12: Will

He's still reeling from the abruptness of it all. Four days. Four fucking days, and he'd spent it eating mash, filling his veins with that poison, losing himself and seeing hallucinations of another lifetime—and that woman. He'd experienced a class A brainwashing, somehow. The way he'd moved during those thoughtless, aimless days reminds him of moving through an ocean of heavy smoke. His body was hardly in his control; it ran on someone else's whims like he was a gear being turned by other gears in a clockwork world.

It reminds him of that other day; he shuts away the memory, letting his realisation strike him instead.

The globe warms in his hands. "This Equaliser feeds off the villagers," he breathes. "It protects them—uses its aura to keep them complacent. Which… means they were lying about the herbs."

Neither of them says anything for a while. Avett's stomach churns. He shakes his head.

"Why lie about the herbs?" he asks himself. "They could've used any excuse, but why herbs?"

"The herbs do the exact opposite of what they're supposed to do—they accelerated the process, making us more susceptible to its aura. I get feverish in the presence of the dragon; it's the same feeling when I eat anything here, or when the villagers… use their power on me." She shrinks back, her shoulders hunching over her chest. With a shuddering breath, she starts talking again. "The artifact was protecting me this whole time, like an auto-immune system burning up a virus. One dragon's aura for another, but I guess this one doesn't want to enslave us or something."

The globe heats at her snide remark, beating hotly at Avett's chest.

“It’ll go tits-up if we don’t stop it,” he adds. “B ranks have aura, B5s especially, but not to this extent. Put two and two together, and I don't think it's feeding just for sustenance.”

Gears turn deep within Lilith’s mousy eyes. “B ranks can’t become A ranks… can they?”

Avett shrugs.

She releases a breath, holding her knees to her chest as she drags a finger through the dirt. “Oh, god.”

"This is good and all, but dragons are not fucking smart enough to do this," he says plainly. "The Equaliser doesn't hunt in packs. It's biologically engineered to be lonely. Gathering an entire community of endemic species, brainwashing them into submission—not possible. Pigs can't overthrow a farmer. It can't happen."

"But it did."

"It doesn't happen."

"It just did."

Avett throws his head back in defeat. "We're missing something here."

Lilith looks off to the side. "But you believe me, right?"

"Believe what?"

She toys with the folds of her gloves, pulling them taut, rubbing the material between the flats of her fingers until she's ready to talk again. "It's just—it's a pretty far fetched claim."

He looks at her. "It's a pretty apt claim. Everything fits together nicely… except for that."

Lilith shakes her head. "I was worrying about bringing it up with you, because you looked fine, so mundanely unaffected—" She stops herself, takes another breath, then looks to him. "I didn't think too much of my judgement at first, because I assumed I was wrong."

"So you've stayed quiet for this long because of your cripplingly low self esteem."

She slinks backward until her back is pressed against the wall. "I guess. Maybe. I just wasn't sure. I thought you had a better idea than me, and it definitely looked like it—you were integrating into Human society so well, even though you're Kattish and I'm… you just looked like you had a plan. A better plan. I was willing to take anything—my ether’s back, Avett, but its performance is spotty at best, unresponsive at worst.”

Avett tries not to show it, but his disappointment comes leaking through anyway. It must've been in the way he'd exhaled, because Lilith is saying quickly, "Whatever you're about to say to me, I've already said it to myself a hundred times over the course of this conversation."

He sits up, placing the globe on the ground. Soothes down his boiling frustration, because he's starting to learn exactly when Lilith needs some nice fluff and when she just needs a good scolding. And right now, she needs a little bit of both.

So he focuses his eyes on hers. Places both of his hands on her shoulders again. Lilith tenses underneath his grip.

"Lilith," he starts, his tone gravely serious.

She trembles. "What?"

"You put too much faith in me instead of where it actually matters. And that's not a good thing."

Her mouth is slightly ajar, as if she wants to say something back. Avett doesn't let her, pulling himself away from her body before she can vocalise her thoughts. "I know that's a fucking weird thing to hear from me, the self-righteous hot-headed asshole, considering I just exploded at you earlier today, but you're a frontline caster." He mulls over his sentence for a bit, then adds, "Our frontline caster. There's no one else I'd rather trust other than you, even if I… hate it."

Avett stumbles over his final two words like a kid on their first date. So then he decides that that's enough of that. Lilith's flush is all that it takes for him to stop digging his grave any deeper than it already is, but he could've used a thank you, at least.

"So." He scratches the outer shell of his distinctively Kattish ears, thankful for their presence once more.

"So?"

"About that GlassLink."

His partner picks herself from the ground. She smooths down her tunic with the flats of her palms, drags a raked hand through her hair. "It'll be in Will's weaponry shed, probably. The plan is to call the Winnow, get reinforcements from Auren… then go after the mark again."

"It won't be that hard if we go now," says Avett. "They're eating dinner, we could just walk in. Walk out. Leave."

And yet when they make their way across the village and towards the shed, making sure to crouch below the glow of the dining hall's windows, they find that the door is padded firmly shut. The lock is bulky—but old from the village's lack of modern resources. Since Avett is a firm believer of giving traditional obstacles an innovative treatment, he readies the barrel of his blaster, holding it flat side down against the lock, flexing the muscles in his arm as he prepares to strike against it.

This plan is going to shit already.

Lilith winces as he poises to make the hit. The moment his blaster connects with the metal, a loud clang grates through the air. He raises the blaster up again, intimately aware of the noise he's about to make if he carries through with this plan.

"Wait," Lilith hisses. "I'm not confident in my ability to use ether entirely just yet, but—let me."

His grip loosens. She's already moved in front of the lock and gripped her hand over it.

Fine then, he'll step back, just this once. She shuts her eyes until they wrinkle at the sides, until the tips of her fingers are dangerously red.

Avett folds his arms across his chest. A second passes. Five seconds. The lock is still intact, and Lilith's lips have pressed into a wobbly grimace. They're wasting time—the strength she'd used to push him to the ground early had been a fluke, something akin to an outburst.

She looks to him, eyes swimming with puppy-like innocence.

Of all of the—he bites back the urge to smack her. "...What."

"It's a lot of ether to call up on such a short notice…"

"Fuck, just let go. I'll deal with it."

Lilith shakes her head. "I think you're missing something, Avett."

"Oh yeah?" he hisses back. "Missing what? Your lack of utility? I wouldn't miss you for shit, Lilith."

A raised eyebrow, and the faintest wisp of ether on the wind. "You can do better than that."

Her voice is lined with a stingy coating of arrogance, but it's there all the same. Avett tenses a bit at the challenge in her tone, unused to the confidence, but welcoming it entirely when he makes a face and indulges her and her unusual methods of manipulating ether. "You're a fucking freak. Get over yourself—better than that?" He towers over her, or at the very least, he tries to. "I could do so much worse. I could make you fucking break down in tears and get you to come crawling back for more right after."

"Oh yeah?" She grins, her hand shaking from exertion. Mousy brown eyes flare into a deeper umber, and her grin turns disastrous. "Can I get a demonstration?"

It's hard to keep his voice lowered in the throes of his passionate tirade. "You're a shit field partner. You know, at one point in the forest, I decided that I'd actually prefer Auren over you. Yeah, that's right." He's pacing around now, arms gesturing madly. "Auren—you know, the guy who's got the personality of a dried up cum sock—"

Lilith winces.

"—and I chose Auren anyway," he finishes. "Over you. At least the man can cook without having an existential crisis every ten seconds about how he's a useless sack of shit. By the way, your mushrooms tasted like ass. Never cook again. Fuck you."

The lock shatters in her hand, shrapnel splintering through the air and stabbing their pointed ends into the earth. Her gloves have protected her from the brunt of the damage, but she hisses and shakes out her hand anyway. The door swings open easily and without sound; a mercy, considering their prior ordeal.

Then she catches herself. She offers a worried glance to Avett.

He throws up his hands. "You told me to do it."

Speechless and properly humbled, she enters the shed. Avett follows along, pacing forward until he's next to her. He's sure that she can't see jack in the darkness of the unlit shed anyway, and any form of light would give way to their location all too soon.

Lilith skims the nearest rack with her hand, and his suspicions are confirmed. She might as well be blind, especially when she's running her fingers over a display of sharp blades—rubbing them the wrong way too, like she's ruffling against the way fur grows.

