4: the mall

Lili’s not sure if she’s ready to see the visceral mess of bygone cities and desolate roads she assumes that the Hive will be, but when she tries looking out of the ship she’s actually pleasantly surprised. The roads leading to the Hive are completely intact. Instead, it’s a factory that’s been taken down and repurposed into three sky-scraping spires. The two leftmost spires look like they’ve seen better days—exposed beams of steel spike out in haphazard directions up along the shaft like an agitated hedgehog. The third tower has clearly had more maintenance done to it. 

What really interests her is the initial lack of a real hangar. As the ship swerves around towards the third spire, it's only then does she spot exactly where Ysh'vanna is supposed to dock: a small, jutting platform that leads into a domed alcove.

“The way the Hive works,” Avett says as he slides on his leather gloves, “is that the third spire’s for off-landers. The first and second… ” He gives Lili a wary look before casting his vision aside again. 

“Full of humans?” she finishes. 

Avett doesn’t say anything. “They don’t like off-landers. We do our business in the third spire, they do their ‘best’ to stay out of it. I just stay onboard.”

“The Hive’s third spire is safer than what Avett,” Auren says as he shoots a passing glance over to his frontliner, “would make it out to be. I invite you to disembark the ship and draw your own conclusions.”

Lili has a feeling that her own conclusion won’t exactly be the most informed, so she doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns her attention to Ysh’vanna’s flurry of hands as she lurches the ship into a stomach-dropping dip. She plays chicken with the shifting view for a bit before she forces herself to leave the room. 

A few minutes later and she’s down in the Hive along with Ysh’vanna in a room that barely has any air ventilation; the only mercy is that the place is completely devoid of anyone else. They’re observing a mission board that flashes—presumably refreshing itself—every minute. It’s about as wide as the wall that it’s mounted on. Multiple text boxes litter the board. When Lili taps on one of them, the box expands and a short descriptor of the mission displays itself alongside a prompt for the ship’s card to be placed on the screen.

“We’ll pick something easy for now, hm?” Ysh’vanna has a hand on her hip as she walks across to the other side of the board. “B rank… how about this?”

She flicks her wrist, and the box slides its way across to Lili. Her eyes immediately lock on to the reward money that’s being offered. “Relic recovery?” 

“Don’t let the recompense money fool you. This stuff is painfully easy. Normally these types of missions are snatched up the moment the Inter-Realm Concern uploads them, but since it’s the Hive…” Ysh’vanna folds her arms. “Pretty easy to grab whatever when the only other ship operating in the Hive wilds only has a C rank authorisation.”

Lili turns her attention back to the text box. That ship would have easily been them, had the test not played out the way it had. “What exactly is a Relic?” 

“S ranked targets passively create a reality altering field around them. A ranked too—though to a lesser degree. You have to have special clearance to even be in the same area as one, and that’s only after they’ve done extensive research through the relics that they leave behind. Similarly, it’s why we also hunt certain B and C ranked dragons who look like they have the aptitude to become A ranks.” Ysh’vanna shrugs. “It’ll be around forty years, maybe even more from now—but the moment the IRC elites eliminate the last S or A ranked dragon, we win. The realms go back to normal, the IRC gets to assimilate Earth into the family of discovered realms, and they get to rename themselves to The 5th Consortium or something.”

This sounds like a recipe for disaster to Lili. She’s about to voice her concerns when Ysh’vanna strolls right back over to her and slaps her back. “Chill out, hm? We wouldn’t even be allowed to enter if it hadn’t left a long time ago.” She slaps her card onto the screen, and a circular bar quickly wraps itself around it. “All we have to do is dive into some ruins, get the relic, then we leave. Very small chance of encounter. You wanna grab a snack before we head off?”

Somehow, Lili has a feeling that the Hive is going to have a very small selection of food compared to that of the Afflatus’ smorgasbord of cultures. Maybe Avett’s influence is finally serving it’s toll, or maybe she’s just not a big fan of how this place feels like an undersea tuna can despite being elevated one hundred metres in the air, but she refuses Ysh’vanna’s offer. They’ve just had lunch anyway.

When the two of them arrive back on the Winnow, Lili heads for the bathroom to refresh herself. She spots Avett lying against the floor in the sleeping quarters on her way there. He’s holding what looks to be a transparent phone screen above his head, and there’s a slight grin on his face.

She splashes water onto her face from the sink. Her first mission. Maybe it won’t go as badly as her last encounter. Or maybe it will. Because she’s not actually that great at making informed decisions in the heat of the moment, and when it comes to dealing with larger-than-life dragons, it seems that everything she knows about defending herself is only secondary to her ability to determine the best course of action in any given moment. 

The water drips down her chin. She wipes at it desperately with her sleeve. A wet sleeve, she thinks, is far better than a soaked collar. Then she looks at herself in the mirror.

Never had she ever envisioned herself wearing the same casters’ gear as Auren. However, instead of her tunic being burgundy-red, her attire is a dull teal. It’s a perfect fit on her, but somehow, she just can’t seem to wrap her head around the fact that it’s on her body. Or that it’s even meant to be on her body. The cloth seems too new, too unworn—though that’s a descriptor she knows is going to change pretty soon.  

“You know you don’t have to wear the whole thing. Most people don’t.” 

Lili spots Avett leaning against the doorway. He’s in an unbuttoned jacket and a black tank top. Definitely not the usual mechanic jumpsuit that he’s in. “Auren does,” she replies.

“Auren’s a prude.”

She winces. “I don’t have anything that’s field-appropriate.” Besides, she’s not sure what’s wrong with her gear, aside from the weird shade of teal. It’s comfortable, it doesn’t scratch her when she bends her elbows, and it has way too many pockets running down the side of her pants. 

“Fine, fine. You win.” 

She braces her arms against the sink counter. It’s obvious that he’s not just here to bash on her fashion senses. “Is… is there anything else you want to say?” she tests. 

Avett brings himself upright again. “I really don’t know what Ysh’ told you, but you should probably relax. Relic recovery’s one the easiest jobs we could’ve gotten. You literally walk in, grab the thing, walk out, get paid.”

Something catches in her throat. “Walk into what?”

Thirty minutes later, and she’s standing outside in front of what used to be the Baywaters shopping mall. She has been here at least once or twice, back when she considered store-bought Pak’n Save chicken roasts to be the pinnacle of western dining. She was fifteen. Now she’s back, and all that’s left for her as she stands in the carpark are half-rusted signs and crumbling walls of concrete. 

“Ruins, princess.” Avett straps into his messenger bag. “We’re going ruin diving.”

Lili presses her lips together into a grimace. She eyes the glint of the exposed iron framework as it pierces through the pillars like a broken bone. Someone could impale themselves on that if they fell directly onto it from ten metres up. The thought of that happening doesn’t help the roiling wave of dread that’s settling over her body like a fine coating of dust. 

“Great,” she mumbles. It’s in her best interests to streamline this job as much as possible, so she adds, “How do we know what the relic looks like?”

“Beats me. You’ll probably feel it before it shows up on my GlassLink.” He waves his phone in the air briefly. “The real, organic deal’s way better than this cheap old thing.”

She can see his hand vaguely through the glass, which is a deep shade of grey. There’s no way that that’s what’s considered cheap and old in Therius, but if it is, it doesn’t surprise her. The guy in front of her is holding two state-of-the-art blasters—capable of taking down dragons, allegedly. Though now that she’s gotten a better look at them and seen what his crossbow is capable of, they seem more suited to giving mild headaches rather than inflicting skull-blasting finishers. 

The crumbling exterior of the mall gives way to—unsurprisingly—an open air roof. The once stalwart pillars that held the ceiling have long since toppled here, and if Lili walks over all of the chunks and leftovers of what used to be flooring, she can see ugly, blackened welts—scarred into the concrete like a brand. Burn marks. 

Unease drips into her like a broken tap. Maybe she shouldn’t be looking at this so soon.

Avett occasionally checks in on his GlassLink as the two of them traverse deeper into the abandoned mall. The odd, uncovered spike of metal here and there keeps Lili on her toes. She just hopes that she’ll start feeling whatever Avett wants her to feel when they approach the relic. It’s a silly comparison, but the whole thing makes her feel like she’s a TV receptor. At least she’s useful to him.

Soon, the roof starts coming back together, kind of like icicles freezing over a pane of glass in winter, but she’s not quite feeling safe yet; there’s a crack that’s running down the length of the ceiling, and she’s worried that the glass dome that’s directly above them might rain down on them if they aren’t careful. The whole place is giving her just a terrible time, and the deeper they go, the worse her dread gets. It’s awful. She looks over to Avett, and he just seems to be having a swell old time. Relic recovery beats hunting dragons anyday, of course. It’s just a shame that they’re in a mall that Lili recognises and knows all too well. She can see the old doughnut store that she used to eye up constantly until her mum caved and bought her a takeaway box of six tiny, cream-filled, doughy balls. 

She fixes her eyes in front of her.

“So.” Avett holds up his GlassLink for Lili to see—there’s nothing on his radar. Not even a hint of where the relic might be. “You feeling anything yet, princess?”

“Not really.” She shuffles from foot to foot. “This place—something’s off. You’re sure that nothing’s here?”

Her line of sight falls onto his blasters and crossbow. He covers them with a hand. “Look, I’m sure it looks like I came prepared for a fight, but the toughest thing that could possibly fit in here probably’s a baby—hardly worth your time, but still need a few blasts to put them down. B ranks prefer the outdoors.” 

“You’d shoot a baby?”

Avett narrows his eyes, draws his blaster, and fires a round into the ground near Lili’s foot. A jolt of pure adrenaline shoots right up her leg and into her head as she jerks herself away. 

The shot leaves the ground vaguely smoking. And the report of that one, presumably innocuous shot’s just echoing, echoing away into the rest of the mall. 

“Only big babies,” he answers. 

Lili can still hear the gunshot. And it’s not just her imagination. The echo really does just go on for way too long. She’s so busy focusing on the sound that she almost misses something else—the sound of rocks cracking under the pressure of one another. 

“Avett—” she starts. The cracking is loudest directly above them. Whatever Lili has to do, she has to do it now. Her legs scream to life as she pumps ether through every single one of her limbs before throwing herself into Avett.

