almost dejected.

Lili doesn’t stick around to hear the rest. She needs more information beyond the vague terminology of 'Alexei's request.' They're kicking her off the Winnow, but that means they're kicking Auren off as well, and that doesn't make any sense. He's too diligent to be fired. Ysh'vanna wouldn't do something like that.

Though who's she to make calls on what Ysh'vanna would do? As far as Lili knows, they hardly even know each other. Maybe Auren's heavily broken protocol just now, or they're finally seeing his lack of physical skill as a liability on the battlefield. The reasons for his dischargement could go on forever, and so could Lili's.

"Upset, Lili?"

She whirls around and finds herself face to face with Alexei. Flabbergasted, Lili doesn't have an inkling of what she should be saying right now. She blurts out, "Where am I?"

"Hive headquarters, or my humble abode." Alexei gestures to the walls. "Just as a teacher may only live at school, an overseer's life and blood belongs to their sanctuary."

Teachers don't live at school, but Lili’s not about to correct him. She asks more questions instead. “What’s this request Auren keeps referring to?”

Alexei smiles at Lili. “Are you attached to these off-landers?”

She shrugs. Then she realises that Alexei has done nothing to answer her question. “You’re separating us—but why? Did we do something wrong again? I could take the blame for it—”

“Excellent joke, however that won’t be necessary.” Alexei pulls Lili aside and puts his hands on her shoulders before leaning down to her level. “You have done nothing wrong. My request necessitates absolute loyalty until the very end, and your friends are simply re-evaluating their values before they come to a decision. They are, of course, mercenaries first and foremost.”

She tears herself away from his grasp. “Tell me what your request is, or I’m not helping.”

“Lili.” He reaches out again; she steps back.  

“I could hurt you,” she says, her voice low as she can make it. “I’m not Human. I’m like you. I think you’re hiding something from me, like how Kashira’s more than just an artifact, isn’t she?”

Alexei’s expression darkens, and he averts his gaze. “You’re correct. She is an overseer, much like you and I.”

“Why was she down there then, in that vat?”

He hesitates, unsure of the words he should use. “Overseers were created semi-naturally. Each overseer was originally Human, and they were designated a sanctuary during the initial… attack. There is to be no more than seventy overseers at any given time, else…” He trails off, inhales, then begins to speak again. “Kashira, however. They animated her from the corpse of the Exodus overseer, in Greenland, in order to test the limits of the seventy overseer limitation rule. It shook the overseers to their very core to see that she was allowed to exist by the system. As a result of her unique origins, she has an affinity unclaimed by any person, unmatched by any power, overseer or not. You’ve seen it in action already, I'm presuming.”

It dawns on Lili exactly what Kashira can do. “She makes prophecies,” she breathes.

“She lacks a degree of proper control, from what I’ve heard. It’s more like she makes a request with terms that she must fulfil. For small boons, this may include a blood sacrifice. For larger requests bordering on the miracle, she would require more than a few droplets, I’d say. Perhaps a ritual.”

“Is there anything she can’t do?”

He shrugs. “So long as she has the ether and the means to fulfil the terms of the prophecy, theoretically there is no limit to her affinity. You can see why her power is so coveted among us overseers. All of our deepest, darkest desires—fulfilled right down to the atom. It’s understandable that the twins kept her in stasis in that vat for so long, though their actions were hardly excusable.”

Lili narrows her eyes. “So I guess there's something you want from her, then."

"In the face of a thousand possibilities, man is often blinded by desire, and I like to think that I am an above average individual. I have no intention of using her for my own gain, and I would never entertain the mere idea of it."

She keeps her eyes narrowed, because to hell if she's accepting a roundabout response such as that.

Alexei caves in, thankfully. "Alright. Well, if I were to come into the possession of the ability to change reality, in this dragon infested world… I would simply rid the realms of the beasts once and for all."

Lili waits for the contradiction, the drawback, the punchline that she’s allowed to fly over her head. It never comes; Alexei is wholly serious.

It takes a moment for his proposal to sink in. He chuckles at her silence. “Are my motives far too sinister for you to comprehend?”

Lili jolts back from Alexei. “N-no, uh, I just.” She coughs. “Didn’t expect something so, so—”

“Naive, perhaps.”

“Um, selfless?”

“Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?”

With every ounce of her former confidence having disintegrated into meek embarrassment, her cheeks redden and she looks to the side. “I thought it was pretty noble…” she mumbles.

“You’re too kind, Lili.”

She opens her mouth, but the words don’t come out. She’s embarrassed herself enough already today, so maybe it’s for the best that she’s suddenly lost her tongue.

“Back to the topic at hand, naturally Kashira cannot hope to create and fulfil such a demanding prophecy on her own. Which is where you come in. You’re a bit of an outlier as an overseer, Lili.”

“How?”

“Which sanctuary do you belong to then?”

Lili shrugs.

“An overseer without a sanctuary means that you were created outside of the system, and since I haven’t caught wind of any of our already established overseers passing,” he says, his gaze sturdy, “you would be our seventy-first. From what I’ve heard from Kashira, she was only able to use her fateweaving after your assistance, and that your ether carries some vein of… unique properties to it that she couldn't quite explain. God only knows of the other miracles that you are capable of performing.”

Something clicks for Lili, and she looks up to the taller man with her breath held.

“You have a lot of potential as the first ‘true’ artificial overseer, Lili. That’s why I need you to see this plan through. I cannot even hope to begin planning without your involvement.”

She stumbles back, but Alexei takes her hands in his, steadying her.

"Please." His eyes are shining. "To liberate your own home realm from the throes of the dragons so early into the Migration would be to save your world from any further ruin. Think about it for me."

“I—I—thanks. I’ll, yeah. I'll think about it,” she manages to say.

“Another thing.” He tightens his grip. “Kata’lana says she has no working theories of the cause of your status as an artificial overseer—but perhaps you might. Is there a moment in your past where you felt something snapping into place?"

"That's…"

"Or like you’d spent your entire life adjusting the focus of a lens? I'm not fond of vague terminology, however I suppose if the situation calls for such…”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I recall on my first day as an overseer, I accidentally created a miniature crater on the side of a mountain.” He sounds like he's joking, but Lili can't be too sure. His voice seems far away, like he's talking to her down a narrow corridor.

‘Not really,’ she tries to say, but she's not totally in control anymore. It feels like there’s a tangible delay, a yawning chasm between her brain telling her body to move and her body actually moving. It feels like she's back in her down-beaten house in the wilds. It feels like she'd never left in the first place.

“You’re so useless, Lili.”

Lili blinks. All of a sudden it’s not Alexei in front of her anymore, but Ava’s peaceful scowl. She blinks again, and the world folds out before her: grass blades dig into her calves, and the sun’s rays pelt down like thrown knives. Ava is leaning against an old brick and mortar house.

It’s so hot. It’s so unbearably hot.

The handle of her makeshift dagger is made out of cloth scraps that they’d found in an old Spotlight store, and it’s gone yellow from the sweat in her palms. Lili doesn’t know what she’s to do with this blade. Ava opens her mouth to speak, and it feels like she’s let forth a deluge of dammed-up thoughts for the last time.

“You’re fucking useless. You’ve always been a useless bitch. Prove me wrong. You can’t, can you? You're sca—”

—

Alexei stops himself short. His gaze turns worried, then soft as he releases Lili from his grasp. “My apologies. I hope you can forgive me.”