Turning away from his partner's inevitable despair, he scours around, noting down the contents of each rack, each stand. They've been sorted by date and arranged by type. The blades—the ones of higher quality, at least—are displayed on the walls alongside the blasters. Not sorted by coincidence, but by…

It takes a great amount of effort for Avett to squint, but to look away would've taken an equal toll on his conscience. On every hilt, every grip, every frame, there's a golden-edged insignia that blinks through the black and blue darkness.

"Avett, what does it look like?"

Lilith is on the other side of the warehouse already, and she's leaning over a table—Will's table, he realises. She runs her hands over the assortment of tools, wincing when one of the blades manages to snag on the seam of her glove.

"You mean, what does it feel like." He sidles through the rows upon rows of tables, making sure not to bump anything on his way there. "I can't stand to watch you fumble around. Play the casual racism card and let the cat man do the searching for you."

She steps back, her features scrunched up in disgust. To her, the tools—and he uses the term tools lightly, because he manages to catch the glint of a glossy magazine and the curve of someone's very pouty lips—are fuzzy shapes resting on a vaguely flat surface.

A quick scan of the tabletop tells him that his GlassLink isn't here. He pulls open the drawers, making sure to lift them upwards by the handle to avoid the clatter of the runners. Porn, porn, and porn—more stupid fucking ‘Playboy' booklets; a plastic cover with a Human chick on the front, her bare legs crossed up and over the other, revealing enough to tease but not enough to please; a smorgasbord of horny postcards, each model showing more skin than the last.

"Not here." He slams that drawer shut, moving onto the next, his other hand slipping into his pocket like it's second nature.

Lilith narrows her eyes in annoyance. "What did you see?"

"A whole lotta' useless shit."

He's scanning the second drawer for anything, anything at all, but it's the same shit again. His movements become desperate, more inane. Lifting a magazine gives way to more women, another sensual curve, another arched back, another, another—

Avett's ears swivel on the spot. He lowers into a crouch and pulls down Lilith with him.

The first footsteps are bold and heavy. They set Avett's heart ablaze, and he doesn't need his enhanced hearing to know that Lilith's heart is pounding equally as fast.

Will's flashlight circles around like a search beacon on an iron fortress. Lilith is literally hissing through her teeth like a snake ready to bite, but her doubt keeps her circling at bay. Which is a good thing—better for her to stay sober, than to go heady from the rage and malice.

"I know you're there." Like a hunter readying his rifle, Will goes absolutely still. "Didn't have to break my lock like that. Why don't you come out from under that table, and we'll talk this out like civilised Humans?"

Several seconds of silence drip past like a jar of spilled molasses.

"Should we answer?" Lilith whispers.

Avett's answer is blunt. "I dunno, it's your friendship you'll be ruining. Just know that he's reloaded a clean battery into his blaster in the time that he's taken to give you his 'we come in peace' talk."

He'd heard it—a subtle snap of iron against plastic, nestled between the words' civilised' and 'Humans', a sound he'd recognise three sheets to the wind. She slumps back against the leg of the table, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

"He's not leaving without a fight," Avett offers.

"He's got no reason to fight us when he doesn't know that we know about the dragon." She balls her hand into a fist.

"He's holding a loaded firearm, Lilith."

His partner pounds her fist into the ground, silence and violence concentrated into one swift movement so that she makes nary a sound at all when her hit connects. If only she'd channel that passion elsewhere.

Then she shakes her head. You first.

Projecting his voice out and upwards, he pushes aside his usual air of arrogance and wears a mask of pure brown-nosery on top. "Alright, you got us. You've won."

At least Will isn't moving forward anymore, but that's because he's entirely aware of where they're hiding right now. Avett hears the sound of cloth shifting against cloth and assumes the worst: his blaster, pointed right at the edge of the desk, just slightly above the surface so that when Avett pops his unassuming 'alien' head over, Will won't have to adjust too much when he shoots him between the eyes.

A rich chortle. "Why am I not surprised that it's you?"

Though he can't see Will from here, Avett is willing to bet that he's rolling his eyes into his skull. He decides to return that sentiment. "I'm just a little unforgettable like that."

He takes a few steps towards the table. "That's my desk, Ironsturm."

"And?"

Will halts, his leather shoes just visible from underneath the overhang of the table. "You like what you see?"

"I'm seeing a whole lot of vanilla and nothing else."

Behind the leg of the table, Avett gestures towards Lilith with a raised hand. Gears turn behind her once dulled eyes, fast and hard enough to fling sparks into the air.

The rattle of metal against metal as Will raises his weapon. A snort—then, an exhale. "Of course. Of course. I saw you eyeing up Mari earlier—emphasis on the 'up.' I suppose the men of your kind simply have to make do, hm?"

Lilith waves at Avett to scuffle back. When he does, she plants her feet firmly into the ground and squats low. Then she curls her fingers underneath the overhang.

Ether ripples through the shed, its scent hot and tangy like freshly pounded iron. Something changes in her posture. Maybe it's because she's finally hitting back, maybe it's because she's trying to lift a desk into the air, but she looks a little stauncher, a little more unhinged.

As the desk goes flying, flying, Avett replies with, "Don't worry about us. We've got it where it counts."

—

Four days.

Auren pushes past another cluster of ground-hugging bushes, wincing occasionally at the way their brambles stick into his slacks. It has been four days since he’d received Avett’s last call, and his GlassLink contact hadn’t lit up since.

Naturally, his captain assumed the worst.

So she’d sent him out despite his points about her safety—shooed out of her ship is a more apt description, now that he’s thinking about it—into the wilderness on a wild goose chase. Auren doesn’t even know how to track people ethereally. He’s heard of Palerians who can track by the scent of one’s ether, of Kattish hunters who’ll chase their marks to the edges of the world with nothing but a strand of hair.

He doesn’t know how to do any of that. His Gallian teachers chose his life for him a long time ago. They taught him how to maintain the portals between realities, how to check for barrier deficiencies and perform various maintenance procedures. Warding became second nature—it’s not his affinity, not at all, but it’s better masquerading around as a talentless backline caster.

Auren stops to snap off a dry chunk of ration. The moisture on his tongue is absorbed the moment he puts it into his mouth.

Field work is a break from the mundanity he’d subjected himself to for the past thirty or so years. Look at him now—babysitting for two frontliners, both ready to beat the other into a nasty stain. Portal deficits are easy to categorise, but he’s lost count of the various topics Avett and Lili have butted heads on, lost count on the ways he’s had to bail Avett from various encounters over the past year.

Auren’s getting a little sick of playing caretaker for Avett, but what can he do? That’s the role a backline caster has to play—caretaking, babysitting, standing just far enough from the action to feel the heat, but not close enough to get hurt. When he thumbs his caster’s pouch and sees that he’s running dangerously low on those company-mandated rations that taste like wood chunks and marinated cardboard, he promises to himself to give Avett some form of stern talking-to. Ysh’vanna already has enough to worry about.

He cranes his neck and stares at the slits of light through the canopy, drinking deeply from his canister, letting the cool water slide down the back of his throat. Each drop is ravished rather than savoured.

The lid clicks back into place. In the distance, he catches crushed grass, iron bolts; a scuffle. He heads towards it, batting away a stray branch. Sees dried black blood on blades of trampled undergrowth. On a stump, there is a lantern in the distance.

Four days.

11: the cough

One trip to the cabin and back and they've got themselves an entire environmentally-based kitchen in the middle of the woods. Lilith has fashioned a hearth out of various bundles of snapped branches. Their stolen culinary cookware hangs at the apex of her contraption, and occasionally it wobbles haphazardly. Avett has one hand on the edge of a sizable bucket of water for this very reason. He'd taken it from the estate, 'just in case.' That case now seems very plausible and very likely to occur.

Thankfully, Lilith seems to know what she's doing because not once does the pot topple over; neither does the makeshift hearth snap underneath its weight, sending a spark of fire careening throughout the entire forest and burning them alive. The idea of Lilith being a decent cook both surprises him and feels obvious, because of course she's decent; she's made her own meals every day for six years. It just strikes him as strange that he has to accept she's actually competent for once.

It's not long before the mushrooms are starting to brown and sizzle at the sides. The meal smells earthy and sweet—courtesy of the wild onions she'd dug up earlier, he realises. With a pinch of stolen salt and a handful of fennel, the meal is ready.