A shot goes off. It hits another part of the broken ceiling—Lili watches the bright blue spark pop against the concrete, watches another crack form, its reach spreading like a web. As they tumble to the floor, the torso-sized chunk thuds to the ground behind them. The crater that it makes upon landing is enough to make Lili immediately grip Avett’s—strangely limber—shoulders. He has a blaster in one hand. 

She looks back just in time to catch another chunk thudding to the ground behind them, sending microscopic flecks of asphalt up into the air. The ceiling is collapsing fast. She’s thankful for the rubbery soles of her combat boots as she pulls Avett upright, her adrenaline bursting into her anew—but even then, the ground seems like a shitfest to sprint across. 

“You useless—” Avett’s tail wavers behind him, no doubt correcting his balance. He spares a glance behind him. “Fuck. Talk later. Fuck. Fuck!”

Every step she takes feels like she’s skidding on ice, even though she knows it’s just the copious amounts of rubble. As the two of them vault over the old shop counters and slip by glass displays, it occurs to Lili that the sensation of crushing dread is just getting worse by the minute. Adrenaline is a potent drug, but whatever this is… it’s weighing her legs down, making her lungs wheeze like an overheated kettle. Her muscles have been replaced with lead.

“Lilith—Lilith, no,” Avett manages to pull her forward. She must’ve faltered a bit. “Come on. We’re almost out. Fuck—how long is this ceiling going to—?”

He’s right. The ceiling’s been falling on them for way too long. But she can hardly think, hardly follow any line of thought to its conclusion—it’s all a faint pulse against the voracious heat of dread, now sinking and clawing into her skull like it’s a parasite inside of her, itching and worming its way through her head. All of this, just to survive.

Lili bites down on the insides of her cheeks. Hard. The sharp bolt of pain is enough for her own thoughts to come slamming back into her. She grabs Avett’s arm and pulls him to the side into a small shop that she’s not sure she’s seen before. It must be new.

The ceiling continues to rain down outside. But the store stays intact. 

It’s not over yet. She has to do something. If she stays still, stays complicit for even a second too long, she’ll start feeling it again—the sensation of being gnawed alive. It feels like it’s right next to her. Like if she turns back slowly, she’ll see the gaping, salivating maw of a certain dragon from a few days ago.

Lili groans and clutches her head. It’s here. She kneels over and starts clawing at the rubble beneath her feet. She doesn’t care that her fingernails are chipping or that she looks like a maniac. She just needs to free it. Every second she spends in close proximity to this thing is an eternity spent in damnation. 

Her hands close around something. Something scalding to the touch. It’s a glassy sphere, probably an ornament of some sort. She wrenches it free from the rocks. As soon as she does, her mind rams into that sweet, ecstatic pause of thought, and for a minute she actually considers embracing this silence wholly. It’s a sweet mercy compared to the whirlwind of emotion she had subjected herself to for the past hour. Why shouldn’t she?

Her eyelids start fluttering against her will. The glass now only feels mildly warm, as if someone’s been lovingly embracing it with their body. 

“Fuck—Lilith.”

Something—someone, actually—strong pinches her cheeks and stretches them apart. And then Lili is awake again. Far too awake. 

She splutters and nearly drops the damn thing. 

“Uh.” Avett plucks the object from her hands. “Maybe I should hold that. You alright, by the way, princess?”

“Yeah, but ceilings,” she says, a pant wrenching through her body mid-sentence, “they’re not supposed to fall like that.”

“Relic might’ve been sending this entire place into overdrive. They’ve got a mind of their own—though never to this extent.” Avett turns on his phone and peers at the bauble through its transparent screen. Lili almost wants to strangle him for even daring to check that yes—this is the thing that drove her crazy, and that it is in fact the relic that they’ve been looking for. “Never really sure what they’ll do, but they don’t usually try to kill you.”

She gulps down air and slumps onto her back, rubble and dirt be damned. “You didn’t feel it? Not a thing?”

He shoves his phone back into his front pocket. “Nope. Didn’t even scratch my balls. Seemed to be turning you inside out though. Kind of glad I’m an arms specialist now.”

She looks back at the relic. Wet flakes of glittery snow swirl around inside the dome and come to rest atop a plastic cabin. A tiny pine tree stands next to it, and underneath that’s a poorly-built snowman. His carrot’s been stuck in the wrong way.

Before she can pick her—now stiffening—body up off the ground, Avett pins her right back down with a dirty look. “You know, I had the situation under control. You were the one who knocked me over and set the whole ceiling off.” 

Lili thinks back to the stray shot that started this whole mess in the first place. Had it hit its mark—the initial boulder—none of this would have happened. Her cheeks pink in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

Something ticks in his jaw. He opens his mouth to say something, closes it, then turns his attention to the entrance. Despite the fact that he’s not facing her, Lili can tell something is amiss—he’s gone completely still. Even his tail isn’t moving. When she stands and pats down her thighs, she can immediately see why.

The ceiling is completely intact, as if it had never collapsed at all. And all she can see is the darkness of the abandoned mall, its seemingly infinite hallways beckoning them like a stranger in the moonlight.

— 

“Captain O-Raal, this is frontliner Ironsturm radioing in to perform a status update. I’d just like to say, if you two just aren’t picking up because you’re off canoodling somewhere, you can suck my Kattish dick until it prunes.” 

For every off-brand ice cream stall that they’ve passed, Lili is sure that Avett has left at least a hundred more voice messages on his GlassLink for their cheery captain, though if any of those messages actually end up going through, she probably won’t be cheery for long. Nevermind the fact that dicks can’t prune. It’s not her place to correct him, though. His rage is secondary to the mess they’re in; the mall stretches on for eons, its corridors blurring into a fine mist of shadow when Lili tries to look any further from the dimly lit area that they’re in now. They’re not in the Baywaters department store anymore, but everything inside—from the layout to the actual stalls—seem almost the same, keeping their resemblance to the original mall in broad strokes, like a poorly filled out stencil.

As far as they’re concerned, there’s no exit. 

The sensation of entrapment in such a foreign, yet familiar world only plays second fiddle to the soul-crushing dread Lili had experienced earlier. She doesn’t know how Avett is holding up. Maybe he’s the same, in a different sense. He's got his rage to fill in the gaps that his fear has left for him, like a pot that’s been broken and remade with gold far too many times. Or maybe he’s just used to having his life threatened. Lili’s too tired to feel anything other than a gentle defeat; she’d be lying down and halfway off to slumberland if it weren't for the insistence of this uppity catboy. He’d made her use a vast majority of her ether in an attempt to escape already, leaving her in a barely conscious state. She hadn’t even left a mark.

Five minutes later and they pass yet another off-brand ice cream stall. It’s got the same baby blue and muted white colour scheme, and on the side there’s a round, pudgy mascot hugging a waffle cone. It’s the same design. But it’s not the same stand. Lili knows because Avett has kicked over every mascot out of pure frustration, and each time they happen upon another off-brand ice cream stall, the mascot is standing upright again.

Speaking of, Avett strides up to the counter and rears his leg back before sending it careening towards the mascot’s round head. Either he’s finally ready to kiss his last, sane brain cell behind, or he’s actually bothering to use his full strength now—but the moment his foot makes contact with the head, it cracks and gives way. Enough to stop his momentum and to keep him trapped in the hollowed-out head by the ankle.

Lili doesn't bother with helping Avett as he hops around on one foot. He doesn't need it, right? He can handle himself.

“Fuck—piece of shit, I swear.” With conviction, he whirls his leg into the counter, and the mascot’s skull shatters into a million white shards. She doesn’t point out that, where the mascot had latched onto his ankle, are several wounds that look like they need attention. In fact, she’s keeping herself several metres away from this man. Avett winces the moment he tries to walk away from the scene of the crime.

“Maybe we could take a break,” she offers.

He shoots her a death glare, his jaw muscles clenched in a grimace. 

Lili shrinks back. “Sorry.”

After what seems to be an eternity, Avett finally decides that it’s in his best interests to sit down and tend to himself. It seems that he’s also interested in keeping his distance from Lili, because he chooses to seat himself next to the statue. 

“I don’t give a damn how sorry you are,” he replies.

Here it comes, Lili thinks. She forces her mind into a sea of obsidian, wills her emotions into a dull grey as she sits down and prepares herself for the verbal beating she knows he’s been holding in this entire time.

Avett strips out of all his equipment—automatic crossbow, blasters, messenger bags—and tosses them unceremoniously to the floor. “We’re fucked. We’re tits-deep in shit, Lilith, and sorry doesn’t cut it. I don’t know how we got here, but I know we wouldn’t be if you weren’t on this fucking crew.”

Lili is far enough to not be in his immediate vision, but close enough to watch him dress up the scrapes on his leg with his first aid kit. She’s nibbling at her hardtack like she’s a Victorian-era orphan that’s just been offered a roll of bread by the local mafia. Like their situation can’t get anymore depressing than that. “I’m sorry,” she blurts out again.

Avett is mid-way through a wonky loop of bandaging, but he stops tending to his leg and lets out a noisy sigh all the same. “Again, stop that. Stop fucking saying sorry. Please.”

“I’m sorry for—” She stops herself, then bites into her hardtack. Not with the intention of eating it; she just wants something to hold on to as she adds, “You can hit me if you want.”

He actually stops to think about her offer—actually steps over all of the rubble and stray metal foundations to stand in front of her with his hands balled into angry fists. He kneels, draws his arm back. Lili tenses her body.

Smack. 

His fist slams into the wall next to her head, where he holds it there as he leans over her. “You may have blown this entire mission, but it is not fucking worth it.” Rage—wholly controlled, contained rage—eddies in his eyes, like smoke from a smouldering wick. “Don’t ever ask someone to punch you ever again.”  

Then he gets up, flexes his fingers, and goes back to his corner of the abandoned mall. The drunken confession that she’d drawn out of him only a few days ago now seems like a distant dream. 

She sighs, and then shoves the rest of the hardtack into her mouth. 

— 

“Captain O-Raal, this is frontliner Ironsturm radioing in to perform a status update. I’d just like to say, if you two just aren’t picking up because you’re off canoodling somewhere, you can suck my Kattish dick until it prunes.”

Click. Ysh’vanna leans into the ship’s microphone.