A breath. Another breath. Lili’s hand involuntarily flexes against itself, and she’s glad to find that there’s no dagger in her grip. She sighs and presses her lips together.

“Are you alright?” he asks. “I shouldn’t have—I should have been more careful.”

“You saw my memories,” she whispers. “Now you know.”

It’s Alexei’s turn to be stone-cold silent now.

Lili looks away. At least she doesn’t have to explain herself to him, but even now she’s only just shaking off the dregs that comes with recalling her past. It’s been like this for years now, and she's ashamed that she’s not more used to it. She takes another deep breath.

Alexei steps back into the main hall and beckons for Lili to follow. “Have you checked on the others yet?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve only just woken up myself.”

“Avett is outside, if you need him.”

Excitement flutters in her chest. She’s about halfway down the corridor when she realises why Avett isn’t with the others inside the building; fear seizes her stomach. “Is he coming—or, er, staying with me—uh…”

Alexei is already gone.

—

Despite herself, Lili ends up seeking out Avett anyway. She doesn't have to look far; she finds him leaning against the wall outside Alexei's office. In front of him is a large, glass screen, and if Lili looks too far down, she can see that Alexei's office is actually connected to a hallway that's suspended high above the ground. There are Humans wandering around like ants below her, and it's the most she's ever seen in one place. She steps back out of shock. Avett snorts.

"And here I thought you'd appreciate the view," he says. "It's like a miniature Earth down there with all of those Humans."

She shakes her head. "I'm not used to seeing this many, it just took me…" She tries not to look over the edge of the platform again. "...By surprise."

"Yeah, it's real scary up here." Avett's smile turns devilish as he regards Lili's pale face. "I heard one of the screws on this platform squeaking loose, stars, I almost shit my pants when I felt the floor wobble."

"R-really?"

"No."

Lili looks at her partner oddly, though her confusion is short-lived as she soon realises that he's just having her on.

Avett grins. "So you're just scared of how high up we are, is that it?"

She shrugs, neither dismissing nor affirming his claim. Better for Avett to think that she’s scared of heights than to look like she’s scared of people, she supposes. Or more specifically, murderous hounds who want each and every off-lander dead.

“How’d you get in without…?” Lili beckons to the sanctuary below them.

“Without getting jumped? There’s a hidden hangar connected to Alexei’s office that leads straight into the wilds, and we dropped the Winnow off there.” He wrinkles his nose. “Though I would’ve lasted at least ten rounds in the mosh pit, believe me.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for a second.”

Avett smiles, but he doesn’t say anything else. He chooses to keep his arms folded across his chest as he gazes out of the window, his eyes fixed on the leaded glass dome ceiling and on the clouds outside.

Lili swallows. He looks like a man that’s already made up his mind. All of a sudden, she feels stupid for even thinking that she’d ever had a shot at changing Avett’s decisions. He’s worked his whole life to get here. He’s not about to throw it all away for a stranger, especially not a stranger that’s as listless and clueless as Lili.

So she does the unthinkable. If Avett won’t hurry up and spit out his goodbyes, she’ll just take this opportunity to make sure that he knows exactly how she feels.

She steps in front of him, spreads out her arms, takes another step closer—and hugs him. She presses her face into his chest. It’s uncomfortable for her to do so since she’s a touch taller than him, but she doesn’t mind the strain at all. She would bend her spine over backwards to keep her friends in her back pocket as she’s come to realise.  

He doesn’t return the hug. Lili doesn’t blame him for trying to keep his distance.

It’s only after a few seconds of heavy silence that Avett decides to ask, “What brought this on?”

She shrugs again. He goes quiet.

“Alright. That’ll be one grand for the mental consolation, and another grand for the intimacy.”

“Wh—”

“Pay up. It’s an additional two grand if you want me to hug you back, I’m not a free whore.”

Lili pushes away from him. “I—I just wanted to say goodbye, I didn’t want you whoring yourself out to me or anything.” Despite everything she’s done to prepare herself, she still chokes on the slur; this elicits a smug grin from Avett.

“Goodbye?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Alexei wants me to go with him,” she mumbles. “I’m the only person alive who can power Kashira, so I have to go."

He blows his hair out of his face. "You don't have to. You can say no."

"I'd feel terrible."

Avett snorts. "Well, guess I'd also feel terrible for leaving you be with those two creeps. Good thing I'm feeling awesome right now."

Lili has to do a double take. "I'm… sorry?"

"Why would I not come?"

"I just—Alexei told me not to get my hopes up, so I expected the worst, especially from you." She staggers back, her face burning a bright crimson. "I don't mean that I think that you're cruel enough to not come with me—ok, maybe you are, maybe a little, but you worked so hard to get to where you are now and I would hate for you to suddenly drop all that just for me because last time you did that you cried so mu—"

Avett makes a slicing motion at his neck with his hand. "Please, just stop talking."

She does. She regrets the hug now. So much.

He continues, "Listen, I don't know where you got this idea that being a mercenary explicitly meant taking jobs from the IRC board, but that's not all we do. Third party benefactors aren't all that rare nowadays, especially not with New Therius' status as a criminal hotspot, since no well-meaning outlaw's gonna want to involve themselves directly with the IRC. Not with the strict regulations they've got in place regarding IDs or whatever—they've probably got me tracked down to my bowel movements, and I've only been working for three years."

"I… I see."

"It's literally in my best interests to accept Alexei's offer, actually. He's putting forward enough money to buy a hug from me five times over, with a little extra on the side if my client's feeling a bit raunchy afterwards."

She deadpans. “But Ysh’vanna wasn’t interested in the job.”

“Ysh’vanna might look like she’s got her head on the right way, but she’s got this nasty habit of deliberating over every single decision sometimes. She doesn’t like being chained down by certainties. She just wants to fly.”

Hope blooms in her chest. “So you’re coming?” she asks.

He scowls. “Yes, but please stop making that face at me. You look like you’re about to launch into a love confession that’s the length of a thesis.”

Fuck—Lili draws back from Avett and rubs at the smile on her face. It won’t come off.

“Anyway, if we can’t get Ysh’ as our pilot we can always grab another off the board, though those’ll tend to be fresh graduates from school. Or get Alexei to drive us around, I doubt Auren even knows how to navigate anything beyond the messenger app on his GlassLink.” Avett shuffles on his feet, his features shifting to something darker. “You kept your mouth shut about that night, right? They don't know?”

Lili is about to shake her head when Ysh’vanna slams open the entrance to Alexei’s office. Her shoulders are quivering, and Lili thinks that her captain’s about to smack her on the head as penance for escaping with Avett when—

Ysh’vanna does slap Lili, but she aims a little lower instead of at her face—her back. She hits hard her enough to send a sharp cough up Lili's throat. “I knew you two could do it! As your captain, I’m real damn fucking proud of you guys! Congrats!”

“Thanks, Ysh’vanna,” Lili says, but her voice rasps on the last syllable and she launches into a coughing fit again. She's not even sure of what she's being congratulated on.

“We didn’t fuck, end of story,” says Avett. “Try eavesdropping better before jumping to conclusions next time.”

"Bleh. Boring." Ysh'vanna shrugs. "An easy misunderstanding. So what did you guys get up to in the dead of night that you don't want your captain to know about, hm?"

"Lilith just threw up and hid in a corner all the way to the Afflatus while I was piloting, it's no big deal. It's a huge stain on my ability to pilot though. I'd rather her not bring it up with anyone."