Avett stares at what she's made; it's small, it's bite-sized and looks more like a side dish than a main, but it's better than the soapy aftertaste of mashed root vegetables, so he'll take it.

It's only halfway through Avett's twentieth bite of Lilith's foraged mushrooms when he realises that the comforting protrusion in his left pocket is strangely absent. When he finishes his meal and idly strokes a palm over his pants, he's immediately aware of why; his GlassLink is gone.

With his bowl now nestled between a clump of grass and his shoe, he thrusts a hand into his pockets. When he comes up empty again, he searches his breast pocket, then the two on his ass—not like he'd ever put anything in there because he's not comfortable with sitting on his wallet or GlassLink at all. Those pockets are strictly nonfunctional.

Lilith just watches, her eyes unblinking as he stares at his lint-covered fingers. She scoops up another spoonful and chews thoughtfully.

"Look," he starts, his cheeks beginning to redden. "It was with me before. I-I don't know—they probably took it off me when they were tying me up, I could get it back if I asked."

Lilith isn't saying anything, but the ambient tinkle of her spoon against the sides of her bowl is enough to turn him into an uncomfortable mess. "Fuck, I'll call them, ok? First thing I'll do when I get my shit back is call them. Stars, you're annoying. I didn't forget. Not at all."

"You’re compromising a mission over your dick."

There's the line he's been dreading. Lilith's been a lot more adventurous with her verbal lashings as of recent, that's for sure.

He sends out his own counterattack, his precision sharper than a freshly forged pin. "Excuse me? Don't bring up compromising in front of me," he spits. “You think we’re stuck here because I want to get my dick wet? I’m fucking waiting for you to recover so we can get the fuck out of here, because if you’d told anyone about it—anyone at all—we wouldn’t be in this mess. The least you could do is be thankful that I’m even putting up with your shit, Lilith. You won't even tell me why you're out here, instead of in there." He points vaguely in the direction of the dining hall.

She exhales through her nose, her eyes fixed to the ground. Avett grits his teeth—he hates it, absolutely loathes that self-depreciated look on her face whenever he brings up something valid. It makes her look like a kid who's just endured a proper scolding, except she's like eighteen or in her early twenties or so, and she's not a kid; she's a frontliner who's been through more encounters than most. 

Avett waits for her to bring up the GlassLink again. He's not sure why he hasn't called anyone yet, but he sure as hell isn't about to give Lilith any leverages by shrinking back and apologising.

Something deep flickers in her irises. "Thank you," she says.

Hesitation seizes his body in a vice. His fiery rage has dissipated into a gentle surprise, and that's no good.

Lilith continues, "You did a good job, saving me. I'm sorry I kept secrets from you. I promise to do better."

All of this, and she's still looking towards the ground. Lilith is the only person who'll stand there after an insult and thank her enemies for it.

Avett trembles. His fist clenches at his side. The air around Lilith is fundamentally wrong, kind of like an empty doctor's office: beige and liminal. She looks like she could shrink in on herself at any moment.  

With an exasperated sigh, he sits back against the tree. Lilith is hopelessly good at making him feel bad for her. If not for her lack of self-defensive capabilities, he'd have punched her out of it already. But right now, she's meeker than an ewe. And Avett doesn't hit animals.

Her lips press together again, like she's trying to keep down a rise of bile in her throat. Then she says, "I still think we should leave soon."

"Did you not hear a word of what I just said? Not with you," he says, picking up the bowl again, "like this. I'm sure some of the villagers could help you regain control over your—"

Lilith shoots up. "They can't."

He damn nearly chokes on his words. "You can't be serious. They've trained, Lilith. They know what they're capable of."

She shakes her head. "It's not ether. Not like mine. I just know."

Another exasperated sigh. They can't do anything, can't go anywhere without bumping heads. How the fuck are they supposed to be working together when Lilith can't even admit that she's useless right now and needs help? She's about as open as a closed casket funeral. Avett's had better luck with their resident Gallian, he swears. Maybe that's because he's hardly around Auren for most of the time.

"Fine." Shrugging off the urge to roll his eyes, he scrapes around his bowl and finishes up. "But you better be trying on your own time."

Lilith only awkwardly adjusts herself in her seat. Man, he misses the woman who gave him shit for everything he’d said back in the old ship. He thinks about bringing up what she’d said earlier about the village last night, but he finds himself tossing the bowl in front of Lilith’s feet and leaving her for herself out of spite. It's not like she’s in any real danger from the dragon anyway.

—

When he gets back to the village, the low thrum of civilisation hits him like someone’s just thrown a warm blanket at his face. It’s totally out of left field, but it’s not exactly unwelcome. He places a jar of filched pickles in front of Johanne’s doorstep and is about to head for Susan’s shack on the other side of the square when he catches the flutter of a certain Human’s leathery jacket.

Before he can trace it down, it disappears behind a cabin that’s been mounted on a hill. She must’ve headed upwards.

Avett knows that it's not any of his business, but he finds himself following her anyway. The path behind the house is accented by worn-down stepping stones, and it hugs the sides of the building like a precarious child. When he gets closer, he finds that there are no hand rails to hold onto as he ascends the steps.

By the time he's gotten to the top, he's already huffing in exertion, and his legs are feeling pleasantly numb. In front of him is a gnarled tree, unlike any of the ones back in the forest. This one has long, glossy leaves that catch the sun at certain angles, giving the flora an ethereal glow.

Mari stands in front of two headstones, both fashioned out of grey waves of tin. A thin coating of rust has started to creep over the surfaces. Looped between the two stones is a garland of similarly glossy leaves, with the odd sprig of cilantro and thyme weaved in. A circlet of dead twigs lies on the dirt next to her feet.

Avett immediately starts down the hill again, his curiosity sated, but he guesses fate has other things in store for him when he steps on a poorly-positioned stepping slab and feels it slide from underneath his feet.

He lands on his ass not a second later. Mari whips around—then laughs.

"Thought you guys were meant to be good at landing on your own two feet," she teases, her hand outstretched; Avett accepts her hand graciously.

He pats himself down. "That's for shit like walking on fences. Contrary to popular belief, my tail does nothing for uneven ground."

"Any other fun facts about your tail you'd like to impart?" A subtle tug at the edges of her lips sends Avett's heart into a giddy gallop. He scratches the back of his head.

"Mine's longer than most," he brags. This isn't really something to flaunt at all, because he's been targeted by his cousins on multiple occasions about it. It's kind of like glasses—they're not necessarily a negative trait, not until you're in an argument. But when you do find yourself in one, you'll be enduring insults like 'four-eyes' until your ears pop.

Mari grins. She looks like she might have something else to say, but instead she folds her arms and nods at the space next to Avett. "And a warm hello to you too, Lilith."

Fucking hell, he's been so enamoured with this woman that he's totally tuned out of his surroundings. Lilith is panting hard, gulping down fresh bites of cool air. She still manages to glare at Avett even in her current weakened state.

"It's Lili," she says, once she's managed to catch her breath.

Mari waves a hand. “Oh, sorry. Will just kept referring to you as Lili, and Avett here seems adamant on calling you Lilith—and, well, you’re already well acquainted with Will.”

Avett watches Lilith’s chest heave a bit, like she might start talking again. But then she turns her head to the ground, resigning herself to complacency. “It’s ok. Just call me whatever.”

It’s amazing how quickly Lili can shut down conversations. Avett might consider it a skill, if not for the fact that it has probably never worked in her favour. Weaponised awkwardness lies in the palm of her hand, and all she’s doing with it is somehow managing to catch herself in the explosion radius. It reminds him of aspiring arms specialists during their first practical course.

Lili’s attention moves to the graves. “Your mum and dad,” she says. Her tone is flat.

Avett expects Mari to recoil from the bluntness of it all, but she lets out a single laugh and turns back to the tree. “Mhm. Miss ‘em terribly.”

Lili doesn’t say anything about that. She’s looking at the wreath that’s been draped over both headstones. At the odd blade of thyme.

Something seems to be churning in that weird, elusive mind of hers, but Avett isn’t sure what it is.

Mari continues, her voice dropping low, “You remember that day too, don’t you? That fateful Saturday.” She takes a few steps forward and reaches upwards to pluck a leaf from the tree; its branches shiver in response. “When the dragons descended and destroyed our world, leaving us in shambles—yet totally new, empowered and fight-ready.”