“Captain O-Raal to frontliner Ironsturm,” she says, making sure to punctuate every consonant with a sharp tap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Not cool. I’m gonna be deducting this from your share.”

This back and forth exchange has happened at least ten times over the course of an hour. Ysh’vanna and Auren are both fully aware that, while they can hear Avett’s charming little messages, he cannot receive any of theirs, rendering their communications unusable. Something has happened to their frontliners, and yet all Auren can do is sit back and do nothing.

“Startin’ to feel useless.” His captain drums against the counter. Her eyes do not leave the message interface for a second. Perhaps she believes that to look away would be to seal their fates within the ruins. 

Auren changes the subject. “It has been a while since our last airborne encounter, no?”

“Don’t jinx it.” 

The silence before the next notification is deafening. Ysh’vanna taps on the screen immediately. Avett’s voice rolls in as a hushed whisper.

“Why’d we have to hire Little Miss Sheltered-and-Naive again? I can’t work with her without wanting to commit several felonies. Fuck. I’m going to lose it. I shouldn’t. I’m too hard on her. I’m pretty sure the relic had some sort of allergic reaction to her, and that’s why we’re trapped in this hellhole. This never happens when I’m on the field by myself. Some fucky things, yeah, but this? Give me a second.”

Auren winces as he hears Avett grunt in exertion. The hollow thunk of plastic against wood follows not soon after. The message ends.

Ysh’vanna presses her lips together. 

—

Something is wrong with this dream.

Lili can feel every breath that she takes in from her lungs. She feels heavy. She’s in a room that she doesn’t recognise, and there’s a sense of impending dread—or excitement, she can’t tell—that’s settled in her chest like dust on an abandoned piano.

The thing that she’s lying against seems to engulf her. Everything feels terrible. If this is how it feels to die, then she might not mind it. She’d always assumed that it’d be a horrific experience, one involving a sensation not unlike sleep paralysis as her lungs slowly fill with water, or catch on fire, or whatever it is that’s happening to her.

Then it dawns on her. She is dying. She can’t breathe, and this will be her final minute of being alive. She’s had plenty of dreams like this, of being lulled into a violent rest by a feral dragon, but never like this. This feels like she might be bleeding out.

Disastrous. Lili looks to the sky. It’s offensively sunny today, and when she tries to turn her head she feels thousands of grass blades scratch against her cheek. It occurs to her that her brain might be remembering that time she’d defected from Ava and laid in the field, somewhere between a slab of cement and a weatherboarded house.

“Lilith.”

She blinks. A familiar voice—but it isn’t Ava's, nor is it from any of her old friends. Lili racks her head for who it might be, but she’s always been terrible with voices. It’s soft, but it’s not like it’s weak. Gentle, yet defiant.

Why the hell would Avett, of all people, be in her dream about dying?

Before she can even attempt to choke herself back into consciousness, Avett’s face comes into her line of sight. He’s been crying—Lili can tell from the way his lower eyelid shines in the sunlight.

He cups his hand against her cheek, and all of a sudden, Lili feels like she’s wasted her entire life.

“You should’ve let me love you.”

She inhales. Consciousness smacks into her like someone’s introduced a baseball bat to her face. Sweat stains the back of her casters’ tunic. When had she fallen asleep? She reaches over and grasps the relic shakily, like she’s holding a wasp’s nest. The glass dome feels hot underneath her fingers. Disproportionately hot, as if such an object could blush out of shame.

This object simply should not be allowed to exist.

Lili leaps to her feet and poises to smash it against the floor, her face flushed in embarrassment as her mind recalls the world this—deranged relic had so carefully crafted for her. “Fuck!” she spits. “Fucking fuck—fucked up, this thing is fucked—”

“Don’t fucking throw that!” Avett grabs her wrist. His touch feels like hot embers at her skin. She jerks her hand back. He’s right. They have to bring this damnable thing all the way back to the Hive, or this mission—their current circumstances—will all have been for nothing. 

Lili breathes. Her shock and disgust ebbs away to a slow, hollow feeling in her chest. She slumps back against the wall and hands the relic over to Avett, making sure to intentionally miss any attempt at eye contact.

He takes it. “Never heard you sing like that, princess. Feels like you used up your entire year’s allotment of swears the moment you woke up.”

She buries her head in her hands. At least he’s calling her ‘princess’ again, instead of her full name. “Circumstances called for it. I… think I’ve slept enough.”

“In case you missed it,” he says, his voice testing, yet firm, “that was your chance to start talking about your nightmare.” 

Lili’s mind sputters. She thinks back to events of last night, how he’d slammed his fist into the wall behind her, how his rage had swirled like molten copper. Well, maybe it’s time she straightened her back and gave him a little piece of how she feels about him.

“Don’t pretend that you still care about me,” she answers.

The hurt that briefly flashes across his eyes brings about a sense of guilt-laced satisfaction in her. No, she shouldn’t feel bad. Not after that deluge of verbal abuse he’d thrown at her. Besides, Avett is the last person she wants to be talking to right now. She runs a hand through her hair and prepares herself for the trip ahead. 

The snowglobe faintly pulsates in Avett’s hand, as if shaking its head in disappointment.

Yuck. Moving on.

3: the exam

 

6PM, Winnow, navigation room. Ysh’vanna taps on the email icon, scrolls down a kilometre-long list of junk, then empties her entire inbox into the trash. She taps back into her draft right after. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, poised to type—yet she can’t figure out for the life of her what she should be typing.

Her eyes flit over to Auren. The thought of asking the big, sensitive Gallian for help crosses her mind for only the briefest of seconds before she wipes it clean from her head with a quick shake. He’s an Eldrak Gallian. His only parental figure growing up had been the ethereal world in its raw, unfiltered glory—and you can’t exactly email a mountain.

She rubs her face. The email window closes and the navigation panel flickers to a dark blue. “Sure wonder how Avett’s faring with Lili,” she mumbles.

Auren answers, “I would imagine them to be just fine, Ysh’vanna.” 

That dark, sinister feeling’s starting to get really uncomfortable in her stomach. “If Avett doesn’t pull it off—” She stops herself. She’s spiralling again. 

“Then I will train her myself. Perhaps you should focus on your own ordeals. Such as that email to your mother.”

“You saw,” she says. Her hand slaps the table as she picks herself up from the seat. “Well, whatever. I’ll just get it done before our mandatory leave, it’s—whatever.”

Auren looks like he’s about to say something, but he looks away from Ysh’vanna at the last second. “Avett… is a smart boy. I trust in him, more than I would like to admit. You should do the same.”

She forces a smile. As she always does. “Right. Believe in Avett.”

—  

“How many motherfucking drinks can you fuckin’ hold down, princess?!” 

Fourth shot. Fifth shot. If Lili drinks them all in quick succession, she won’t feel the effects of the alcohol, allowing her to quickly slam back another three or so before she starts getting faint. The next shot’s scent shoots straight up her nostrils, leaving her with a crazy migraine; she has to pinch her nose just to get it down. The bartender clicks his tongue and returns to his idle conversation with a ram-horned woman; Palerians, she’d learned that they were called. She’s dressed to impress. Maybe Lili should find some new clothes to wear—her baggy sweater and ankle-length jeans are just not cutting it here.

But she digresses. Seventh shot—shit. By the eighth, Avett’s finally cracked and holding her wrist flush against the table. “Okay, okay—I get it. You drink. That’s enough.” 

Drink? She’s hardly even feeling that sweet spot between feeling buzzed and being absolutely trashed. “I don’t feel anything,” she admits.

“Seriously? Is your liver made out of iron?” He raises an eyebrow and places a hand against her forehead. Lili hadn’t been watching, but he’s definitely had more than one shot. “Are you meant to be flushing like that?”

“Don’t feel anything after Ava died.”

She senses the concern in his eyes. Shit. Gotta backpedal fast. “I meant alcohol doesn’t hit as hard anymore. I dunno why.”

“Who’s Ava?” he asks after a while.

She stares down the piss-yellow liquid in her shot glass. Ava. Ava. Her name sends cascades of fire licking up her back and into her head, makes her teeth clack together. She hates her. She’s well aware of what she’d done to her for eighteen years. So why can’t she fucking forget her? Why is it that whenever she’s upset, she can hear this bitch’s voice in her head, talking and talk— 

Lili's wings unfurl, glowing a beautiful cyan blue. Her ether rushes down her veins and into her hands, meeting her newfound anger like she’s trying to mix diluted watercolours together. They roll and collide into each other; they eddy and turn to brown.

The shot glass explodes into tiny shards. Pain arcs through her hands. Blood follows not a moment after.

Avett jumps back. He spares one look at the bartender—still chatting away with the Palerian woman—before sliding off his seat and guiding Lili out of the bar by the shoulders. Once they’re well and clear of the bar’s golden glow, he guides her body down against a wall, underneath a faintly flickering lamp post. 

“Hand. Out.” 

When Lili doesn’t respond, he wraps his fingers around her wrist again and pulls it out into the open himself. It’s then that she realises that he’s got a pair of dull tweezers.

“Fuck. I’m fine.” She makes no effort to pull her hand back.

Sharp, red-hot pain sparks through her hand again. Avett lifts something into the air—a small cut of glass, glittering in the shitty lighting.

She grits her teeth. “I can do it myself.”

“Seven shots in? Nice try.” He drops the shard and starts picking at another.

“Why do you care so much?” she asks.

“Because,” he answers. Another bright shock of pain spreads outward; Lili’s jaw stiffens. “You’re fucking injured.”

She blinks; her eyes stay closed for a millisecond too long. “I’m not asking about that. You changed your mind about me so quickly at the store.” A one-eighty heel turn like that feels off. People don’t just change convictions like clothes. 

Avett taps his soles against the pavement. “You’re a lot more aware of things than you let on, princess.”

“I’m drunk.” She shrugs. “I was worried I was wrong… but obviously I’m not worried anymore.”

He sighs, his tweezers stopping their prolonged assault against a particularly deep shard. “Had a bad run-in with some humans. My first day here. I was nineteen. I’d heard from my seniors that the majority of humans that I’d meet on Earth would be less than hospitable towards off-landers… but—fuck. We had to stop in the Hive for some quick repairs, but I got curious and snuck off into one of the stores.”

Lili’s reminded all too soon of her own encounter with the Draconian store owner. 