Lili is coughing way too much to quip back at him with a snarky insult. She curses silently and continues to blink away her tears to no avail. Just what the hell is going on? The conversation’s zoomed by so quickly—she’s hardly grasping one topic before it's already melted away into another.

Ysh’vanna continues, “Anywho, heard you and Alexei need a pilot. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve decided to tag along for the job. Can’t get rid of me that easily, Ironsturm.”

Her grin is so sweet that it’s almost saccharine. Avett pretends to gag. Lili is already on the verge of actually gagging from coughing so much.

Lili rasps out her sincerest gratitudes after she calms herself down. It gets a laugh out of everyone as they bring her back into the dining hall, where Auren and Alexei both happen to be waiting for the trio’s return for what looks to be an early dinner consisting of steaming hot spaghetti. Thankfully, Avett doesn’t bring up the hug once, nor of the awkward encounter that had ensued right after.

Lili is glad for that. It’s good to move past misunderstandings quickly.

—

“I apologise for the hasty meal.” “Cooking is not an endeavour that I wish to undertake.”

They’re eating Watties. Watties canned spaghetti; the soft, almost gelatin-like stuff that comes in the 420g tin bricks that you have to open with either a specialised can opener or a sharp knife. Lili knows this taste, and it stings her tongue like a rusted spoon.

None of the Winnow’s crew say a word. Not even Avett, who looks like he might explode at any second. Lili muses over what he’d say as she watches his jaw clench. “You can’t cook? The almighty overseer can’t cook? I could burn bread better than this microwave slop.”

He doesn’t say it. Alexei is looking over at everyone with the sincerest, most genuine smile he’s ever made in the time that they’ve known him. This spaghetti is his magnum opus, his chef’s specialty, and Avett isn’t as cruel as he thinks he is. To criticise Alexei now would be like tearing up a five year old’s drawing.

So the young man keeps his mouth shut, albeit with some degree of difficulty.  When Lili goes to give her meal another prudent sniff, she notices the stench of tin that belies the initial sour tang from the faux-ketchup. It's only a faint whiff to her; she can't imagine how it might reek to the Kattish nose.

Kata’lana eats the spaghetti by the spoonful, and is the first to leave the table. Lili has no doubt that the young Draconian woman might’ve ended up chewing on nutri-bars made out of sawdust had Alexei not heated a canned meal for her. The dark circles around her eyes and her sunken skin just scream bad diet.

Sighing, Avett puts down his spoon on his plate. "What does… being your assistant actually mean? What's Kata'lana's role in all of this—what’s she good for?"
 
"Wouldn't you like to know?" Alexei doesn't even have to waggle his eyebrows for Avett to get the full picture. Upon witnessing Avett’s scowl, he corrects himself: “Nothing too out of the ordinary for an assistant researcher, I can assure you.”

“Oh yeah, and where’d you go for your first date?”

“She took my hand and dragged me into my basement, whereupon she presented the results of her first etherchemical experiment on organic dragon material.” Alexei spins his spoon into the spaghetti; none of it sticks to his utensil. “Quite the boring first excursion—Kata’lana has no interest in the carnal either, which makes us rather incompatible. You, however, seem to care a great deal about my sexual affairs.”

“I think we’re incompatible for other reasons, but sure.” Avett returns a full-faced smile rather than the fang-bearing snarl Lili had expected. When she casts a glance at the backside of his chair, she immediately knows why; the fur on his tail is spiking straight up. He’s very angry. He’s just keeping it all inside for now.

"She seems tired," Ysh'vanna says. "I feel terrible for her."

"As do I. Rest assured that her sleep deprivation is self-inflicted; she has worked into the early hours of the morning on various projects despite my protests. I owe her a great deal in regards to pinpointing the whereabouts of the artifact both times. I only wish peace upon her in the years following our success."

Lili also puts down her spoon to fidget with her nails. "Is Kashira ok?" she asks.

"Merely resting in her chambers, Lili. There's no need for worry. You lot did well in keeping her unharmed."

“Speaking of,” Ysh’vanna says between mouthfuls. “What’s the plan after this? You said that Lili had to act as Kashira's ethereal battery while she made the prophecy. I'm guessing there's a missing step there, considering how you haven't already done just that."

“Quite the sharpshooter, aren’t you O’Raal?”

Avett butts in. “She’s the pilot, actually. I’m the sharpshooter.”

Before Alexei can snipe back at Avett, Ysh’vanna says, "I'm willing to guess that it's got something to do with her New Order heritage."

"Alas, you are spot on. From what I can recall, the overseers chose a Gallian as their vessel for the race's innate ether handling capacities, however as you know…" Alexei's eyes trail off to rest on Auren's displeased expression. "Eldrakians that have been dispatched to Earth are so incredibly rare. The overseers knew that they would have no chance of acquiring a subject for use, much less a willing subject. Yes, believe it or not, Kashira was willing."

Avett snorts. "I'd ask to see your gold star from the ethics department, but from the way you've worded all of this, it sounds like you weren't even involved."

"The overseer tribunals called upon a vote once the Afflatus's overseer brought up the possibility of an artificial dragon-hybrid to reliably fill in the wake that the Exodus' overseer had left in her death. The vote did not swing in their favour—not only that, but I chose to cast against it. They went ahead with the plan anyway, as you can see.

"But I digress; you aren't here to hear me plead for my innocence. As a New Order Gallian, Kashira has not been trained as an Eldrakian would. She can take and use another's ether, but only as much as her original capacity allows her to. A true Eldrakian would not be fettered by their bodily limits as they would have been trained from young to manipulate monumental quantities of ether."

Auren sits up a little straighter. His meal is untouched, and his spoon remains in front of him. "You cannot train a Gallian in Eldrakian techniques past their sixth year. What do you imply, overseer?"

"That's where my lovely assistant comes in." Alexei flashes his teeth at Avett. "Kata'lana is an avid researcher of the draconic, though she isn’t formally recognised for any scientific achievements on Therius. As such, she's already collated a list of possible ether-enhancing artifacts from every current dragon on Earth for our usage."

He slaps a sheet of paper into the table. The handwriting is a hasty scrawl, and there are brown half-moon stains on each corner of the sheet. The list itself, however, only goes one line down.

Avett takes one look at the list, exhales through his nose in resignation, and scrunches his features. So does Ysh'vanna.

Curious, Lili takes a look at the list:

A07 - nicknamed "the Palatable," has been known to demonstrate several reality warping abilities that might assist with increasing Kashira's ether capacity. A rank. Readings are most prominent surrounding the southernmost area of the New Therius - Afflatus landmass.

She swallows. Ysh'vanna grits her teeth and slams her hands into the table. "The deal is off, Alexei. Assemble your suicide squad elsewhere."

Avett hisses, "We both know that A07 isn't on the bounty boards for a reason, dick, and that's because it's still in the same region as its artifacts. You've never had to deal with one of these assholes, and it shows."

"Settle down, I have yet to divulge the specifics of your task."

"Divulge my balls, prick."

Alexei continues, undeterred, "Surely as mercenaries you must know that the Palatable cannot release an aura?"

"Doesn't matter," says Avett, but his voice wavers in uncertainty. "Still an A, still a bitch to run from."

“Fine then,” Alexei says, folding one of his hands over the other. "Six hundred thousand credits."