Her other hand lights up, engulfed in a spread of inky flame. She runs her fingertips over the leaf, leaving a trail of gold on its skin around the edges.

“A little.” His frontline partner sounds uncomfortable; not because of the topic at hand, but because she’s testing the waters. For what, Avett still doesn’t know.

“We lived around the northern part of Auckland, near Matakana. There wasn’t a lot of cover—we were wide open.” Mari stills, then takes out a utility knife and flicks it open. “I’m the youngest of five. My parents were too old, so they didn’t make it. They’re not even buried here—probably under some rubble back at home. Least they’re resting now.”

Lilith’s fists are clenching hard enough to turn her knuckles white. Mari is working down a branch from high up with her knife, sawing at it until it drops off. She holds it—leafy side forward—towards Lilith.

“It looks like we’ve both lost something in the apocalypse,” Mari says as she clips her utility knife back into its sheath. “Wanna help make wreaths for my mum and dad? We could talk about it. It helps.”

There’s a brief breath of hesitation before Lilith responds, her eyes looking elsewhere. Her arms remain at her sides. “It was a school day. I went to class and I never saw them again.”

A flicker of emotion ripples through Mari’s features.

Then Lilith turns and pushes gently past Avett. “Excuse me. Sorry. Enjoy yourselves. I’ve got… um, dishes to clean, and grime doesn’t come off easily if you leave it for too long.”

And then she stumbles down the hill.

What an amazing excuse. And an even more impressive exit. Avett’s a little displeased at her insistence of refusing to connect with other people, other Humans—but it’s not like she's not leaving destructively. He doesn’t really have anything to complain about here.

“Is Saturday school normal on Earth?” Avett asks.

Mari shrugs. “In this country? Not really.” She offers the branch to Avett instead. “She might’ve taken supplementary classes on the side. She looks like the type of person to take extracurricular courses.”

“If she did, they didn’t work. She’s kinda dumb. But she’ll be alright.” He presses a glossy-skinned leaf between his fingers. “So how does this work?”

“Sit down. You’ll be here for a while.”

Mari shows him how to thread the stems through the gaps in the wreath. She does it slowly, methodically, as she has for the past six years. Avett messes up a few times—sometimes he’ll snap the twigs right in half as he’s weaving them in; other times he’ll end up accidentally scraping the leaves between the gaps in the wreath, causing them to bleed chlorophyll from their fragile skins. He learns that the tree they’re using is called a magnolia, that the flowers it bears are beautiful, but it’s the wrong season for them right now. There are no magnolias on Therius, let alone on any other known realms. He wonders if there are other unique, unfound endemic species on Earth.

He’s kind of looking at someone like that right now.

With a twist of his fingers, Avett manages to pull the last thread of stubborn thyme through the gaps in the wreath. By the time they've finished, the sun's already sunk its core into the horizon, and the bell above the church has started to chime.

His ears perk up; Mari raises an eyebrow in interest.

"Wasn't aware that you liked the idea of dinner that much," she teases.

"Yeah, well, growing boys need nutrition." He shrugs and blows his hair out of his face as he starts down the hill again, this time with a hand splayed against the sides of the cabin like it's a handrail. "Lilith held me at gunpoint for lunch and forced me to eat nothing but sauteed mushrooms; I've been feeling the bite of hunger ever since."

"Ooh, so it's one of those types of relationships." She offers a hand once Avett is on the final few steps. "You scared of her?"

He folds his arms and pins down Mari's boyish gaze with his own stern stare. It then occurs to him where she's looking; her eyes are fixed downwards of course, courtesy of her height, but they're hovering a touch too low. Somewhere between his Adam's apple and his nose, tracing the gentle outlines of his cupid's bow. Fuck, he'd let this woman beat him silly any day. Kiss him silly any day.

He feels himself soften once the situation dawns on him; it's like he's just had the pleasure of watching the sun rise to the harmonial greetings of the new day, only to realise that he's stayed up the entire night. Mari looks like she might feel the same.

But then she leans back and crosses her arms behind her head, instantly heralding the end of whatever spell she'd put him under. "Dinner or what?" she asks.

"Don't just act like you weren't just thinking about kissing me." Avett could have had a bucket of ice cubes dumped over his head and it still wouldn't compare to the total mood whiplash she's just subjected him to.

“Thinking?” A smirk. “You think I’m only thinking about it?”

“Clearly.” He folds his arms.

She turns. The back of her head is silhouetted against the sun's farewell rays that stream through the curved awnings of the communal dining hall. “I don’t kiss on an empty stomach, Avett. Get some food in you, maybe I’ll reconsider it.”

“Like beef and mash is something to get hot under the collar over, but alright.”

Mari doesn’t respond.

—

The length of the dining hall yawns before him. There’s a long, wooden table in the middle of it all, and it stretches on for figurative eons. Placed strategically along the surface are metallic oil lamps, similar to the ones Avett had followed into the village… what, three or two days ago? Maybe even four.

As he stands in line for food, he finds that he can’t quite recall the exact measure of time since he’d first arrived in the village. Not that it matters too much to him right now.

He watches Susan, the woman he’d helped earlier, ladle a healthy helping of creamy mashed roots into his tray. She offers him a warm smile—a far cry from the glares he’d endured on their first day here. In fact, all of it seems so far away now.

The next villager piles layers upon layers of sliced meat into a separate compartment on his tray. He generously drizzles a greenish sauce over it—Avett assumes it’s mint, but he could be wrong.

Then he catches himself; him, wrong about a scent?

When he goes to take a testing sniff, he’s expecting the sharp tang of certain chilly herb, but instead he gets the soapy aftertaste of cilantro. There’s a note of thyme in there too, but it’s so overpowered by the initial scent that Avett nearly misses it.

“Cilantro and thyme as always,” his server says. “Mint doesn’t grow around here. Not anymore.”

"How come?" Avett asks.

His server eyes the tightly packed line behind Avett and the widening gap in front of him. Instead of answering, he responds with a low shake of his head. Time to move on.

When he's done receiving each and every server's blessings, he finds his seat next to Mari on the elder's table. Will offers him a tight smile—the other elders vary from outright distaste to warm welcomes.

A familiar touch at his shoulder keeps his back straightened, his eyes fixed on his meal and towards the warmer welcomes. Mari sits ever so tightly, her speech crafted like machine carved wood. She's stilted, but not as stilted as Will, whose expression looks as if he's stretched what should've been a gentle smile over his feral scowl.

Avett turns to his meal. The elders' table is incredibly silent, save for the occasional pratter about Susan's scarecrow attracting more crows than scaring them away. It's not until he's scraped off the remains of his mash that Mari taps him on the shoulder again. Twice—both uneasily sympathetic.

"Is that her?" Mari asks. Her head's tilted towards the entrance, the double entry doors still swinging on their brass hinges.

Lilith. Avett blinks hard enough to see stars. She's lining up for food. She's wearing the caster's tunic and pants.

Avett clenches his jaw and stiffens his shoulders. Lilith in caster's gear, wearing the corporate monotony of the IRC. She should be ashamed of herself, he thinks—but for what? The thoughts pass through him like ghosts, and he shakes his head. The taste of their previous disagreement still lingers at his taste buds like a scalding soup. It's hard to see Lilith without seeing red as well. That's all it is.

When she takes her seat next to Avett, there is not a single person that meets her eyes, no one to offer her a passing glance as she smoothes down her skirt and sticks her fork into a slab of meat.

He leans over. "What the fuck and why?" he asks.

She spends a while rubbing the sides of her beef onto the tray, making sure that not a drop of sauce remains on the slab. "Why what?" she retorts.

Avett starts her off with an easy question. "Why wear that uniform?" He’s not sure why it matters so much.

Lilith regards him for a second, her shoulders hunched like a watchful hawk. She bites into the meat later, tearing it from her fork grain by grain, sinew by sinew. Her knife remains flat against the table.

One of the elders darts his eyes elsewhere; another coughs into his sleeve.

"Please tell me you know how to use those." Avett jerks his chin towards the unused knife, his voice lowered.

"I came in my caster's gear because it's comfy," she answers around a mouthful of beef.