Avett continues—the shard pops free from her skin. “Don’t mean to brag, but that day? Found out just how far you could get with an empty blaster and some fast legwork.” 

Silence. Even as the alcohol starts to make its grand, numbing tour around her body, she can’t think of anything witty to say. Even in her current state, she knows what he’s planning; behind those honest words is a test to see if she’ll give a single shit about how he came to be the asshole he was today. If she’ll side with her own people—or with him. “So that’s why you’re wary of me.”

“I’m wary of you because you look like the type of person who’ll just run into something, guns blazing, without thinking.” Another shard comes free—this time, she winces. Avett presses a ball of cotton into her palm. “Now I know that you think. You’ve just got poor judgement. But I’m sorry for shoving a gun into your mouth, if that’s what you’re referring to.”

Ouch. Brutally honest, and he’s not even four shots of hard liquor in. She’s gotta change the conversation before it ends with him berating her to no end. After several beats of silence, she says, “I used to fantasise about stuff like this.” 

“What, slamming seven shots in front of a handsome, strapping, capable lad?” His ears twitch.

Ignored. She continues, “I went to an all-girls high school, so shitty young adult novels were all I had. I always… had this fantasy that a dark prince with tousled hair and light stubble would just sweep me up at the annual spring ball, and we’d dance around our emotions—pretending to hate each other, because loving the other person was just too hard to accept.” It’s not as if she means any of the stuff she’s laying down, but at that moment she lets her eyes float towards Avett’s in the most earnest way possible. 

It works. His grip tightens, just a little. Then, with a sudden jerk, he quite literally wrestles another shard out of her skin, this time with little to no care for her wellbeing at all. She winces. At least he’s distracted. “You’re a fucking deviant. Sheltered to shit. You’ve got no idea of how you’re meant to talk to guys, do you.”

“I dunno how to talk to anybody anymore, really.”

“Can tell.”

The lights are so unfairly bright when she looks out onto the street. They’d chosen a well known area, far from the narrow streets and shady, towering apartments. For good reason too—she hadn’t realised that at exactly 6PM, the overhead floodlights would turn off and the street lamps would flicker on, simulating a faux day-to-night cycle within the sanctuary. The people around them have changed from young, strapping mercenaries to people in tight pencil skirts, in clothing that just seems to glow rebelliously against the backdrop of the night. 

Finally, after what seems to be an eternity of sudden pains and bloody glass shards, Avett starts to wrap his bandages around her hand. His leather gloves feel warm against her pulsating skin. 

“Don’t you hate me?” Lili mumbles. 

“You asking because you want approval, or because you’re thinking about getting off to it later?”

It feels unbearably hot. Maybe doing seven shots of hard liquor back to back hadn’t been the best idea after all. “Asking for a friend.”

He knots the bandage. “Figure it out yourself when you’re sober.”

 —

Day two of being in Australia. Ysh’vanna’s driven them all the way out to an empty spread of grass—or at least, that’s what Lili had seen at first. When the ship draws closer to land, its engines whirring into action, she sees the land for what it actually is. Or was; a forest, each tree levelled to the ground. She hadn’t seen earlier because of the overgrown grass, encroached on the stumps like knock-off rows of ivy.

Not surprisingly, when Lili comes to pick Avett out of bed, his ears start twitching uncontrollably at her mere footsteps. A groan leaves his lips not a moment after. “Aren’t you hungover?” he asks.

Lili shrugs. He mumbles something incoherent under his breath and rolls over. Guess he won’t be training her today.

Good thing there’s Auren. Getting him to go outside had been easier than the former.

The Gallian man is dressed in a perfectly ironed-out red cape that buttons up on the side. He’s wearing something with long sleeves underneath, and for pants, he’s got a pair of baggy slacks that taper at the end near his shins. His slender arms are folded. “I am surprised that you are not hungover, Lili. I did, however, expect you to have better judgement than to drink after training.”

She looks to her left hand—still bandaged, though she knows that if she lets Auren look too closely, he’ll know that it’s not a sparring injury. She hides it behind her back. “I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have let Avett talk me into it.”

“What matters now is that you are here.” He readies himself, though it’s not a fighting stance that he’s assuming—he folds his arms in front of him. “I want you to hit me with your blade.”

Auren isn’t exactly the sturdiest fighter around. One misaimed hit, and it looks like he might actually end up with a few broken bones. Lili shuffles on her feet awkwardly. “S-seriously?”

“What are you waiting for?” He squares his shoulders. “Perhaps if you need to warm up, to stretch your limbs before exerting strength—”

“I mean—I hit hard, I can hit hard.” She lets the world’s ether rush into her wings, her veins, to mingle with her own personal reservoir of it before concentrating all of that energy into a bright, faintly pulse blade. “I don’t know if you want that.”

“Are you underestimating me?” The Gallian raises his chin. He’s already at least two heads taller than her, so this is pretty unnecessary, Lili thinks. Doesn’t make him any less intimidating.

Her heel taps on the ground twice. “Ok, I’m coming,” she calls out. With her sneakers slapping against the grass, she readies a swing, her blade aimed right for his upper arm—

No. She can’t do that. Her first hit goes wide, directed towards the empty space between his neck and shoulder. Only it doesn’t go through. She’s hit something. Something hard, unforgiving, and unyielding. Her blade bounces back—her body follows it, and she stumbles back. 

She looks up. Floating around Auren is a sphere of pure, faintly shimmering, raw ether. Before she can even marvel at the beauty of a Gallian shield, Auren’s voice booms through the field. 

“We will not be ending this session until you manage to fracture my shield, or until you understand how I have manifested it.” A light smile graces his features—it’s hard not to imagine him as a beatific god, with those literal strands of solar energy radiating from his head like he’s a small star. “Now—are you willing to hit me?”

Training with Auren lasts for both an eternity and an instant. Each time her blade collides with his barrier, she feels a little bit of her ether leave her body, as little sense as that makes. An hour later, and she’s on the floor, her vision blurry, and Auren’s shield as sturdy as ever. 

“BluEther,” he says simply. A packet of the stuff lands next to her head. “Take it. Then we start again.”

With a rough exhale, she slams her hand over the packet and nearly makes its contents squirt out onto the grass. Upon closer inspection, she finds that BluEther’s design looks very similar to a Capri Sun, plastic-wrapped straw and all. The only difference is the texture of the drink, if she can even call it that. It has the consistency of watery instant mashed potatoes. 

“Still don’t know how this is meant to help me,” she mumbles between mouthfuls. “If I’m channelling ether from the environment, then why is it that I still hemorrhage personal ether?”

Auren doesn’t move from his position. “You are simply not an Eldrak Gallian. Hence why you must use wings to manipulate ether.”

“Yeah, and?” 

“As such, your body cannot handle foreign ether. It must be filtered through your wings beforehand. But in order for you to use that ether, it must be introduced into your body.” His hair radiates outwards again, and Lili is reminded of her lowly human status. “Your wings can do more than siphon ether from the environment. They take a sample of your personal ether, combine it with the ether you’ve gathered, and only then can you use foreign ether safely.”

Lili keeps sipping. “And because you’re Gallian, you don’t have to do all that.”

“An Eldrak Gallian, I am more commonly referred to.” He folds his arms. “New Order Gallians… they are not so ethereally nimble as I. A shame that they choose to betray their heritage, though I harbour no ill will towards their decision.”

Lili looks back at the sky. Even though it’s early August, the heat still rolls off her forearms like waves of hot water. That’s not to mention what it’s doing to her legs, which are trapped underneath her jeans and feeling like a miniature sauna. She clenches her jaw against the urge to rip off her hoodie.

“Alright.” She rises back to her feet. “I’m, uh, ready.”

He chuckles. “I do admire your resolve. Allow me to give you a much-needed hint.” Lili flinches at that. ’Much needed’ indeed. “Try focusing on my shield.”

She stares it down. The barrier is still swirling around Auren, a suspension of wispy blue inks against the dull landscape. It’s guarding him at all angles. 

“I did not mean for you to start a staring contest with it.” Auren folds his arms. “Focus on its ethereal makeup. How did I create it? Discerning its properties, understanding that the barrier in front of you is not a static obstacle, but a living, breathing construct, is the first step to destroying it.”

She freezes. This is cool and all, but it’s just an elaborate way for Auren to tell her that her shielding needs some work. “And how do I do that?” she asks.

“Your mind is a weapon. Direct your ether towards mine. You must think of it as your third arm. You are already able to manifest your ether, so this should be relatively simple.”

Lili shuts her eyes. Relatively simple for a Gallian, or anyone for that matter—but not for her. It took her a good five months to understand ether manifestation in the first place, whereas Ava had only taken one. She thinks about the way she’d formed her blade earlier, the sheer pin-prick concentration she needed to spread her power from hilt to tip. How her hands had pulsed with raw power.

Then she thinks about the barrier in front of her. Surprisingly, her method works. She sees something hard, solid—a creation of adamant diamond. The surface is smooth. But that’s all she can see. It’s an impenetrable sea of pure crystal if she tries to look any further. 

She reels her power back in. “The barrier works both ways. I can’t see anything after the surface.”

“But what is on the surface?” Auren presses.

Shutting her eyes again, she places her ethereal hands onto the barrier. What is she meant to be looking for? It’s all solid—isn’t that the same as her own shields? What should she be learning?

Taking a step back, she leaps and strikes out her blade into Auren again. Her attack connects, and her mind flies right back into the wall of glass. 

There—right where the tip of her blade’s touching the surface of that once impenetrable shield is a facet, so fine and delicately formed that she’d have missed it had she not slammed her sword into the surface out of desperation. His barrier isn’t entirely smooth after all.  

She draws back, tries to imagine her own shields as not a smooth pane of crystal but as a multifaceted, crafted gem. It takes more than one try, but as soon as she’s got it, she rams herself into his barrier.

It shatters. Like a crystal cut at the wrong angle. So does her own. 

Auren trips backward. His body is not used to the intense momentum that she’s forced onto him all of a sudden, but that doesn’t mean he’s not ready for her. He sidesteps her easily. She faceplants into the grass.

“I did it.” Her voice is muffled.

“I noticed your shielding needed a bit of work on the technical side.” Auren offers her a hand; she accepts it. “You should not be recoiling so much now.”