"You're a real dick if you think you're gonna actually bribe us—"

Ysh'vanna goes still. Deathly still. "Nine hundred."

"Seven hundred. I may have funds at my disposal, but I’m no bottomless well."

“Eight hundred and fifty.”

Alexei clicks his tongue. "Deal."

Avett gawks at his captain, who remains unmoving as she stares Alexei down. "Where are you getting all this money anyway?"

"The very same organisation that I call when I need to make an arrest on a certain band of tax evaders," he responds easily. "Being an overseer has its perks. Please, do sit back down. Your food will get cold."

The meal continues in silence, broken only once by Auren asking whether the spaghetti happens to be vegetarian or not. Avett is the first to leave, and he makes a big show of it by rattling his chair legs against the wood as he gets up. No one stops him.

Lili chews the insides of her cheeks and continues to eat.

22.5

Avett finally manages to catch a glimpse of the wall that he and Auren have been running at for the past hour, and with it the door that they'd entered through. It’s only a few more shelves away, and if they keep going at this rate they’ll be out of this mess in no time.

They turn another corner, and then another. Avett isn’t running at his usual speed anymore, and Auren looks like he might puke at any given moment from the overexertion. Just a bit more. Just a bit—

He skids to a halt. Auren stumbles next to him, his eyes bleary and unfocused.

“What is—what is it?” he pants.

Avett’s not sure what he’s asking for, considering the fact that what he’s looking at is directly in front of them. There’s a bright light beaming down on the two figures like he’s watching a screenplay and everything. Then he realises that Auren is probably on the verge of either blacking out or throwing up, and he tries his best to forgive him.  

He recognises one figure immediately from the tone of her faded, blue jacket. Lilith is lying against the ground, and her head is resting in the second figure’s lap. The second figure must be the artifact Auren had referred to earlier.

Without hesitation, he rushes towards Lilith and crouches at her side. It’s then when he realises the artifact is crying, and that she’s not the confident warrior he’d expected such a powerful force to be. Her silvery hair falls over her eyes in misshapen curls. Her shoulders shudder with each sob.

Avett places a hand on the girl’s shoulder instead. “Hey. Hey. It’s alright. You’re safe now.”

The girl shakes her head. “She’s dead.”

His limbs go cold briefly, and he puts a finger against the side of Lilith's wirst. It takes a second too long for him to understand that she's not referring to Lilith. “It’s ok. It’s not your fault.”

“It is.”

“No it isn't. It’s alright, you acted in self defense, it's ok.”

The girl breaks down into incoherent babbling. Despite himself, Avett looks at his immediate vicinity, scanning every nook and cranny for a stray foot, or a pale and motionless face. He finds nothing of the sort. With Claire dead, there won’t be anyone alive to take the twins to the incinerator. He thinks to retrieve the bodies, but the girl clutches at his sleeve when he goes to move.

“Claire is alive,” she says. "It's not her."

Avett raises an eyebrow. “Then who did you…?”

She shudders again. Then she whispers, “The other twin. I didn’t know it would kill Lethe, I didn’t know it’d make Claire scream like that.”

She must be confused from the trauma of witnessing Lethe’s death. Avett knows Auren’s doubling back behind a shelf right now, and he’s probably sixty. This girl can’t be any older than seventeen, and, well—Avett knows all too well how it feels to be in this scenario.

He hushes the girl and presses her to his chest. “It’s ok. You didn’t kill Lethe. That mercenary did.”

“No.” She pulls away from his grasp. “I did. She wouldn’t have come down here—”

“She came for me.” He reaches forward again. “Not for you. Just for me.”

“No!” The girl swats his hand out of the air. “I made her come here. I caused all of this to happen. I didn’t mean for her to die, I only wanted to be free, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen—”

“I don’t understand, you need to breathe—”

Auren places a hand on Avett’s shoulder. He’s swiping at his mouth with the sleeve of his robe, and there’s a particular stench about him that informs Avett he’s just cleared his stomach. Nevertheless, he begins to speak, his tone solemn. “She told the truth, Avett.”

“The fuck are you on?” Avett snaps. “We saw Eltia shoot Lethe, we heard her smarmy fucking ass taunt the both of us.”

The Gallian man regards the girl with an uptilted chin and downcast eyes. “Kashira Hellsborne, New Order Gallian and current holder of the Exodus sanctuary’s overseer position. You used your affinity for fateweaving to influence Eltia Earlstone to infiltrate this laboratory, no?”

Avett coughs. “What the fuck are you saying?”

The girl whimpers. “I didn’t mean for it to end this way.”

“Additionally, you also used your affinity to lure Alexei into the initial laboratory, would I be correct?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“And finally—you influenced us to arrive to your rescue.” Auren doesn’t move from his position. “Am I wrong?”

The girl shakes her head.

And with that, Auren nods to himself. “That is all I needed to know.”

He heads for the door, leaving Avett flabbergasted and alone.

22: the encounter

Lili can't possibly fight.

In the face of dragons and beasts, she might be able to hold her own for long enough to call for help. That said, Lili’s ability to fight falls flat in the presence of a B-ranked mammalian. She's scared; she can tell in the way her ether shrinks when Lethe meets her eyes. Lili is not mentally equipped to do battle at all, despite her eagerness to do so.

Avett, on the other hand, is fully prepared to shoot and bomb his way out of an underground bunker. Ether coalesces between the twins’ hands, and Avett is already poised to react; he pulls Lili by the sleeve behind a vat large enough to cover all of them. Auren follows suit. Their attack splashes against the vat, and it shakes slightly from the impact.

“Keep moving,” Avett hisses. They squeeze their way through the aisles; Lili hangs a good ways behind them, her body straining from the simple act of carrying the girl.  

They crouch behind a line of dragon eyes. Avett makes sure that they’re out of earshot of the twins before he starts hissing at Lili.

“Just what the fuck are you doing?” He gestures to the girl in her arms.

Lili begins, “She’s the artifact. They were going to kill her—I couldn’t just leave her behind!”

Avett is a right mess. He clenches and unclenches his hands at his sides, darts his eyes around his surroundings like a cornered cat. Guilt wrenches at her stomach. She’s doing it again, she’s taken Avett’s only salvation, his only ticket out of this mess and now she’s the one to blame for all of this.

Auren takes this moment to voice his opinion: “Astounding performance of collaboration on the field, frontliners. Had I known your level of teamwork, I would have attempted to accompany you on your missions more often.”

"Fuck, man." Avett lets out a long, winded groan and readies his blasters. "I'm not letting you fight after your run in with Will from last mission. The moment someone raises their fists at you you're like a deer caught in headlights."

"I can handle two teens," Lili hisses back.

Before Avett can even start refuting Lili, they're wracked by another explosion just to the left of them. They dive behind another line of shelving in a panic; Lili tumbles to the floor from the weight of the girl. One of the twins sings out, "A caster, an arms specialist, and one unfit Gallian man. Not the brightest group to infiltrate our laboratory in a while, hm?"

Avett’s already hoisting Lili up by the scruff of her robes by the time she’s started apologising. She can’t handle the extra load without being a liability to both herself and the people around her. The arms specialist curses. “Pass her over.”

“I can take her,” she says. “I have to take her. He needs you.”

“What the fuck are you saying?”

“Auren can’t handle himself in a fight.”

Auren’s eyebrow twitches. “I am sure that I would be more than able.”