He tears his focus from Lilith and onto Mari again. Her cheeks are red, not from embarrassment, but in reaction to Will's temperamental, snarky smile. Avett can almost imagine his features turning dark in an instance of clarity, at the flourish of a curtain—he'd rage and burn at Lilith for her lack of manners while making it reflect on Mari's shortcomings somehow.

His partner stares him down as she takes another bite, chews on it methodically, then helps herself to another slab of meat. A challenge; this is premium bait in its purest form. Will eats it right up and stays silent—a bomb deactivated from lengthening the fuse.

This is stupid, Avett realises, because they are literally having a battle of wits over table manners and a tray of food. He turns back to Lilith, eager to blot out Will's narrowing simper. It doesn’t work.

Behind him, Will returns to his food. "I’m surprised that you’ve decided to eat with us at all."

Lilith doesn’t answer, choosing to prod at the surface of her mashed potatoes instead. She slides a prong underneath a leaflet of thyme and wipes it onto the side of her tray.

She definitely doesn’t need the opinion of two jackasses tonight. Avett bites back a snide insult with another mouthful of hot food. This is certainly not the first awkward dinner she’s had—he can tell in the way she holds herself. Her chin is aimed down at her feet, her head tilted away from Will like she can’t stand to breathe even the same air as him.

Lilith looks like she’s a small animal stuck between fighting and fleeing. She picks out another grain of herb and leaves it half-stuck in a wad of creamy mash beside the other one.

“Think you’re a little too old to be picky about eating your greens, Lili.”

A ball of muscle ticks in Lilith’s cheek. She grips her fork—

—and stabs it into the mound of pulpy mash, herbs and all. It goes into her mouth a second later. Will raises his eyebrows, but says nothing in response.

This is stupid, so fucking stupid. This is what years and years of unresolved tension does to a motherfucker. Avett is glad he’s done and dusted all of his previous less-than-stellar relationships before leaving for Earth, instead of allowing them to fester as dirty wounds do. A testament to this shitshow that they’re treating him to right now.

He’s about to lean over and tell her just how petty she looks when she stiffens, her face reddening as she covers her mouth with the palm of her hand. Her fingers dig so deeply into her cheeks that when she slowly lets go of herself there are white half-moon embedded in her skin.

Then she runs for the doors. They slam shut behind her.

Mari fixes Will with an unsteady glance, but the larger man merely scratches the scruff of his blond hair. “None of our business, Mari,” he says, cutting away at a slice of beef. “Don’t let your food go cold.”

Don’t let your food go cold.

His words are nothing to Avett—a discarded note of garbage in the afternoon wind, but it’s everything to Mari, to Lilith even. He rattles his chair against the flooring and storms after her, not stopping to give a single shit about the mess he’s left behind.

The night air nips at his skin, but all Avett can think about is finding Lilith. He can't see where he's going; it takes a while for his eyes to adjust to the sudden absence of light. There's no rush though: her coughs are loud enough to shake the birds from their trees. Avett follows her heaving splutters, feeling alongside the walls of the dining hall and finally crouching down next to a bush.

His hands grip onto her shoulders. She's turned away from him, her head buried in twigs and leaves. "Lilith." He shakes her, but she doesn't budge. "Lilith, what's wrong with you?"

"I'm fine—" She coughs again and takes in a wheezing breath. "Please don't worry—"

"Don't worry?" Avett feels his cheeks flush with hot anger. "Lilith, you've been sick all week, you launch into coughing fits whenever you eat, and you've been throwing up your food behind the nurse's back."

Lilith opens her mouth to fire back a retort, but Avett strikes first. "Don't deny it. You look like shit. You haven't even given this village a chance—even I have, and I'm—come on, please. You're clearly not fine."

Something flashes in those dim-witted eyes of hers, like they're finally seeing things in crystal-sharp clarity for the first time in days. Then she's back to her old, stiff self. "Where's your GlassLink?" she asks.

He squeezes her shoulders, his knuckles straining against his gloves. "What? Lilith, fuck the GlassLink—"

Lilith grits her molars and turns away briefly before fixing him with another clear-eyed stare. "Hold still, Avett."

It's then that she slips a hand into her pocket and pulls out a round, glassy object. When she fully reveals it to the night sky, he finds that it glows. The snow catches the starlight, and for a moment it looks like it's raining meteors inside the wintery diorama, their shine illuminating the plastic cabin that sits in the midst of the storm. The artifact, he realises, before another surge of apathy takes his head and drags it under.

"Look at yourself in the reflection, Avett." Her voice is slight, yet solid.

He's about to ask where the fuck she got her globe from when he sees himself staring right back in the glassy material, his rounded irises swimming in a pool of tawny brown. His ears—hidden behind his hair. The skin around his eyes is unblemished and clear.

There's a Human staring back at him. And somehow, Avett realises with muted horror, it feels right.

Until Lilith shoves the globe right into his ribcage, winding him and—surprisingly—knocking him to the ground. He catches the tang of ether on the wind when he hits the ground.

Her ether—angry, bright, and furious. When had she gotten it back?

It's like he hasn't been breathing at all for the past four—or five—days, and like he's only just rediscovered proper respiration after a brutal brain injury. He lies on the ground, his chest rising and falling as he wraps his fingers around the smooth finish of the globe for dear life. The image had shaken him to his foundations. His eyes scan the night sky, then the innards of the globe, but the snow has long since lost its star-ridden shine. He savours the touch anyway. 

The sure-fire memory loss examination comes to mind immediately. Avett sits up and says, "I'm Avett Ironsturm, and I'm a twenty year-old Kattish male."

…Factually true. Lilith blinks in confusion as he releases a sigh and slumps back to the ground. He’d experienced all stages of the onset of dragon-induced madness in the span of four days. He breathes. Four fucking days. It’d taken a week for the workers to even notice, but—only four days for him. 

"The Equaliser," she begins. Her tone is steady, but her heart is pounding loudly enough for Avett to hear, even from here. "I figured it out. I think you might've as well."

"Thank the fucking gods." Avett lets his head roll to the side, eager to let the image of his Human self wash over and away from him. Fuck that noise.

10: the past

 Underneath the canopies of concrete and vines of hanging copper cables are the beady eyes of a lesser dragon. It's definitely a C rank, likely a type 5 judging from its proximity to the Equaliser. Avett's not taking chances. It might turn out that it's still in the grips of early infancy—it could be knee-deep into its teen years for all he knows—but it's still a fucking menace and a bitch to exterminate. In the time that he's had to collect his thoughts, it's already slinked off elsewhere.

Out of sight, but certainly not out of mind.

He curses and moves on, keeping his body lowered and pressed against the handrails of the escalators.

Both of his hands are firmly on his blaster. All Avett hears are the ambient noises of the nearby forest, the occasional whistle of the early morning breeze, and the obnoxiously loud crunch of pebbles against the concrete at his feet. Shit. He's never been light on his feet. His mom used to tease him about it for days back in his single-digit years. His dad had bought him these hard-soled house slippers, and they'd slapped against the wooden floorboards all the time, keeping the entire household up in the process.

He peers over the handrails, aims his gun at the sulking mass of inky tendrils, and fires at the growth of white gauze. The dragon is dead before it hits the concrete. He'll have to work on his footsteps later, but it hasn't screwed him over yet. It's not fair that his mom's still right, even after all of these years.

In a wild series of circumstances and events, Avett finds himself at the epicentre of what appears to be an incredibly high-class department store. As he steps out from behind the escalator, he's greeted with an open ceiling and the unrelenting glare of the Earth's sun. The glass dome that rests above him is surprisingly intact. A lot of things are, in fact. The fast-food counters are made out of marble, and they're not cracked or scratched in the slightest. Just dusty. It's more abandoned than evacuated.

This seems like the perfect place to reestablish society. It's nostalgic, familiar, and it's got tons of resources—he's seen what some of the stores have had to offer in the brief glimpses that he's taken on his way in. All of this sounds way better than a clearing in the middle of a forest.

He turns a corner and slings his backpack onto the counter. This is some kind of supermarket, he's aware. There are condoms on sale at the checkout; he leans over and pockets like four of them. It's not shoplifting if no one's around to see it.

Something rustles behind him. He flinches, flicks his blaster into his hands, and points at… nothing. It's not just the wind because the ceiling's sealed up here, and the breeze hadn't even been strong enough to rattle the chunks of asphalt against the concrete. It's not a dragon either—or at the very least, it's not Equaliser spawn.