“Is that all? If I just want to bring down someone’s shields, I just ram them with my own?” It seems far too simple. There must be a catch behind it. She flexes her fingers for any signs of injuries.

“Not everyone will have a basic shield.” The air in front of Auren wavers again, and another shield appears. “Experienced casters might imbue their shields with a counterspell. Or their shields may simply be stronger. My affinity is warding, so I am the latter.”

So Auren had shown her a flimsy shield. Lili’s heart sinks. Her hour-long training session feels like she’s just wasted her time on fundamentals. 

“What’s this affinity thing?” Lili asks instead. 

“Every soul has an inclination towards one aspect of casting. Your body will see it as natural—akin to moving a limb or having a thought. Acting in accordance with your affinity expends little to no ether at all.” He raises his chin at her. “Yours appears to be body enhancement.”

“Natural.” Lili observes her hands. “But if I try to send ether to more than two parts of my body, I get this massive headache and I feel like I’m getting overwhelmed.”

“Have you ever tried to lift more than you physically could? Without using your ether, of course. Your control over your affinity is a muscle. It may come naturally to you at first, though utilising it to its full potential will not.” Auren flicks his wrist, and the miniature barrier in his hand is gone. “Now recreate your shield and destroy it immediately after. You will do this two hundred times over the next hour.”

— 

Lili had ended up collapsing after the first fifty, only forty-five minutes in. At first she tried conserving her ether, but that plan went straight out the window when Auren began to fire non-lethal projectiles at her between shields. He had rained down multiple apologies onto her, and even though she humbly accepted and deflected most of them, he still chose to end training prematurely, his rationale being that she would sprain her ethereal muscle or something. Lili was too tired to understand.

The next two days passed like this. They would fly out to the same field, run through some ethereal theory, and then she would be drilled into the ground by Auren’s hellish exercises until sunset. Then they would fly back to the Afflatus and dine on Gallian meals, shower, then prepare for bed. 

The third day passed similarly. Unsurprisingly, Auren had caught onto her weakness on the second day. Lili could not aim for shit. “You have to see the target in your mind before anything else, Lili,” he had said. She’d been staring down a faraway tree trunk amidst the grass. At least when the mercy of the sunset finally arrived, she could confidently say that she almost hit it.

When she leaves the bathroom, her body feeling well-cleaned and deliciously limber from the previous hour’s activities, Avett is leaning against the wall directly in front of her.

She hasn’t exactly been in contact with this guy for a while, despite them living on the same ship. “What is it?” she asks.

“I’m sick of Gallian food.”

Lili thinks back to last night’s dinner. Auren had sautéed a seasonal blend of root vegetables and stuffed potatoes full of lentils and spices. “What’s wrong? It was good.”

He glares at her like she’s stupid. “Don’t tell me you’re one of them too.”

“Them?”

His hand makes a beckoning motion. “Vegetarians.”

She shrugs. “I don’t get it. What’s your point?”

“The point is,” he says as he walks down the corridor, “is that I’m heading off ship to get my own food. I’m sick of vegetables and no substance. Auren refuses to stock meat on board and Ysh’vanna doesn’t care as long as it’s him putting food on the plate.” 

Lili does feel curious about Therius’ foreign cuisines. Some of the stalls she passed earlier that week had looked interesting, and some dishes had even looked vaguely similar to human cuisine. There’s one problem though. 

“I don’t have any money,” she says.

“You think I’m evil enough to invite you out and expect you to not eat?” He waves his card in the air. 

Feeling a bit brave, she looks Avett right in the eyes. “Yeah, I do.”

He turns right away and laughs as he steps off the ship. Lili follows him.

— 

Lili is going to die.

Her throat feels like it’s flaring up. There’s a furnace in her stomach, and someone’s fanning the flames like they’re about to mold glass. “Water,” she manages to choke out. The Kattish store owner smirks before walking over the sink with a glass and turning the tap on. She gulps down her drink immediately. It does little to soothe her mouth.

“You can hold your liquor, avoid getting hungover after seven shots.” Avett taps his chopsticks against his bowl of noodles. The red oil wobbles around the surface when he does. “But stars forbid you have the mildest option on the Casa-Ilgash menu.”

Lili can’t answer. She calls for another glass of water, gulps that one down too. “Don’t worry,” she says. She tries to sound cool, but it’s hard being tough when your voice is the vocal equivalent of sandpaper right now. “I’m used to pain.”

Avett snorts. “Need another napkin? You’re crying.”

Her bowl is a blurry mess. She blinks, and her tears fall into the soup. “I’m not crying,” she says as evenly as possible. 

The store owner just keeps grinning. “Humans. Seem to be hit or miss when it comes to ‘gashian spices.” She looks at Avett. “Looks like you missed.”

Lili digs her chopsticks back into the soup with gusto. “I have spices for breakfast.” Oh god, she’s getting delirious from the heat, isn’t she? “Mum used to make me have spicy noodles all the time. I’m used to it.”

She takes another bite—and instantly regrets it.

“Something tells me she didn’t have the best childhood,” the store owner whispers into Avett’s ear. 

Eventually, she gives in. Her soup is barely half-drained, her flat noodles are floating around the bottom like a school of white eels in murky pond water—but she’d rather strip down in public than take another sip. She places her chopsticks on top of her bowl and rests her forehead against the counter.

“Why’s it the same kind of spice here too…?” she whimpers. She’d expected a totally foreign taste unlike anything she’s had on Earth, but this just tastes like Sichuan-style noodles with a sugary aftertaste. The spices burn the same too. Like she’s eating a mouthful of TV static.

The store owner shrugs. “If you threw two groups of people into roughly the same environment, they’d probably end up developing roughly the same technology and culture. That’s what they teach us in school, anyway.” She turns her attention back to Lili. “Can I get you anything else?”

Lili slides her bowl over to Avett. “I’m sorry for wasting your money.”

“No big deal. I expected more from you, but I guess it’s on me for choosing this place.” He shrugs. “We’ll clean up and get you something else.”

Panic spikes through her. “No—I mean, thanks, but don’t. It’s fine.” She doesn’t want to spend more of his money, but the empty sensation in her stomach’s gnawing at her like a puppy that hasn’t been properly broken in yet.  

And, also like a puppy that hasn’t been properly broken in yet, her stomach growls its disapproval. Loudly.

“You have your test tomorrow, Lilith.” He starts shovelling the rest of her noodles into his mouth. It’s only when he’s finished with his bowl that he starts talking again. “You’re not sleeping on an empty stomach. I’m not letting you.”

Avett’s sudden use of her actual name leaves her reeling. It’s a good enough distraction for him to start walking off to some other, less spicy food stall before Lili can make any further objections.

— 

Day of the test. She’s been drunk, thoroughly drilled through the basics of ethereal theory, then beaten into the ground over and over by Auren spanning a period of five days. When she arrives at the Afflatus’ local Inter-Realm Concern station, she finds that it’s one of the only buildings in this sanctuary that’s been well kept. It’s not a part of the walls; it’s been built from the ground up because natural sanctuary formations are just too vulgar for Inter-Realm Concern employees, it seems. Only Auren is here with her—Avett and Ysh’vanna had preparations to make before taking the trip back to the Hive. 

Lili tries her hardest not to be daunted by the sheer opulence of the floor-to-ceiling windows that greet her like the queen’s soldiers as she walks through the entrance. That’s the last thing she needs. She finds it ironic that even years after the fall of civilisation, she’s still stressing out over graded tests. 

“Good luck.” Auren rubs her shoulder. “You should not require my blessings if our training served its purpose.”

Blunt. Lili just smiles at the Draconian man that’s currently working through her documents. After a good five minutes of rifling through papers and nodding to himself, he says, “Alright, Lilith Wang-Rosales. You may enter the testing room.”

She gives Auren one last glance before following the man into the room.

The room is completely dark. The Draconian man has to turn on the lights, and when he does, it’s like she’s been thrust directly into the sun. That’s because everything in this room is white. The walls, the floors, even the dust bunnies in the corner probably—all white. There’s a mirror in front of her, and in front of that is a single desk and chair. On top of the table are several sheets of paper. One dastardly pen rests next to it.

Lili can feel her soul melting into her body. 

“You have an hour,” the man says. “The timer will start once you write down your name, and it will end once you leave the examination room. Good luck.”

She takes her seat at the table. Good luck this, good luck that. Good luck does nothing if she’s taking a dumb, written exam due to the arbitary decisions of some intergalactic Ministry of Education that she could not give less shits about. She scribbles down her name, and a timer in red LED projects itself above the mirror in front of her.

There’s no way that’s an actual mirror. 

Fine. This is savable. She looks at the first question.

An S rank dragon approaches your crew and appears to only show interest in your ship. You are fifty metres away from the entrance. Do you: 

• A: order your backline crew to take off without you, 
• B: ask your ship to wait for you before leaving, 
• C: sprint after your ship as it leaves in hopes of intercepting it mid-air, 
• or D: stand you—

This question just goes on and on. Lili can’t see an objectively correct answer. She quickly scans down the paper. They’re all the damn same—they lack just enough context for her to make any educated assumptions, but not enough for her to feel good about leaving a random answer. 

She grits her teeth and does the latter anyway. A bad rank can’t be so bad if both Auren and Ysh’vanna are just going to lift her and Avett by the scruff of their necks into a more acceptable rank, right?

Lili thinks about the lowest possible score as she marks her way down the paper. That’s an E. If she gets an E1, theoretically the lowest she can get that isn’t a complete fail mark, she’ll be dragging her team down into… a D? She gulps. Nausea rolls through her like a vicious heatwave. That’s terrible. 

By the time she’s neared the second to last page, the clock’s only at twenty-five minutes and thirty seconds. No good. She wonders how she’s going to break the news to her crew members. That they won’t be getting a new member. That they’ll be heading off to the Hive without her. 

As she pens in the last answer, she’s already got a pretty good idea of what she has to say to Auren. A wave of calm washes over her. It’s over. It was dumb of her to think that she’d even remotely have a chance of getting anywhere without Ava’s guidance. Without her, she’s just a nuisance.