Lili’s hands tighten around the girl, causing the fabric of her surgical gown to scrunch up at the sides. A muscle in her jaw tenses. “No. You wouldn’t be.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s a reason why you’re not a frontliner.” Both Auren and Avett are about to argue back when she continues, “I don’t doubt your skill. But there’s a reason, isn’t there?”

Something flies high over their heads and crashes into the wall, shattering into a thousand glass pieces. Blue liquid rains down, staining Auren’s robes brown and the frontliners’ gear… bluer. Lili hears a sigh from Claire—they're not too far off from their position from the sounds of it.  

“You are stepping out of line, Lili.” Auren’s tone is sharp. "I do not need an arms specialist for assistance, I will be fine on my own."

Lili’s ether shudders into her arms, and she hoists the girl onto her back. She’s not sure of how long she’ll be able to hold onto her—she’s worried that her ether’ll sputter out the moment she encounters a danger of any sort—but it’s all she’s got. Auren needs Avett, not her.

Avett touches a hand to his chin. Recognition flickers in his eyes. “They called you unfit, didn’t they.”  

Auren bristles. He’s about to snipe right back at Avett but the younger man continues, “There’s no point in having you run. They’ve already judged our strengths and weaknesses from our gear alone—and I’m willing to bet that they’ve been in enough fights to know how to exploit them. You’d be caught in seconds. So would I, though I’d probably put up a better fight.”  

Fear runs down Lili’s spine. “So what?”

A grin sweeps over his features. “So we swap clothes.”

—

Avett hasn’t let down his hair for a long time. He’s upset to say that Lilith’s robes are just a touch too large on his frame, but he’s surprised to find that her boots fit him snugly. He’d worried about how his clothes would look on her body earlier, though upon seeing her in his signature blue jacket he’d stopped worrying altogether. Alexei was right; save for Lilith’s rounded pupils and Avett’s Kattish markings, they are nigh-identical. All Avett has to do to really sell the disguise is to press his ears flat to his head.

With a bright flash of light from an impromptu battery flashbang, he sends Lilith off running with the girl bouncing on her back. One of the twins grunts out loud and covers her eyes—but the other only curses under her breath.

“Cass—Lethe,” Claire spits. “Where are you?”

Avett looks into the darkness. Lilith is far gone, leaving only himself and Auren to battle the twins.

“My sister, you must retreat.” The other twin’s—Lethe, he assumes—eyes glow an eerie blue in the darkness. “My vision is unaffected. These two casters will prove to be nothing in the presence of my strength.”

“So your ether protected your eyes?”

“It would appear so.” Lethe throws a hand back. “I shall see you within the hour, sister.”

“Please don’t be so dramatic.”

Lilith’s wings rattle against his back when he shifts his stance lower. He’d given a spare blaster to her in return to really seal the disguise, but it’s all just for show; operating machinery is foreign territory to that girl. It’s about as useful as her wings on his etherless, Kattish body.

Claire retreats into the darkness. Several whips of light snap out at her, but she’s long gone before Auren can get a good shot. He curses in Eldrakian.

It doesn’t take long for Lethe to do what she’s stayed here to do. She pounces at Auren, her hands glowing with cerulean knives. The backline caster barely manages to teeter backwards to avoid her attack.

Avett dives between them, but he keeps his blaster by his side. His arm moves faster than he can think. His knuckles crack against a spongy shield; the air reverberates and ripples in movements of blue.

“Silly girl.” Lethe smiles. She raises a hand at him, and he feels icy talons spearing into his wrist. He bites down the urge to scream, to give away his disguise. Auren is picking himself up already.

Avett can’t move. He’s frozen to his bone marrow.

With a wild swing, Auren sends his ether rolling towards Lethe. She flicks her hand to deflect it; Avett falls back, his vision blurring into obscurity. Auren is meeting each of Lethe’s blows with his own power, but Avett can’t stop his teeth from chattering long enough to help him with his encounter. His head aches and his joints feel brittle. He’s so, so cold.

And he’s doing so well. In his stupor, Avett wonders why Auren had chosen to become a backline caster in the first place. He’d punched Lilith pretty well back there, he muses. He should probably get up.

Avett grips the shelves and hoists himself back up. Auren parries like an ill-trained dancer. He knows all the moves, has pored over stances and motions in the pages of a book over and over—but his body shakes with fatigue, and every parry looks like it could be his last.

The shelves shake from their clashes. With a shaky hand, Avett brushes over the cool metal casing of his blaster, hisses in pain from the biting cold. He holds his firearm by the battery instead, and he feels the warmth spread over the pads of his fingertips. Time slows to a crawl; each of his heartbeats lasts an eternity. He needs to fight now. He needs to move, now.

He aims for Lethe’s shoulder, but she’s way too close to Auren for him to make a safe shot. He’s not even sure if he can shoot her. No, he definitely can’t.

Avett aims up at the ceiling lamp instead. He fires—pain darts up his fingers and into his frigid arm. The recoil feels like it might’ve broken his bones. His shot lands true, but all Avett can hear is the ear-splintering crackle of glass against the concrete flooring, the twin’s light footsteps as she bounces backwards and away, and Auren’s low grumble of pain.

He fumbles through the darkness. For all of the shit he gives Lilith, he’d kill to have some Human eyes right now; having to rapidly swap between white-hot light and pitch-black darkness is really killing his visuals. He drops to the ground and crawls on all fours. His hands grope around, and he closes his fingers around various objects before hitting his mark. Glass shard, glass shard, then—cloth.

He grabs Auren’s body by the scruff of his robes and drags him back behind a shelf. He’s adjusted to the lack of light by now, though he wishes that he hadn’t. When Avett sees Auren’s bone-white complexion and sweat-drenched hair, he realises what Lilith had meant by her ballsy proclamation earlier. Not even slapping the man’s cheeks rouses him.

His ‘superior’ is deathly unfit.

A laugh shudders out of him. He’d let a man like this bully him into subservience for a year.

A spark of cerulean ether skirts past his shoulder, and Avett crouches behind the shelf again. He swears under his breath. What’s the use of having an ‘invisible’ ether circulatory system if everyone who matters can see him anyway?

“Perhaps you would like to surrender, Human girl?” she gloats. “Yes, you heard correctly—despite your ears and tail, I know what you are: Human.”

Avett whips his blaster around the corner and fires a few warning shots, but none of them land. He’s doing an amazing Lilith impression right now.

Despite knowing his location, Lethe only continues, “What gave you away, you must be wondering? I can assure you, your ears are very much convincing, and though your tail appeared limp at times, I truly believed you were of Kattish descent.”

He has to get out of here. He hoists Auren up in his arms and runs further into the laboratory. Lethe thinks she’s got him on the ropes—he has to keep deluding her into believing that she’s won herself a premature victory for the time being, and that means turning tail and fleeing. Deeper and deeper into the labyrinth he goes.

“So what gave you away?” Stars, Avett can practically hear the smirk on her lips. “Your movements. Earlier, you fought like a Human: clumsy, inefficient, yet wholly powered by your own ether. Your ability to fight is artificial.”

Avett hopes she’s referring to another fight that the real Lilith had with Lethe, and not to the fight they’re having right now. He ducks behind another shelf, though he’s only now realising that this is all pointless—his assailant is acutely aware of his position within the laboratory at all times. He’s alive because she wills it.