"Come on," he says. "I saw you. Get out."

The bluff works. She's doing the thing that makes Avett's insides feel funny where she laughs from the deepest parts of her belly. He wonders if he should lower his blaster or point it at himself.

"There's no way you need all of those," Mari says as she comes into the light.

He slips his blaster back into its holster. "I collect them. I like how the boxes look."

"Really?"

Avett swings his backpack over his shoulders again. There's a smile playing on his lips, and for a brief second, he feels like a fucking king. Like he's the first kid in a class full of geniuses to put down his pencil, flip over his test, and lean back in his chair. Stars, how he's missed little interactions like these. Lilith would've seen and ignored him. Auren likely would have done the same. Ysh'vanna would have lost it and pulled the condoms over his head. He's not allowed to have fun aboard the Winnow because they're all stuck-ups with silver utensils shoved deep inside their anal cavities.

"What do you mean, 'really?'" He shrugs and walks into a random aisle. He hopes he's in the preservatives. "That's all they're good for, right?"

A snort. "Best to keep them as family heirlooms. I'd check the expiry date if I were you."

Onset, palpable fear. Avett shoves a hand into his pockets and brings out a box. The black numbering on the side shows that it's at least a year past its best-by date.

He whirls around. "Condoms on Earth have expiry da—?"

There's no one behind him. She's just gone.

He takes a few cautionary steps forward. The supermarket's tiling is so brittle that he cracks one clean in half with his heel. He calls out her name. He calls out her name again, this time slightly louder. When she doesn't answer both times, he starts walking faster. His heart is pounding, ready to leap up and out of his throat at any damn second.

Again he calls her name. Again, she doesn't respond. Avett can only assume the worst.

Then—a flash of brown leather. The tinkle of her zips hitting the supermarket railing. Mari comes out of the aisle next to the one he's in. She's in front of him now, and she's got the biggest shit-eating grin on her face, one that puts the one that'd been on his face not five minutes earlier to shame.

"Cans are this way," she says. There are black spots in his vision when he looks at her, but they're slowly starting to recede back into whatever hell they'd come from. "I just walked into the aisle next to yours, and you just started screaming my name like I'd gone off and died."

Then she sees his expression. He probably looks like shit. He feels like shit. It's like he's just been unwillingly ripped apart and exposed, like soft citruses in the hands of a starving child.

"I'm fine," Avett says. "I didn't hear you move, that's all."

He slides a hand over his stomach and clenches his hands into the familiar warmth of his navy-blue jacket; Mari catches him doing it, so he rounds the corner and enters the aisle of preservatives without giving her a second glance.

"It's magic," she says, a bit after. She's still on the other side of the aisle; Avett can see her painfully still face from over the tops of the cereal boxes. "I'm using a glamour to hide the sound of my footsteps. Obviously, I'm not too good at it. I can't hide anything else."

He tries his best to ignore the piles upon piles of rotting fruit displays and decaying herb pots that haven't seen the blessing of light and water in a while. It seems counter-intuitive for one side to need daily maintenance while the other might as well go half a decade without needing to be replenished.

It's almost retroactively funny, actually. Just like how he'd freaked out over absolutely nothing at all.

The rest of the outing is pretty awkward after that. But when he comes back with a backpack full of jars of pickles and soft chickpeas and corn, the villagers seem elated to know that the Kattish man isn't out to kill them all in their sleep anymore. So he's fine with feeling like someone's just twisted a knife into his stomach, he guesses.

—

Lili doesn't like this place.

She'd woken up in the middle of the night, her back and bed drenched in sweat, and when she'd reaffirmed that the moisture at her back hadn't been piss but sweat instead, she'd gone right back to sleep. Come early morning, and she'd never felt better. 

Until she walked out of her room in her weird white sheet-robe thing and nothing else, and found herself eye to eye with William Dresfort, Ava's boyfriend before the fall… and point guard for his all-boys school's basketball team.

There's no way they're on equal footing. Lili had clung to the excuse of being from an all-girls school as to why she never socialised with the opposite gender, but now she's thinking about it, she never really was one for socialisation in the first place. People who interacted and knew people from other schools—at the time—were scary to Lili. The reverse rang true: as a result, she never really got to talk to Will often.

Lili doesn't like to think about him. She didn't have any friends outside of Ava's friend group, and Ava knew it; she'd ended up with the highly-valued role of the third wheel at every outing. And Lili had eaten all up by taking them up on every invitation, either out of fear of disappointing Ava or losing her only—Lili hovers on the word 'friend.' She doesn't know.

Will is making breakfast for himself. The smell of fried eggs and sauteed potatoes wafts through the air. He doesn't see Lili yet. Or maybe he doesn't want to have to acknowledge her existence before he's had his first cup of coffee.   

She wonders if it's in poor taste to immediately change back into her caster's uniform.

Then he says, "I left a change of clothes for you in your room. Did you miss them?"

Lili knows they hadn't been there. She plays along anyway by walking back down the corridor. Sure enough, there's a pile of old clothing on the stool in Avett's room, which has been left wide open. They're meant for Avett, obviously, but she puts it on anyway. She finds that they're nothing out of the ordinary—just a pair of washed-out jeans and a hoodie.

When she comes back, he's already sitting down at the hickory dining table and neatly cutting into his gooey-yolked eggs with his knife and fork. There's a plate opposite his. Lili sits down there.

There's a knife and fork on her plate as well.

Ignoring the knife, she takes the fork in her right hand and spears right through the yolk. Will is using the slices of sauteed potato as a scoop to wipe up its molten centre. Some of it smears—and stays smeared like he's just tried to wipe away a bloodstain—on the plate.   

"You day drink?" he asks after he's done with his meal. Lili is still trying to figure out how she's going to slice off parts of this egg with the edge of her fork only. She's made a mess of the yolk, and she's caught it dribbling off the sides of the plate at least five times now.

She doesn't answer. He coughs and corrects himself. "Do you drink at all?"

"I don't mind drinking in the day," she says.

"Then," he says, as he pushes away from the chair and leaves the table, "I'll see you at the bar. Building opposite this one. Take your time."

It feels like there's been a weight lifted off her shoulders when he leaves the house. Lili takes pleasure in the absence of him and takes this opportunity to dig through the pantry for chopsticks, or a spoon, or anything she can actually use. All she gets is a spoon. Which is still pretty useless.

She grips the handle tightly. Tight enough, she thinks, to break her bones and cut through her skin if she clenches any harder. Then she puts it back with all the other spoons and closes the drawers.

Lili finishes her meal five minutes later. She's painfully white, considering the fact that she can't speak a lick of Mandarin nor Tagalog, but she'd sell a disproportionate amount of her vital organs just to be able to eat with a knife and fork. It seems like these days, she's always lost in a liminal nowhere, where not even the most fringest of fringe groups can relate to her experience. Stuck in a profound sense of estrangement is how she's going to refer to it. Who's ever heard of a Human caster? A Human caster who's scared of her own ether and can't cast for shit? A Chinese-Filipino who's so whitewashed she can't speak what should've been her own mother tongue, and yet can't even eat with a knife and fork to save her dignity in front of the people who care?

Suddenly, the prospect of day drinking seems a whole lot better. She wishes that it didn't take just a knife and fork and Will's demeaning nature to make her spiral like this. When she leaves the pseudo-mansion, she notices that there is no building in front of the mansion. The bar, in fact, is closer to the left side of the village than anything else.  

It's actually a nice place. Lili's not sure why, but she'd expected a garage or some derelict warehouse. The counter is a deep, red shade, so deep that Lili is sure she'll blend right into the surface if she leans her forehead onto it and lets her hair dribble onto the table. The stools are made of the same material. Both are varnished.

"You're here," Will says. He pats the seat next to him. "Fuck, it's been ages. Come. Sit."

It's a command, and Lili knows it.

She makes her way over, her face perfectly still. She's still a mess underneath. She sits one stool away from him; she doesn't like how close each of the stools are to each other.

He leaps over the counter and runs his hands over the necks of the bottles. There are so many. She doesn't really give a fuck what's on the shelf as long as it'll give her the energy to talk to this man. "For the lady, some cha—"

"Whiskey," she says.