She’s so busy wallowing in her own self-depreciative filth that she almost misses the projectile that’s aimed straight for her head. Her arm raises instinctively to her ear, and her shield forms in the air, not a millisecond later. The projectile explodes against her shield, but its faceted, reinforced surface keeps her body from toppling over the chair and falling to the ground. 

She holds her shield there for a few seconds, thankful for Auren’s gruelling training sessions. Then it occurs to her that these guys shot her. That’s their idea of a fair test. 

Lili just picks herself up from the seat and walks out of the exam room. She hands over her papers to the Draconian man, who responds with a droll, “We will have your results shortly, ma’am,” before shuffling her papers into what appears to be a glorified scanner. Automatic marking. Shit. Nausea boils through her veins again. She’s not ready to accept her fate so damn soon.

“How was the test, princess?”

She wheels on her heel and finds that Avett has replaced Auren. They must’ve swapped while she was in the exam room. He’s sitting slouched and cross-legged on a black, leather sofa that looks way too expensive for someone who looks like Avett. She takes her seat next to him. “They made me do a written exam and then shot me in the head,” she whispers.

He mouths a curse. 

She fidgets with her fingers. “I, um, didn’t do that well on the written.”

Avett doesn’t say anything to that. Maybe because he’s actually keen on leaving her on the Afflatus. She doesn’t know for sure.

After what seems like an eternity, the man calls her full name. He hands her papers back face down. She almost doesn’t want to turn it over.

Like ripping off a bandaid, she does it anyway.

It takes a trip back to the couch for her to totally register her grade. Avett leans over to look at her exam.

“C5?” He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you said you flunked the exam.”

She hands the exam over to him. She’s shell shocked enough as it is. Just looking at the thing makes her want to tear out her stomach and other butterfly-riddled organs.

“Huh, look at this.” He flips the page over. “Practical response: A2. Responded to the threat calmly and with pin-prick precision. Written response… D1. Judgement leaves much to be desired.” 

She clutches her head. It’s like she’s just narrowly avoided a bullet. Which wouldn’t be too far off from the truth.

Avett plucks the attached card from the back of the exam and drops it into Lili’s hands. He’s saying something to her, but Lili can’t figure out for the life of her what it is. She’s too dazed, far too deep inside her own mind. She got a C5. That means she’s following the Winnow back to the Hive, and she’ll be working with their crew for the foreseeable future. 

All this without Ava.

With the weight of her written exam’s grade still resting on her shoulders, Lili can’t even find it in herself to properly celebrate. She probably needs some rest.

2: the Afflatus

“Please let me join your crew.”

Lili is on her knees, her face flat against the dusty dirt path leading to her own home. The thought of leaving this place is so violently at the forefront of her mind that it hurts to even consider what she’d end up doing with her life if these people refused her request. 

Avett immediately pivots on his heel, his face flushed with anger. “You deliberately decided not to follow orders, you put yourself at risk for no good reason, and you would have outright died if I hadn’t been there. We’re not taking you on. Get real.”

This all feels mildly unfair to Lili, but she’s not sure if she wants to bring up the fact that he would’ve similarly died had she not distracted and gotten its attention. 

"Come on, we can give her more credit than that." Ysh'vanna grabs Lili's arm and hoists her right up to her feet. "She totally went toe to toe with a grade B dragon for, like, ten minutes without breaking a sweat! I saw her distracting that thing for you and stuff—plus if we have her on our crew, we can get an obligatory Human discount—"

“Ysh’vanna.” Auren glares at the smaller lizard girl, which shuts her up immediately. 

“Discount or no, I’m not taking on dead weight as my frontline partner.” Avett doesn’t even spare a look backwards at his crew before stomping up the stairs and entering the ship. 

Lili looks to Auren and Ysh’vanna warily. They’re her last hope out of this desolate hellhole. 

“I mean…” Ysh’vanna shrugs. “We could take her back to the Hive. She could get a job there, maybe even do some mercenary work if any ship wants her…”

Wants her. Lili can’t help but flinch. “What’s the Hive?” she asks instead. Anything to stave off the crippling sensation of disapproval in her stomach.

Surprisingly, Auren is the one to answer her. “The Hive is a sanctuary for Humans. Though the same cannot be said for us, they will most likely offer you succour.” He’s sitting on a mound of slightly uplifted dirt and putting his hair back up. Even long after he’d used them to cast wards around her house, they still glow with an insatiable, solar light. It makes Lilith want to shiver.

It’s better than being stuck here, she guesses. Even though she’s spent the majority of her six years here, there’s something about the place that makes her want to leave. Maybe it had been the time Ava had used her wings against her, had threatened to crack them clean in two during a heated argument about things that hadn’t even mattered in the end. Or maybe it’s the fact that she’s dead, and that this dwelling was something she was meant to leave behind a long time ago. 

“Thank you,” she stammers. She’s not sure how she’s going to readjust to talking with real, walking humans, but that’s a problem for another day.

“Of course, there does happen to be another option for you.” Auren nods towards Ysh’vanna, who straightens her back immediately. “But first, I would like you to explain how you, a Human… managed to sprint as swiftly across the field as Avett.”

“Why?” Lili stiffens. While he had displayed a tremendous amount of athletic ability, he hadn’t seemed… particularly special.

Auren continues, “Avett is a particularly well-trained Kattish, capable of running up to sixty kilometres per hour. You are not supposed to match his pace. So how did you do it?”

She feels like she’s being drilled into all of a sudden. “Ether manipulation. I just kinda… shove the ether into my legs. I can do it to any body part. It makes me stronger.”

A flash strikes across Ysh’vanna’s lime-green eyes. “No former formal training?”

“I mean, I’ve been here for six years.”

“No way.” She shakes her head. “Direct body manipulation was a third-year course at—” 

“It is entirely possible that it just so happens to be her affinity and not the alternative.” 

Regardless of how Lili feels, Auren looks to her again. It’s not fear nor hatred glistening in his otherworldly eyes—but wonder. Curious, childlike wonder. “I would like to extend a formal offer to invite you on to our crew, Lili. We could use a second frontliner.”

As the taller man fixes his eyes upon her own, Lili can’t help but feel a burst of warmth in her chest. She’s getting out of here, and she’s wanted, damn it. She jumps to her feet and shakes Auren’s hand until it’s a blur of motion against his still body. “Thank you. Thank you,” she repeats. 

“Avett is… not going to like this one, Auren.” Ysh’vanna exhales roughly and claws a hand through her wiry, white hair. 

Lili freezes. What are they going to do about Avett? It’s not as if he’ll change his mind about her overnight, and he’s certainly going to have to if he wants to continue working on the frontline. 

“That is a conversation I will be having with Avett.” Auren tugs at the cords of his hairnet, securing his locks in place. “I would not concern yourself for now. We leave at six. You will have your belongings packed before then.”

And with that, he’s stepped through the ship’s sliding doors and disappeared into the bridge. Which leaves Lili and Ysh’vanna outside.

Despite herself, Lili finds that she’s fixing her focus towards a distant blue silhouette that’s most likely a mountain. “I can help you with packing, if you want,” the girl says. “I might be Draconian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do heavy lifting.”

“That’s alright.” It doesn’t feel right to make her busy her with any kind of heavy lifting—if there’s one person who should be down here, it’s Avett, but he’s not about to help her out anytime soon. “I’ll be packing lightly.”

She walks into her house, shuts the floor, and sinks to the ground. She’s lived in this place for a good six years now. The dragons had long since destroyed the context around the area, but Lili is pretty sure that this was once someone’s glorified garden shed, judging from the tin roof and its unoiled, wooden interior. She and Ava had quickly placed stolen rugs over the flooring to get rid of the scent. The day before that had been brutal. She shuts out the memory and gets to packing everything she needs in those reusable cloth bags Ava had pillaged from a nearby supermarket years ago.

Surprisingly, Lili has an easy time saying goodbye to her house of six years.

When she’s all done and dusted, she locks the door—pointless as it is—and stands at the entrance of the ship, her knuckles poised to rap against its metallic surface. The doors had slid open automatically for Auren and Avett, so shouldn’t they be opening for her? Or maybe they had opened because they had some sort of ID card, and in retrospect that made a lot more sense than— 

Thunk. Lili jumps at the sound, her heart skipping a precious beat in response. The doors slide open, and then she sees Avett with his fist on a green LED light. 

“Hopeless,” he says as he whirls and heads back inside. “Hit the light again—it’ll close it, in case you didn’t know.” 

She makes sure to treat the button with only the utmost respect, just to spite him in silence. It flashes red, and the doors slide shut behind her.

The ship’s interior is—put simply—something she’s only ever had the pleasure of seeing in a comic book. It’s a structure that’s been primarily reinforced by some sort of blue metal, and she’s not quite keen on settling and calling it iron just yet. Right now, she’s in a hallway that’s just wide enough to fit two people side by side, and that’s if they’re willing to brush shoulders. It’s a good thing she’s closely trailing Avett instead of the former. 

“Right. Behind us are the sleeping quarters, left of that is the bathroom, and to the right of that is the armoury. Up ahead’s navigation, which is also where we coincidentally have the kitchen.” Avett doesn’t stop walking until he’s up against what seems to be a block of metal, but once he knocks on it to reclaim Lili’s attention, the hollow sound that it makes gives it away. “And this is the engine room. Which is my turf. You’ll never have to find yourself here if you’ve done everything correctly, so just follow whatever Auren and I tell you to do—like the good little frontliner you are—and we’ll be good, okay?”

Lili just stares at him. Auren’s been ruthless with him, no doubt.

“Not going to say anything?” He folds his arms and raises an eyebrow. “Or are you more of the silent, seething type?”

She does want to say something. Her hands clench behind her. But there’s just something wiggling around at the back of her mind, telling her that this complete stranger who she’s only known for half of a day is right, that she does deserve all of these beratements. She can’t argue with that. She was a nuisance on the battlefield.

Her eyes squeeze shut. “Sorry. Thank you.”

She balls her hands further into her bags and barges right past him before he can say another word.

—

Lili’s legs are unbearably stiff. 

Though she loathes to admit it, yesterday’s encounter had left quite the impression on her—both physically and mentally. As she rises from her slumber, she has to suppress yet another groan. She’d moved to the armoury with nothing but her quilt in hand because she absolutely admonished the idea of being watched by—she shivers—Avett while she slept. She hadn’t bothered to move the mattress along with her, and now her back feels like it’s been bruised to hell and back. Or maybe that was also from yesterday. She’s not sure.