The twin stops in front of the shelf he’s crouched behind. She runs a finger over the vials of liquidised ether and admires their transparent, blue glow.

“Were you useless before the Migration, I wonder?” she muses. “Less than a normal girl?”

He bites on his tongue and lowers Auren to the floor. He might as well get his defeat over and done with. They’re just distractions after all; Lilith is what they’re really after, not two working class off-landers who can’t even hitch a ride back to Therius without overdrafting. She’s special.

While gritting his teeth, Avett picks himself up and steps out from the shelf.

Lethe’s smile turns smarmy. “Perhaps I hit a nerve?”

Avett says nothing and readies his fists in front of him instead. He tries not to remember the sweet embrace of her ether’s talons, the way she’d so easily thrown him aside with nary a care. He’s sick of these weird overseers and their even weirder personalities. Fuck them.

His fist swings through the air. He feels his knuckles stop in the air like he’s hit an invisible cushion and not a rock-hard shield instead. A scowl spreads across his features.

Lethe does nothing to counterattack. “Would you prefer a fair fight then, girl? Speak your answer, vixen.”

He pulls his fist back like a fully drawn arrow, readying another full-body punch. His opponent doesn’t react. He stops his punch midair and whirls into a roundhouse instead.

Avett hits another shield.

He curses and bounces back from the girl. There’s no blindsiding these overseers either. He's fucked.

A bolt of energy darts towards his ear. Avett can't dodge out of the way fast enough. He bobs and weaves through Lethe's sudden barrage, maneuvering himself further and further away from Auren's unconscious body. He's sweating hard into Lilith's gear, and he's registering a dull ache in his calves, but the worst part is that she's still just playing with him.

The barrage of ether stops for a split second, and Lethe folds her arms. "I proposed a question, girl." Her tone is ice cold. "It would do you well to respond."

Avett responds by hip firing into the twin's general direction. Like he's going to give himself up so easily.

No sooner does he feel the shot leave the barrel of his blaster does Lethe dart up to him with inhuman speed, her eyes glinting that blank and sinister blue. Avett barely manages to register the gleam of ether between her fingertips before she slams that power into his stomach, and he's sent careening back like he's a ragdoll in a toy box. The shelf behind him topples over, and he feels a distinct wetness on his arms as he tries desperately to refocus his vision. Shards of bloodied glass glint up at him from the floor.

He blinks rapidly. Lethe doesn't approach him at all; she chooses to leave him reeling from the impact of her blow instead. He's not even sure of what's hit him until he wobbles back onto his feet. It feels like he's been pried open and hollowed out of all of his bones and organs.

His gut churns. If he had to guess, Lethe's deprived him of his ether circulation.

The twin taps her cheekbone with a dainty finger. "My shields are down. Your revenge is by your command, if you so desire it."

What an idiot.

Avett closes the gap between them in one easy stride and wastes no time knocking the daylights out of this twin. She's out before she's even hit the ground—if he'd let her hit the ground at all. He props her unconscious body against a shelf, mulls over his decision for a bit, then claps a handcuff over her wrist and the shelf instead. He doubts that his standard issue cuffs will hold her down for long, but at least they'll be long gone by the time she stirs. Hopefully.

He hauls Auren's arm over his aching shoulders and hobbles down an aisle of tall shelves. He should probably find Lilith.

—

Lili's body won't stop shaking. Her arms and back could snap under the weight of this girl at any moment, and they're not even halfway out of the bunker yet. Her ether only answers to her command sporadically; she's running through this mess with nothing but her unfit, untrained self. The girl isn't too heavy, thankfully—she's malnourished and skeletal—but if Lili runs into Claire again, she's fucked. There’s no way she’s fighting like this.

She whips her head around. No one’s directly behind her. Not yet.

Corridors bleed into large openings, little crannies lead to rows upon rows of shelves that don’t exactly make much sense. The further she goes, the more she sees. What use is there for B5 gelatin? She doesn’t know, doesn’t care to dwell on it. The entrance can’t be far. If she keeps travelling in one direction she’ll reach the wall, and from there finding the exit will be a cinch. She’s sure of it.

Footsteps on her rear. She whips her head around again. Her breath quickens for a split second before she manages to calm herself down. She hears nothing but the pounding of her own heart.

Lethe's twin has gotten closer. Lili swallows. She wonders if her assailant’s just playing with her, or if she genuinely doesn’t know where she is. Lethe was stupid enough to fool once or twice before she eventually bit down on her pride and barrelled into Lili with full power. Her twin is doubly dangerous, like a knife on a whetstone—precise and bloodthirsty, ready to sink her edge into flesh and bone. Lili is less than that. She’s about as strong and sturdy as a piece of wet paper.

A flash of blue. Lili’s breath catches, and she looks down. The floor is glowing cerulean, lighting her boots up from the soles.

Lili wastes no time throwing her body forward. A spike of pure ether rockets upwards from the ground then dissipates as quickly as it had come. She’s not thinking, but her legs feel both strong and weak at the same time, and she’s using all of that energy to run, to get the hell out of this lab or at the very least, these tight rows of shelves.

Another spike. She dodges that too, but the edge catches on her boot and she’s sent tripping forward. She careens into a pile of empty vats. Bits of glass stab into her thighs.

The girl. Lili’s mind is whirling, whirling, but all she can think about is the girl. She rolls over. Pain sluices up her thighs, through her palms—she sinks back to the floor, defeated. The least she can do is brace herself up with her arms, and even in her pain-addled state she knows she’s not escaping on her fours.

She shakes her head. This is it. It’s over.

But then the girl lets out a light moan. She has a fairy-like voice, like she’s speaking to a cat or a small child. Thankfully, she’s uninjured; a small boon of luck to prelude the shitstorm Lili’s about to face.

The girl blinks slowly—her eyes are wide and red, Lili notes. Then she looks at Lili.

“You’re not…?”

Lili is about to respond, but the girl has other plans. Her eyes dart around the area instead of waiting for an answer, and she picks herself up after she’s accessed the situation.

Fear strikes at Lili in waves. She reaches out. “Wait—don’t leave me here!”

“Are the twins after us?” the girl asks.

Lili can only manage a nod. The girl chews on the edge of her thumbnail.

“I’ll ask questions later, I guess…” She looks to the ceiling; Lili follows her gaze. The girl is scrutinising the very make of this basement, though for what reason, Lili doesn’t know yet. And from her jerky movements alone, Lili knows that she’s just as scared as she is.

The girl raises her hands to her chest and touches her fingertips together. “I haven’t really done this in a while,” she says. “You’ll have to bear with me for a bit.”

They don’t have that much time to waste, but Lili keeps her mouth shut when she catches the aroma of smoke and blood in the air. Her heart leaps into a panic. For a moment, she’s sure that Claire has already found them, and that she’s brought Avett and Auren’s maimed bodies along with her to make a statement.

But then she sees the girl’s hands. Red ether eddies between her fingertips—it’s like she’s handling her very own miniature sun. The light bleeds into her red skin, brighter and brighter, until Lili can’t look directly at her anymore.

“I, Kashira Hellsborne, request a boon from the dragons.” The air begins to swirl around her head, lifting her silvery hair from her slim shoulders. "Impart upon us the terms of your prophecy, or remain forever silent."

There's so much ether that Lili can taste it on her tongue when she breathes in. It's like she's standing next to a plume of smoke.