Will stops on a glassy, piss-yellow bottle that has a faded sticker on it. "You want water with that?"

"No."

"No?"

Lili doesn't say anything. Will sighs loudly, rattles around in the cupboard that's underneath the counter, and slams down a shot glass. The whiskey sloshes over the side and onto the table. It smells really terrible.

She downs it in one swallow. Taps it against the counter. He pours, and she downs another.

"You're supposed to be sipping, slowly, by the way, on a carefully crafted drink while we catch up on the last six years." He leaves the bottle uncapped and on the counter. Lili just pours herself another shot. It takes a volumetric fuckton for her to get anywhere anyway, so she's doing him a favour by getting buzzed early.

He sits on his stool. Shakes his head. "Back then, when you, I, and Ava used to drink, half a shot was all you needed.

"I've changed," she says quickly.

"Damn straight, you have." He brings the glass of whatever the fuck to his lips and laps at it. She's very sure that it's not his first drink, nor will it be his last. As if he'd read her mind, he adds, "Already went down a glass before you got here—comes with the stress of keeping elders like Johannes alive."

Lili doesn't know who Johannes is, but what she does know is that if they'd set up their village a little closer to the Hive, he'd probably be a whole lot healthier.  

Will leans forward in his seat, his eyes darkening over with a varnish of powdered bones and dirt. "Tell me, young lady. What are you doing so far away from home?"

She's already in the middle of her fourth shot, and it's taking all of her energy not to spit it right back into the glass. 'Home' doesn't exist anymore. She thinks that he might say something like, 'home is where the heart is,' or 'home is where you left Ava,' but he keeps his mouth shut instead. The shot glass clacks down onto the counter. She's missing both of those things; how is she supposed to know where her home is?

With her teeth gritted together, she says, "Ava is dead."

Will stills. "Oh."

He moves with a sleazy fluidity towards the bottle of whiskey. Lili grips the neck tightly. No, she hasn't had enough. Yes, she's going to keep drinking. Her eyes don't leave Will's for a second as he slinks back into his seat, defeated.

"Jesus," he says instead. "Must've been quite the shock. And quite the threat. God rest her soul."

She tenses her jaw. For a moment, her eyes squint as if she's preparing herself to cry. Then she tips down her fifth shot. At least that's something she can still rely on.

"Still, it's more of a surprise than anything. I would've expected Ava to survive." It's his turn to grit his teeth. "She's a walking nightmare. You're… nothing much. How'd you get out of it alive?"

"I killed Ava."

Her tone surprises both her and Will. It's cold, sharp, and freakishly tight. She could've cut cold butter with it in a single swing if she tried. She sees Will's fingers close, then open, then close around the glass he's poured for himself.

"...Out of mercy," she finishes. "We didn't… both make it."

Will sucks in a breath through his teeth and eyes the whiskey bottle again. "Oh. Well." He takes a healthy swig of his drink. "How was it?"

Lili is looking at her own reflection in her shot glass when he says this. For the second time that afternoon, she's been caught off guard. And she doesn't want to be off guard because that means being open to Will. She wants to be an impenetrable wall, a house of iron, if she so chooses, instead of bricks and weatherboards. She doesn't want to be a family house, a sanctuary constructed for living—she wants to be an execution chamber. Where inmates enter to die. Where everything enters, and nothing comes out.

"Not very good," she answers.

"How about I tell you about the first time I ever killed something, hm? One of those aliens. An 'off-lander,' if you will. It thought it could get away with maiming two of our elders and—" He chokes. "—Mari. Let me tell you, when you finally get your hands on the thing you despise the most, and you know there's nothing stopping you, it's like popping a zit."

Lili shivers. Disgust snakes through her veins. It's down the hatch for her sixth shot glass. Then another. Then another, until she's sure she's shaking from the alcohol content in her blood and not from the shit he's just thrown at her.

He continues like he doesn't give a damn, "I know what you are, Lili. You're angry. You're violently in love with the idea of being angry, and you're done with only being angry in here." He slaps his chest—holds his hand there, splayed and open. "You yelled at me earlier, spouted all this garbage about how you were going to raid this village and kill us all, because you want your anger to mean something. You want to be bad on your own terms, because you've spent your whole life being good on someone else's. You want to be unexpected."

Lili closes her fingers around the shot glass and throws her ninth shot down.

"You want someone to take notice," he continues, taking a sip of his drink. "And you think, that being tough, being feared and fighting back is going to give you that. It's not. It's all dry satisfaction, Lili. They're bandaids over open wounds that'll scar. It means nothing when you get right down to it. Look at me, Lili. Where'd I end up?"

He's pointing a lazy finger at her now. He's just rambling. He's just rambling. Tenth shot it is, then.

"And you wanna know the reason why you never had the balls to fight back in high school? Why you let us, all of us—shove you into that corner over and over? Because you weren't powerful. You were scared of the consequences of confrontation, and in our circle, that happened to be physical pain and exclusion. But you've got some of that power now. It makes you brave. You have the muscle to back your words, you've got even less to lose, and you're just discovering how great it feels to be unapologetically you."

Lili stops at the eleventh. Will leans in, his breath heavy with the stench of alcohol. She's not sure if that's actually just her own breath. "Something's changed inside of you, Lili. You can take more alcohol, you're a capable magic user, if not far more capable than the rest of us. It's not about whether or not you'll survive the confrontation anymore, it's just a matter of whether or not you're bothered enough to deal with the consequences of being a big, bad, angry bitch."

Lili just swirls the shot glass between her fingers. The word 'bitch’ is an insult, it's meant to be demeaning, but from the way he'd said it, it might as well be the nicest thing he's ever thrown at her. It probably is—Will deals his insults in double entendres and context-reliant statements. Insults, to him, are tacky and unrefined. The amateur's first lamb shank roast to the sous chef's specialty foie gras.

Then she looks down at her glass. Why do people drink alcohol anyway? It kind of tastes like garbage. Whatever. It makes her feel good, unknots the tangles of her worries from her head like a fine-fingered hairstylist. Even if it's only for a brief moment. Even if she has to keep chugging for the rest of the night.

"The gods drifted down and bestowed upon the cornered animal fangs." He snaps his fingers in front of her face before he grasps the neck of her whiskey bottle and puts it under the counter. She tries not to show her disappointment. "Just know that you're not brave. You're just lucky."

Lili stares at Will. He's leaning against the counter with an absolutely despicable grin on his face. "Are you done?" she asks.

He motions to the door. "By all means, if there's anything I've said tonight that offends you, then feel free to leave."

She looks at the shot glass in her hand. Blinks. Realises she's hardly even buzzed, let alone drunk. That was twelve shots. What the fuck is wrong with her?

"Hey. Hey. Look at me when I talk to you." He's snapping his fingers again. She could not give less of a fuck. "You either leave, or you stay, Lili. Very simple. You heard me, right?"

Her hand shakes a little. She hears Will loud and clear—that's the problem. Normally she'd be giddy right now, and his words would be flying over her head like a targeted joke she's not meant to get, but she's… sober.

Something hot and electric snaps at her forehead. It spreads quickly from the site of impact as waves of feverish heat. She flinches back, steadies herself against the counter, and wobbles on her seat.

Will has his finger extended in front of him. Ether wafts off the tip like a recently used cigarette. It's an extraordinary power—she's never seen anything like it, but then again, she's not all that well acquainted with the methods of other casters. Maybe he's just different.

Lili pushes herself from the counter. "I'm leaving," she says. "Thanks."

He lowers his finger and clicks his tongue. "Remember. Just lucky."

Lili is inclined to agree.

—

Avett is just about to start helping council Elder Johannes with his garden when he sees Lilith stroll out of the village tavern. Actually, he smells Lilith first before he sees her. She reeks of cheap whiskey. He's on his way to give her a verbal smacking—who drinks at 11 AM anyway, especially right after waking from a one-day coma?—until he sees just how sober she is.

He must be scrunching up his nose subconsciously because she apologises and confesses immediately. "Sorry, Will made me drink."

"You're ok, right?" Without thinking, he strides up to her and presses a hand to her forehead. Her temperature is average. It takes her a moment to realise what he's doing, and when she does, she wraps her hand around his wrist loosely. He could easily shake her off. She hasn't recovered. Not yet. Avett lets his hand fall to his side.