There aren’t any windows in the armoury, so the entire room’s dark. She can only hope that her body clock is on time and that it’s nine in the morning and not… nine in the evening. 

“Oh, what’re you doing awake? It’s five in the morning.”

Lili deadpans as she stands in the entrance of the bathroom. Ysh’vanna is up and brushing away at her teeth. Her canines are pointed. Lili briefly makes eye contact with her before looking into the corner where a pile of dust bunnies are sitting. “I thought it was morning. But—like, a more acceptable ‘morning.’”

Ysh’vanna gargles her water and spits. She runs the tap—her face returns wet, the fringes of her white mane sticking her skin. “You moved to the armoury. Don’t like sleeping in communal rooms?” Her toothy grin is bone-white.

That’s… not quite true. Lili has slept under the same roof with Ava for all those years, so she’s used to the absolute surrendering of all defences that sleeping with another person offers. In retrospect, she hadn’t liked it one bit—but it was bearable at least. 

She shrugs as she crosses the bathroom towards the sink. “I’m just not fond of sleeping near someone who hates my guts.” For good reason, she adds silently.

Ysh’vanna doesn’t leave the room. Instead, she leans against the shower’s sliding glass door. Does everything on this ship have to slide open? “He’s incredibly prejudiced against Humans. He had a bad run-in with a couple on his first day out on the field.”

“And now he just hates all of them,” Lili completes. 

“Well, hate’s kind of a strong word—I wouldn’t say hate, maybe more like misguided prejudice?” 

She looks at herself in the mirror. Her mother used to call her lucky—her eyes are more Caucasian than East Asian, having layered eyelids and all, so kids never really got to stretch out their eyelids at her. They did, however, call unwanted attention to her last name (“Why’s your last name doubled up? Isn’t that, like, a Mexican last name? Aren’t you meant to be Asian?”) and made fun of her heritage. Ava had to step in whenever she had even dared to open her lunchbox in the classroom. 

Lili laces her fingers through her matted, jet-black hair. She rakes her hand through it until it hangs behind her back. She’s not sure what kind of environment it is in terms of race for these people. Still, it can’t be much better than what the human race had to offer before the dragons came and rained hellfire onto their world. “So he hates me,” Lili finishes. Then, sensing that the topic had gotten a little too sensitive for her liking, she asks, “You pilot the ship, right? Are there assigned roles for everyone?”

“Eh…” She taps her chin with the tip of her finger. “Where to start… Oh, Auren’s our backline caster. If we encounter anything while in transit, or if we need something warded, or if we just need something ethereal done, he’s our guy. He also happens to be really good at cooking, so he’s also the main chef. Don’t let Avett or me anywhere near the kitchen counter. 

“Avett is our main frontline attacker. He’s an arms specialist—means that he prefers machinery and guns over swords and spells, though if I had to tell the truth, I’ve never actually seen him solely fight a dragon from midrange. He likes his proximity, I guess.” Ysh’vanna strides across the room, her mess of a mane swaying behind her, glittering and catching the dawn like spider silk. “He’s also our mechanic. Fixes up the ship when we’ve busted it. I don’t know how Kattish culture works, but it seems like repairing ships and slinging guns go hand in hand.”

Dread settles at the pit of Lili’s stomach as she squirts a spot of toothpaste onto her brush. Of course Avett is overly competent and completely deserving of his place as a mercenary aboard the Winnow. It feels less valid to want to abhor his innards now. Her fist closes around the hilt of the toothbrush.

Ysh’vanna doesn’t notice. “And then there’s me. Believe it or not, I’m the captain of this ship. Not Auren. When it comes right down to it, I’m the one accepting new jobs and handing in the goods—they taught us all the way back in pilot school that a good pilot is someone even a sociopath feels like they can trust.”

Lili spits out her water. “Where does this leave me?” 

“Frontliner, of course.” Ysh’vanna doesn’t even hesitate when she titles her—her confidence makes Lili feel a bit better about it all. “Frontline… I saw you using ether to attack, so caster? But you were also using that sword, so… some sort of frontline melee caster flex? But I wouldn’t worry about it too much; the graders’ll decide your specialisation for you.”

Wait. Lili freezes. “The… graders?”

“Your license. Here’s mine—” She holds out a thin, rectangular piece of what appears to be metal, though like the ship, Lili’s not entirely sure exactly which metal it is. “A4, baby. That’s one of the highest grades any pilot looking to get hired could strive for.”

Her hands are shaky as she regards the card in front of her with apprehension. If she doesn’t wow these graders when it’s her turn to shine, she’ll likely spend the rest of her days in the Hive, and that’s not something she wants to be accepting at such a young age. 

“Oh, don’t worry!” Ysh’vanna hastily takes back her ID. “Pilots, backliners and maintenance roles have it really easy when it comes to grading, so our rankings are way higher. It’s like at least a B1 to secure a position on a ship, but frontliners are graded more harshly so it’s about a D5 for you guys. You’ll be fine—you’re already with us, so the grade won’t really mean much since you’re technically already working under a ship.”

Ysh’vanna’s reassurances send a wave of apathetic calm over Lili’s heart. “What’s Avett’s rank?” she finds herself asking.

“About B3ish, I wanna say?” 

Nevermind. The dread is back and pumping into her veins like a reversed stomach pump at the hospital. Maybe coming aboard had been a mistake after all. Avett is scarily proficient at his job, and he’s the one telling her to shape up and follow orders. Maybe she really doesn’t deserve to be on this ship, maybe she’s going to be their dead weight, or maybe she’ll end up killing someone as a result of just not being good enough on the field— 

“If you’re finished with your morning routine…” Ysh’vanna touches Lili’s forearm. It’s only the lightest of touches, but it sends her careening back to earth all the same. “Wanna have breakfast now, or are you the type of person who skips that meal?”

“I thought you said that you didn’t cook.” She lets that tender touch guide her out of the bathroom and into the corridor.

“Um, couldn’t cook. Girl’s gotta eat.”

A shiver runs through her spine. She opens her mouth to suggest that maybe she should be making breakfast instead, but the words stay clogged in her throat like cotton balls. It just doesn’t feel right for Lili to criticise someone’s cooking on their turf.

—

Two burnt pieces of toast later, and Lili’s ready to question just exactly how it’s possible to burn toast on an automatic toaster. Ysh’vanna, despite her earlier amicabilities, was ultimately a deeply impatient person and had decided to set the toaster’s dial to max to fully maximise the speed at which the bread cooked. 

But food’s food. Lili has her toast with two slices of tomatoes from her garden and nothing else. The juices are seeping through, and her tomatoes are mildly warm, but it’s good considering she hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch. 

The clink of cutlery against ceramics is an inherently awkward sound. Lili gives her captain a shy glance. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you guys?”

“I’m twenty-six,” the small Draconian gir—woman, says proudly. Lili doesn’t bring up the fact that she looks at least ten years younger than her actual age. It’s probably because she’s wearing knee-length overalls over a baggy jumper. 

She hides her reaction behind a fist and a light cough. “The others?”

“Auren’s… eh… probably somewhere in his forties.” Expected, but that’s not what’s bothering Lili right now.

Her attention falls right on Ysh’vanna. Those eyes of hers are glinting, the flecks around her slitted pupils alternating between a bright yellow and a deep forest green. What about Avett? Is what she wants to ask, but she’s going to most definitely walk into her trap if she does that.

Damn it. It feels like her curiosity is gonna boil over. She spits out her undying question—begrudgingly—like it’ll burn her to cinders if she tries to keep it shut tight inside of her head.

Her captain’s grin turns feral. “Oh, he’s the youngest out of us. Recently turned twenty. You two seem to be about the same age.”

Lili leans forward, her eyebrows furrowing. “I’m twenty-three.”

“Hey, that’s no big deal. Avett’s on this ship—he hardly cares that he’s the youngest. He’ll get anal about the way you hang your face towels all the same…” Ysh’vanna shudders. “Anything else you wanna know about our Kattish frontliner? I hear he’s quite the romantic charmer back in Therius…”

Lili flinches—not at her last line, that’s just gone completely over her head—but at her casual inclusion of his race. Maybe it’s mostly a human thing. Whenever she’s been referred to by her race, it’s never been for a good reason, and yet she can’t seem to detect a single droplet of malice from Ysh’vanna. 

Well, no malice—not for Avett, anyway. 

“Ha. Read like a book.” She tosses her silvery mane over her shoulders. “It’s just unfortunate that he absolutely hates you, but you’ll warm up to each other—soon enough anyway.” 

“Ok, that’s not—” Lili’s starting to stammer. She looks to her shoes for guidance. “I’m not in love. I just want to know about my crewmates.”

“You wanted to know so much about your crewmates that you completely skipped over asking for Auren’s ranking and went straight for Avett’s?”

Shit. Shit! It’s true, he’s been at the forefront of her mind for the past twelve hours, but that’s only because it’s too hard for her to think about anything else. No, that wasn’t the right way to describe it—what she feels is an insatiable desire to compare; to pit her skills against Avett’s massive ego, but admitting that to Ysh’vanna to clear the muddied air… she’d rather eat another slice of burned toast. 

Memories of Ava and her mum arise like hot bile in her throat. They’re asking her to look down upon the kids with bad grades. Maybe Avett is doing the same. 

She can’t stand it.

“I’m not in love with Avett,” Lili replies, her voice aimed at the table. She can’t feel her knees. She’s been gripping them so tightly that she’s cut right through the material of her jeans with her nails and pierced the skin.

“That’s a damn good thing. I’d rather throw myself overboard than have a Human coming onto me.”

This time, it’s her race that’s been brought up—and its usage invites a severe chill to zip down her spine. Thankfully, all Avett offers her is a narrowed glare before he strides right up to the navigation panel. 

“We’re seriously headed off land to get her a license?” His fingers drum against the table. “They assigned us to the Hive—”

Ysh’vanna shrugs. “I got clearance for us to move to the Afflatus – New Therius landmass for like, four days. Penalty was… eh, don’t worry about it.”

The look that Avett gives Lili is enough to sear iron into red-hot embers. She opens her mouth to apologise, but he’s already turned his attention back towards the panel. “Goddamn. You know she’s gonna get nothing higher than a C, right?”