A golden scrawl hovers in front of the girl's face, but no matter how hard Lili tries to make sense of the words, she can't make out what they say. In a mere matter of minutes the words are gone, lost to the darkness.

The girl—Kashira, Lili assumes—takes a slice of glass from the ground and brushes her thumb over the edge. She leaves behind a wet line of red, and she drops this piece of marked shard onto the floor.

"Your terms have been met, and your prophecy has been fulfilled." Her eyes remain on the ceiling. Everything about her is scarily tense. Lili finds herself holding a breath.

She scents her assailant’s ether—some kind of apple and lime—before she really sees her. Claire is silent and precise; she maneuvers herself between the shelves like she’s a thrown dagger. Like the two of them are her bullseye.

Kashira raises a single, red arm to the ceiling.

All of a sudden, it’s not ether that’s pouring out of her fingertips anymore. Lili squints at the younger girl, but she can’t tell what it is she’s doing. Her ether—if Lili can even call it that—is heady and dreadful, like Lili’s been plunged headfirst into the never ending vacuum of space. It’s not power that a mere mortal should have, let alone to be commanding at all. Her teeth chatter together. The blood staining her thighs goes cold.

The lamps on the ceiling pop and fizzle. The vats come tumbling from their shelves, spilling their contents to the floor. Even the shelves, once bolted down by reinforced Therian metal, topple over, shaking the ground to its very foundations. Lili’s hands instinctively fly over her head.  Her nails dig into the roots of her hair. The shelves—they're going to crush her, bone and all.

She squeezes her eyes shut. A second passes. Two seconds.

She loosens her grip on her head and allows herself to sneak a peek upward. The dust's settled, and everything's stopped toppling. Even Kashira has gone completely silent.

Lili squints and looks beyond her savior; she sees blue, spiked ether in the dark. Unfortunately for them, Lethe's twin is well and healthy, and she's standing between what looks to be two low shelves. No. Lili's breath catches in her throat.

Not two shelves. She's split one shelf cleanly in half.

Kashira's ether is now completely gone, and she's just standing, standing in wide eyed fear. Her skin is a ruddy mauve. Her knobby legs shake like they're twigs in the wind.

"We've managed to keep you in your container for the past three years," the girl spits. She flicks her wrist, and her ether dissipates into fine mist. "I know all your tricks. Everything that affinity of yours can do. You're outmatched Fateweaver. I'd get back into that vat if I were you."

Lili shakes her head. "You're not taking her back. I don't care that Alexei's blackmailed us. This is torture, you don't do this to anot—"

Her voice chills Lili to her veins. "The reason we keep her down here," she says, pointing to Kashira, "is because she's part of something far larger than the both of us combined. I don't like torturing children for fun. I'm Human too. But for the sake of both of us, let me do my job. Please."

Lili opens her mouth, but the words don't come to her. Claire looks like she's bargaining with the teacher for a grade, and not like she's arguing over the life of a tortured individual. She's so genuine. That's the scary part. Maybe she's right. Maybe Lili's the irrational asshole here.

She grits her teeth. This is somebody else's life that they're talking about, for fuck's sake! There's always another way to solve things, Lili thinks. Kashira doesn't have to live like this.

Lili flashes a glance at Kashira. She eyes her red skin, her silver hair—if she's not mistaken, Kashira must be a Gallian. She could easily take in Lili's ether. Victory could be a cinch.

She looks back to Claire. "You're—you’re overseers. I'm one too."

Kashira looks back, her eyes wide with shock. Lili flashes a grin at her and feathers her ether against Kashira's own. An invitation.

Her eyes narrow, and she accepts it.

Claire makes her way forward, her steps precise and deadly. "You're a liar. I don't recognise you from the biannual seminars. Which sanctuary are you?"

Shit. She'd called her bluff so easily. Lili needs some kind of proof, some kind of knowledge only an overseer would have. She wracks her brains for anything, anything Alexei might've told her back in his ship.

A flash of genius. "Alexei can't visit anymore because his sanctuary's mostly Humans, and they need someone to keep them in check," Lili says.

Claire snorts. "Everyone and their mum knows that one. His competence reaches far and wide."

Lili swears under her breath. There's something else—surely there's something else she can say, but she's only just realising how little she knows about power she has, and role of the overseers as a whole.

Behind her eyes, Kashira is reaching into Lili's personal ether, inhaling her smoke like she's smoking a cigarette. Just a little bit more time. Just a bit more.

"Smoke," Lili blurts out. "The overseers have ether that stinks of smoke. Am I wrong?"

The twin's eyes flicker. She tenses her hands.

"That's not all,” Lili continues. “You don’t smell of it. You twin, however...”

Her proposition hangs in the air like acid condensate. Lili hides a hiss as Kashira siphons the very dregs of Lili’s ether into her body, leaving her with only the scraps left. Her vision wobbles, her arms are shaking uncontrollably, but they’ve long passed the line of no return. The very least Lili can do is offer a slanted, toothy grin at her assailant as Claire realises exactly what she’s done.

Kashira rises. She raises her arm—Claire flicks a spike towards the girl and hops back, but it’s no use. Kashira deflects it easily with a snap of her fingers.

The twin snarls. She’s no overseer. She can’t possibly hope to beat one, and she knows it.

Kashira starts again, her tone low and rolling. She states her name, her request, and all Lili can do is falter against the steel ground, her consciousness rapidly melting into an uneasy black. Her savior's incantation follows her into her stupor.

"Impart upon us the terms of your prophecy, or remain forever silent..."

And then Lili slumps to the ground.

—

"I'm betting my balls that they're not too far from here," says Avett. Upon catching one of Auren's infamous eye twitches, he adds, "Not that I don't trust her to do a good job of running off. She's a natural."

And to really seal his act as the carefree masterminded-bastard, Avett shrugs at him with his hands raised. Auren only half buys it; Avett can tell by the way his upper lip curls and how his eyes remain narrowed. In truth, they both know what the other’s thinking: Lilith's fucked up and gotten herself caught, because she can't possibly win against such a lethal fighter as Claire. Their assailants are blades that have been honed to kill—they’re just kitchen knives compared to the twins, and Lilith is starsdamned plastic cutlery.

He exhales. Carrying this exoskeleton of a man isn’t as physically exhausting as he thought it’d be; Auren takes his taxes through the way he continues to glare at Avett through his droopy eyes as he hangs from his shoulders by an arm. Avett knows that this isn’t a predicament Auren wishes to be in. The fight earlier has left him ragged, sweat-drenched, and pale faced, and all he can do is allow Avett to hold him upright as they make their way through the lab.  

By the time they’ve made it past the first set of shelves, Avett decides that he’s had enough. “Listen, grandpa, I hate this as much as you do right now. The least you could do is make this bearable for the both of us. And maybe get some exercise.”

Auren only lets out a grunt of disapproval. He’s so angry, stars, Avett can just feel it. He’s done it, he’s torn off his 'superior’s' stone cold exterior and exposed his innards for the world to see.

He’s still smiling up a storm when Auren starts to speak again, albeit quietly. “You seem to be taking all of this well, Avett.”

“Not the first Human I’ve had to punch out.”

He coughs. “That was not my intention. You fought… admirably.”

Avett touches a hand to his face. He finds a smile stuck there, and it’s hard as concrete. He shakes it off, but even then he still feels the remnants plastered against his cheeks; it’s giddy joy. Probably an adrenaline-laced remainder from his prior victory. He’ll ride it off soon.  