Lili bristles. Ysh’vanna’s chair rattles against the tiled flooring as she leaps to her feet, her features narrowing for a brief second before relaxing into something looser. “Avett, that doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” He whirls—his arms are folded. “If she gets anything lower than a C3, we’re gonna be stuck doing C ranked jobs, getting C ranked rewards until she fucking—”

A cold hand grabs at Lili’s throat and yanks it. “Why’s that?” she breathes.

Now it’s her turn to be pinned to the spot by this haughty asshole. “The board won’t let us take jobs outside of our rank range. So they take the average of the crew’s ranks and that’s your highest allowed job.”

Clearly Ysh’vanna’s—and presumably Auren’s—A4 hadn’t been enough to balance out Avett’s unimpressive B3. She doesn’t bring that up though. Instead, she slumps back in her chair, defeated.

“It’s not all bad!” Ysh’vanna points out. “If the thought of ranking down’s bringing you to tears then maybe you should do something about it.”

Silence. A thick, low, heavy fog of silence. Avett places his hands on his hips as he surveys the landscape. 

Then, finally, Avett decides to speak up. “Just dock the ship, Ysh’.” 

His response hadn’t been a no. Lili’s not sure if she should be happy about her new teacher, or if she should start crying and thinking about leaving the ship again. The look that Avett offers her on his way out of the room is anything but a nice gesture.

In seconds, Ysh’vanna is in front of the navigation panel, her hands a blur of motion as they flurry against the buttons. Even though she’s fully concentrating on her job, she still somehow manages to find a shred of consciousness to talk to Lili. “The view’s nice—wanna take a look? Though you don’t have to; a lot of people don’t like watching me dock. Avett included.”

Lili walks right up to Ysh’vanna’s side. Immediately—almost jarringly so—she wishes that she hadn’t.

The Afflatus is a tall, gnarled spiral of steel; its wider on the bottom, and haphazardly thin near the top. But that’s not what she’s looking at right now. What she sees through the room-wide windows are the concrete and gravel remains of what used to be a city. Roads have been cracked clean in half, revealing sewage pipes and drainage systems underneath. Blackened foundations of once towering skyscrapers are all that’s left of the architectural achievements of humankind, and if she looks to the side near the ocean she can see—

The Sydney Opera House, with its interior fully exposed to the elements. Like someone’s forcefully deshelled a hermit crab. 

She pushes off the table. “I’ll—I’ll be getting my things ready,” she says. 

“Hah, my pleasure.” The ship swerves a little too suddenly, leaving the air in Lili’s stomach in freefall. She’s gotta go before she sees anything else.

—

“First things first, we’re restocking on BluEther and ether pens. Auren gets pissy if we go below ten, so we’ll be getting him his sweet fix in bulk.”

Lili lets her eyes wander as she loosely trails Avett’s path. The Afflatus looks much more appealing on the inside. However, that’s only because she’s shoved away the gut-churning realisation that every wall, every building here—has been built from the broken skin and bones of Sydney city itself. Neon signage—not so bright that she can’t look straight ahead without squinting her eyes, but not dim enough to look suspicious—hang from the shops, their seductive lights beckoning to pedestrians like they’re moths. Avett leads her through one narrow street to a wider, bigger road. And by road, she truly means it; golf carts drive down marked paths, each manned by one person with a tin box seated above their wheel.

“Alright, pop quiz.” Avett whirls so quickly on his heel that Lili almost ends up walking nose-first into his chest. “Exactly where are we going first?”

“Uh—um.” Lili’s cheeks flush with shame before she can even consider her options. In truth, she hadn’t been listening at all. She’s walked right into another verbal trap, and this one isn’t even well-hidden—Avett’s ears are twitching just slightly, and his tail’s… just starting to wag itself in a black blur. She doesn’t have to be familiar with Kattish culture to know exactly what he’s thinking.

Avett turns again. “Ysh’vanna was onto something back there. You are fun to mess with. Maybe I’ll get something out of this after all.”

The truth feels even worse coming out of Avett’s mouth.

The two slip and weave between sweaty bodies and oily golf carts until they reach a plaza. Somehow, there’s a palm tree in the centre of all of these shops; the pot surrounding it is made out of pool tiling and concrete. Lili’s sure that Avett’s just trying his hardest to lose her in the crowd, but she’s got enough experience from tailing her mum in busy shopping departments that she could easily do this again with her head dipped between the pages of a book. 

“Right, we’re here.” Avett chucks something at her—she catches it by the tip in both hands. It’s a credit card, and it’s got Auren Draksparrow’s name engraved into it. “Get us some BluEther and pens.”

“Wha—you’re trusting me with this?” She spares a glance back towards the store. The customers, the storekeeper… none of them are human. 

“Do you really think,” Avett says, his smile twisting into a lazy smirk as he closes the distance between them in one, easy stride, “that you’ve got the balls to run off with that thing? Chop chop. You’re cutting into our training.”

Ignored. She pockets the card and walks towards the shop, her mind racing as it rehearses over and over exactly what she wants to say to get what she needs. As soon as she passes the open storefront, two customers turn their heads, narrow their eyes, before promptly turning back to their own shopping.

Okay, this is something she’s painfully familiar with. Except they’ve got horns now instead of ironed uniforms. 

Alright then, here’s the moment of truth. “One crate of BluEther and one crate of pens, please,” she says as she meets the shopkeeper’s eyes. Her pupils are slitted. Judging by the ear webbings, this person is a Draconian. 

The shopkeeper doesn’t even narrow her eyes, doesn’t even show a bare hint of malice as she tosses her shock of bright-pink hair over her shoulder. “Get lost, Human. I only sell to mercenaries.”

There’s no sign outside that says anything like that. Or maybe there had been, and Lili missed it. Either way, the panic’s setting in fast. “You—you can’t just not sell to me,” she stammers. Her eyes are starting to float away from the action, and her back feels hot like she’s just been dunked into a vat full of steam. 

“No license, no service.” The shopkeeper leans back against the wall. “Scram.”

When she meets with Avett again, he throws his hands into the air. “Oh, for fucks sake! How did you manage to come back with—”  

At that moment, all of her pent up rages boil over. Her cheeks are a bright shade of red as she storms forward and jabs a finger into his chest. “You—set me up. They only sell to people with licenses.” She slaps Auren’s card into his body for good measure. “I’m going back to the ship.”

Something flashes across his eyes, but Lili just doesn’t give a crap anymore. Let them string her along, let them play stupid games with her. 

“Wh—wait.” He turns the card over in his hands, his eyes narrowing into a scowl, his body as still as ice as he surveys the store. 

Lili actually finds it in herself to stop in her tracks. “What?”

“That store shouldn’t be asking for proof of license.”

With Avett on the frontline and Lili stuck firmly behind him, they’re on the offensive again. Avett slams down Auren’s credit card onto the counter; the shopkeeper jumps, spares one glance at Lili, then mumbles, “I’ll be right back with your goods, sir,” before scurrying away into the back.

“Gotta be confident.” He hands over the card to Lili. “Straight back and eye contact. Maybe even a little bit of violence if you need the extra sweetener.”

The shopkeeper comes out with a full crate of shiny packets, each one labelled with the words ‘BluEther.’ Lili’s hands clench and unclench. “Violence—that’s…”

“There’s no law enforcement in the Afflatus.” Avett starts counting the packets in complete silence. “Go wild.”

Great. Avett’s fun fact hangs over her—ten tons of deadly steel, just dangling on a needle-thin string. The shopkeeper slams down yet another crate onto the counter—this one’s full of plastic syringes, each one filled with a bluish, transparent liquid. “How do these work?” Lili asks.

“BluEther helps with ether recovery.” The shopkeeper folds her arms, her line of sight never leaving Lili’s for a second. “Ether pens… don’t use ether pens. Leave them for your Gallian caster.”

She assumes that means Auren. 

Once Avett nods and swipes the card through the transmitter, they’re headed off towards the hangar again. Lili’s holding the box of ether pens, and she can’t help but wonder exactly why she’s not allowed to use them. Then she remembers—how his hair had expanded like that from their nylon prisons, how he had smelled like the sun in all its glorious power, how he’d radiated that crushing power simply by standing there. Maybe she should leave the pens for Auren.

After returning to the ship and greeting Auren—he’d been seated on the dining table, eating breakfast while they were having lunch at 2PM—it comes to Lili’s attention that Avett is most definitely taking his sweet time stalling before their training session. A full hour passes before Auren puts down his knife and fork, his napkin dabbing at the edges of his mouth. 

“You two have somewhere to be, no?” Auren finally asks between bites. “Unless Ysh’vanna was mistaken.”

Avett had been bickering with Ysh’vanna about canned tomatoes and their recent appearance in the ship’s bathroom cabinet only a second ago, but now she’s pushing him away from the navigation panel and out the exit. “Nope! Go on—you two enjoy yourselves now!”

Upon being promptly pushed down the stairs, the doors click shut behind them.  

Avett’s tail brushes against the side of his thigh. “Mmkay. That’s annoying.”

“If you really don’t want to teach me…” Lili starts as she moves from one foot to the other, “then just tell me what’s on the test, and I’ll practice myself.”

“That’s the big fucking elephant in the room. What’s on the test this year?” He throws up his arms as he walks ahead of Lili. “The frontliner tests are so fucking arbitrary—one year they’ll be pitting every candidate against each other, the next they’ll actually have modules for you to complete. There’s nothing for you to prepare for.”

Lili’s teeth clench into a grimace. Just what she needs—a shitty, completely arbitrary and unfair test that’ll determine whether she’ll be sniffing around for spare jobs in the absolute dregs of the Hive or if she’ll be actually living. “So… just be prepared for anything?”

“I have no damn idea. I stopped keeping track when they started including written sections.”

Lili’s teeth clench into a grimace. “So… just be prepared for anything?”

“Pretty much. Ugh. Just know that the entire time you’re taking the test, they’ll be watching you. Like a hawk. Everything you do—graded and noted down. ”

The imagery doesn’t sit well with Lili. “So what now?”

“Now?” Avett stops at the hangar’s gate, his tail swishing against the wall like he’s a dog seeing a stick for the first time. “Do you drink, princess?”