“Trying to get on my good side now that you’ve seen what I can do?” he teases back. "I'm just that good, huh?"

Auren falls silent for a bit.

Then he says, “You work well with Lili, yes?”

The answer comes easily and with a laugh. “No.”

“Avett.”

“Defend her all you want, it’s true.” Avett doesn’t look back at the larger man. “She’s a nuisance. Think about all the dough we could’ve been rolling in if you hadn’t taken her in. Now we’re stuck in some underground basement fighting little dragon girls who look like they’ve skipped class for the day.”

Another pause. “Are these your true thoughts?”

“It’s not like I haven’t made it clear how I feel about Lilith from day one.” He blows a stray strand of hair from his eyes. “What, having your second thoughts too? Come on, we’ve gotta find Lilith before she bites it.”

Auren exhales and pushes away from Avett. He seems to be walking fine now, so Avett leaves him be.

“There is really… no need. Do you recall when Alexei took me aside?” he asks.

“You really think I give that much of a shit about you, huh…”

Auren continues unabated. “He informed me of Lili’s true nature. She is not the Human that we believed her to be. She is abnormal.”


“You’re right about one thing there.” Avett snorts.

“She is abnormal beyond the mere scope of her mannerisms, Avett.” His tone is deadly serious. “There is a dragon’s soul nestled within her Human soul, and it was melded there by artificial means.”

“Yeah, and?” Avett bristles. What does this all have to do with why they’re stalling on saving Lilith? “Isn’t that just what’s normal for the lifeforms on this realm? Alexei’s got one too, right? So did the villagers from our last mission, sort of. And the twins—”

“This is different. Alexei has informed me of the exact prerequisites for the existence of the overseers.” Auren makes his way to Avett’s side, clutching onto the shelves for support as he goes. “There are only seventy sanctuaries on this realm, and thus there can only ever remain seventy overseers. No more, no less. The system will attempt to balance itself should the need for such arise.

“The artifact we were ordained to retrieve is an artificial overseer, created from the death of an overseer willing to sacrifice himself. She is not meant to exist, and she possesses certain fate-altering abilities as a result of her status as an anomaly. The artifact is a weapon crafted to end the universe itself. She is dangerous.”

Avett folds his arms. “Just like my cock and balls. Get to the point.”

“The existence of Lili brings the grand total of overseers to seventy-one.”

Avett is about to snap at Auren again when he really lets his words sink in. The artifact is basically an artificial version of whatever Alexei is, and because of that, she’s dangerous on the cosmic scale. But then so is Lilith—and not only is she artificial, but she’s also a living hitch in the system that’s managed to wriggle past the rules.

He looks to Auren with uncertainty.  

“Ergo, she cannot lose. It would be near impossible given her potential,” Auren finishes. “Alexei does not know the extent of her abilities, though we can only assume that they are nigh-fatal should they end up in the wrong hands. Which brings this back to us.”

Avett lets out a choked laugh. “Us? You’ve just dumped all of this fate and destiny shit on me and now you want to talk about us? Get your head out of your ass, Auren. It sounds like we don’t quite matter here.”

“Precisely.” Auren brushes a hand against the glass. “We do not. Which is why we have the option of abandoning Lili entirely in order to pursue our own interests: working inter-realm on a mercenary vessel under the jurisdiction of the IRC.”

His words stop Avett cold. He swallows. “Really?”

“It was an option offered to us by Alexei. He would be more than happy to take her under his wing, though he does not mind should we choose to stay with her."

Avett feels his world crumbling under his feet. The thought of being able to experience the true mercenary life excites him to no end, and yet it also leaves a hollow in his stomach that makes him mull over the options. He doesn't quite get why he's so antsy until he realises—

Loud, unrelenting energy sears past Avett's ear; a blaster bullet. He looks in front of him, expecting Claire or Lethe to be standing there, guns ablaze. He gets none of that. The figure wears a piss yellow jumpsuit that's been tied down at the waist and is wielding a modded rifle-blaster. Her hair is a dirty brown.

It's Eltia. His hand darts to his own blaster, but the woman is faster: she brings her barrel up to Avett's head. He freezes.

“Stars, Avett.” Her voice is a low growl, and there’s nothing kind left in her tone. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

It takes a moment for Avett to find his own voice. “Sorry, Eltia,” he says. “I’m a caster now, and it’s not a phase. Don't shoot at your own son next time."

"I didn't miss by accident, kid." She cocks her blaster to the side, then lowers it. "You’ve seen bodies before. Check your rear.”

He does. He wishes he hadn't.

Draped over a pile of boxes is Lethe's limp body. There's a large splotch of red in the middle of her forehead. Her limbs have fallen the wrong way, and her eyes are wide open.

Auren is the first to lose his composure. He starts to wobble again, but Avett grips his superior by the forearm to steady him. Avett's steadying himself more than anything. He whips back around to stare down at Eltia.

"You bitch," he snarls, but he's far too shaken to be intimidating. "You—you didn't have to, she's just—"

"Just a cold hearted bitch of a killer." She makes her way over to Lethe's body and prods her barrel into her cheek. Lethe doesn't react—Avett can't bear to look. "She's been on my shitlist for some time now, kid. Killed my best men and my closest confidant. You can't replace good people, but you can give them what they deserve: revenge."

"Then you know about the overseers," Avett chokes out.

"Thought I was just fucking around for all of these years?" She scoffs. "Nope. I spent 'em forming grudges with people from all walks of life, kid."

Avett and Auren say nothing at first. Auren especially; there’s nothing for him to say. But as soon as Eltia turns and starts to make her way through the shelves, Avett takes a hasty step forward.

“You’re not getting off that fucking easily,” he snarls.

"Oh, for fuck's sake." She doesn't turn around. "I've just saved your life."

Auren, despite his state of shellshock, manages to wrinkle his nose at this new slew of profanity.

"Why were you down here?" Avett continues, his voice hoarse. If Eltia is after the artifact herself, this might just make for a good excuse to beat the shit out of her. His hands tighten around his blaster.

Her boots click into the ground, and she stops for good.

"Because someone," she says, her tone thin and harsh, "couldn't keep his nose out of New Therian business. If you think I'm down here for some extra credits, or some other underground shit, you're barking up the wrong tree."

"So you killed her—"

"She was going to kill you."

Avett sinks his fingertips into the folds of Auren's robes. There's a thought forming in his head, and he doesn't want to let it finish. He swallows.

Eltia continues, "I tracked you down here. I thought it was strange that my estranged son would come to New Therius—my turf—willingly. Which is when I realised: you were being blackmailed, or at the very least, under some kind of desperate duress. Couldn't just stand and do nothing."

"Just because you act like you own the place doesn't mean I…" He trails off, narrows his eyes, then shakes his head. "What, so you care about me now, is that it?"

"Now?" Eltia glares back. "Only now? Really, Avett, that's the best you could come up with? You think I only care about you now?"

Something cold settles in the pits of Avett's belly. He holds Auren even tighter, so tight that he thinks that he'll pierce right through the fabric of his robes and into his skin. He's not strong enough to, of course. He's never strong enough.

Eltia turns and makes for the exit. "Try not to get into any more fights with the locals, kid," she calls back. "And tell your Gallian backliner that he's not the hot shit that he thinks he is."

Then she's off for good, melting into the darkness like a creature of the shadow. Avett doesn’t look back at the body a second time.