"How many?" he asks. Now that she's closer, it smells like she's been dunked in a barrel of it.

A pause. "I don't know." Then recognition. Then she schools her features into neutrality, looks at him right in the eyes, and says, "I had around five."

He folds his arms. He'll let it slide. "Elder Johannes wants his garden watered and weeded."

"You know them by name?" Lilith looks at Avett like he's just told her something outrageous.

He shrugs. "You say it like it's outrageous. I'd ask you to help, but you reek of liquor, and I'm not sure if he's fond of…" A slow, methodical rotation of his wrist lets her fill in the blanks.

Lilith nods and looks elsewhere. Her cheeks are flushing, and it's not just from the alcohol.  

Avett goes on, "I was out collecting supplies earlier too." Fishing around in his backpack, he pulls out two glassy jars of marinated pickles. "Johannes will want these. Susan's in the next house over, she's not an elder, but you'll probably want to leave these on her porch as well."

"You want me to deliver them?" she asks.

This time, it's his turn to look at her like she's said something stupid. He bobs the jars in his hand up and down in front of her. "Yeah. It's called a nice gesture. Mari suggested it. Come on."

Lilith looks down at the jars. Appraises them with squinted eyes. "Did you call the Winnow yet?"

"Uh." He blinks.

"Have you thought about it, at least?" Even though she's confronting him, she's staring off to the side. Like he'll burn right through her if she dares to look at him directly.

He splutters. Embarrassment bubbles over in his stomach like a kettle that's been left to boil for too long. "I—ok. I'll get on that, just—get these to Elder Johannes and Susan."

She has her hands behind her back. He's just shoving them into her stomach over and over.

"You've thought about what I said last night as well, right?" she asks.

Truthfully, no. But he's not here to be truthful with Lilith of all people. He dodges the topic at hand. "I thought you were delirious."

She glares at him, like she's got way more on her mind than she's willing to let up. She actually does open her mouth, maybe to reprimand him, maybe to give him exactly what she's thinking about, but then she stops.

There's a bell in the distance. It's coming from the building next to their cabin—a long warehouse, likely meant for communal feasts. Or, judging from the way everyone's heading inside, regular lunches and dinners.

Lilith catches on immediately. "Come on. We're not eating with them."

Avett is about to complain when she latches onto him and drags him by the hand between two nameless buildings. They reach the edge, and he's surprised to find that there's no fence separating the perils of the forest from the safety of the village back here.

He's so shocked by this that he's still processing it even when they're pushing past overgrown ferns and unruly tree branches. When they arrive in the thick of the forest, he feels like he's just forced past and through an oppressive membrane.

Alone and together. He inhales—feels the sharp intake of forest musk and the smell of blanketed soil underneath rotting pine needles. And all of a sudden, as if someone's dunked him into a vat of ice shavings, his mind is stark-white clear.

Avett stumbles into a tree and slumps down against it. For the first time in a while, his tongue is failing him, as no words are coming to mind.

"Sorry." Lilith crosses her arms over her chest. "I kind of hated that place."

He nods, both to himself and to Lilith, as if he's still shaking away the mental cobwebs from his brain. He's holding his head not a second later. Everything is so painfully lucid, now that he's away from all of the people and white noise.  

"Holy shit," he breathes.

Lilith leans over, her hair hanging in strands. "Are you ok?"

"I think I was trying to get into someone's pants earlier." He fishes into his pockets. The neon coloured boxes patter to the grass a second later. Disdain flashes over his partner's face before Avett waves it off. "Trying. I don't know why I'm telling you this. I don't think you'd get it."

Another breath rattles through his chest. He'd never expected himself to be the sort of person to easily tire from social interaction, but here he is—thankful for the cool respite of the forest's shade.

"Something just isn't right with that village; it's not just you. It's draining to be in there." Her voice is distant again—the normalcy of it both comforts and bothers Avett to no end. They're frontliners on the clock again, which, speaking of…

"How's your ether?" he asks. She'd managed to keep the Equaliser at bay before passing out a day ago, but he can tell she's not ready for the field yet at all.

She shrugs. Then she says, "I'm making lunch."

He calls out after her, "What, are we married now?" but she's already separated a cluster of plain mushrooms from their families and collected strands of fuzzy-stemmed grass to stick into her pockets by the time he's thought of something witty to say. Then she's off again.

Of course he's going to follow her.

"This plan isn't going to work," he says. "They said the herbs are good for us, Lilith, it'll keep the dragon's influence at bay—"

"Bullshit." She kneels and palms at the dirt.

"Did you just interrupt me?"

Her fingers are knuckle-deep in the ground when she stops. Then she starts digging again, as if she's regained her motivations. "The cilantro thing. Don't listen to it. It's wrong."

For her, a trained caster, maybe. She's not aware of the extent of her power in comparison to the masses. Even though she's dormant right now, Avett is sure that he can feel the raw insanity of a woman pushed to the edge one too many times; it pulsates against the very air that he breathes.

She says it again. "Please, just have lunch with me."

He just rolls his eyes behind her back. He'll just have his dose at dinner, no problem. "We don't have anything to cook out of either. No plates, no cutlery, certainly no water to boil—" He stops as he sees a bundle of bulbous plants in her hand, their bodies still dripping with soil. "Where and how'd you even manage to get those?"

"They've got pots and pans in the house," she answers simply. A sidestep to his A sidestep to his retort. She's gotten better at this.

"They've got food back in the house too."

She stops wading around the grass to look at him.

Avett stops as well, content with keeping his distance. "You've been so opposed to the idea of eating their lunches—they taste terrible and like soap, I know—I just want to know why."  

Her features are weighed with dregs of malnourishment. He realises that she hasn't eaten—either that or that she's been physically rejecting the food afterwards, considering that no one's informed him of her curious eating habits yet.

"We're not eating their food." Lilith turns back around.

Avett puts up his hands. What else can he do?

9: the Human village

In the sweet embrace of the morning light, Avett's already had plenty of time to come to the terms that he's been forcibly detained in one of their makeshift cabins. Not as their guest, but as their prisoner. The room only has two windows—one above his bed, and the other on the door—and if he lies on the wooden floorboards and presses his head against the wall, his toes can just about touch the other side.

The flap in the door rattles. A tray rattles against the ground as it slides over. Surprisingly, the food actually looks good—though anything's better than the glorified slop Auren serves, especially when it's got meat in it.

He lets his eyes drift off onto the tray of food. It's a bit far from his bed. They've tied not only his wrists together, but his legs too, because they're scared that he'll kick down the door or something. Lord knows he could do it regardless. Not like he's planning to—not yet, anyway. The fact that they haven't attempted to smother him in his sleep is proof that they're willing to listen to him. He's sticking with Lilith until her full recovery. Worst comes to worst, he's not above assaulting his would-be assailant and making off with Lilith.

It's mashed root vegetables and generous slices of roast beef. Steam is wafting off the tray.

"I'm so glad you guys do room service," he says. Loud enough for his waiter or waitress to hear, but not loud to the point of aggression.

At first, there's no response. Then a feather-light voice responds with, "You're welcome, sir."

A kid. A boy, judging from his intonations. But he's not really sure because he's also got the same accent as Lilith; the boy sounds like he's trying to talk around a mouthful of bread.

If he's young, it means that he's impressionable, which means he can bargain with him. He looks to the tray on the ground. "No utensils?" he asks.

"Will said you're going to have to eat out of it like the animal you are, but personally I don't agree."

The words juxtaposed with his childish tone throws Avett for a loop. Gotta start them young, he guesses. In truth, he'd much rather be spoon-fed than to wriggle over and plunge head-first into a pile of mashed potatoes. He's already decided that he's not eating a lick of that food, but it's getting harder with each passing second; his Kattish nose is betraying him big time, and it smells absolutely salivating. He hasn't eaten since yesterday's noon.

He flexes his hands against his restraints. "Mutual exchange. If you untie me and get me a spoon, I'll tell you where babies come from."

"Sorry, mister cat-man." The boy is walking away. "I already know."

Avett curses under his breath. Kids grow up so quickly these days. A certain frontliner could learn a thing or two from him.

His stomach growls, so he rolls over and faces the wall. The things he'll do for Lilith, he swears.

—

Chaos, the slam of wood against wood, and a guttural slurry of swears and commands. Something rattles across the floor and hits the wall. Avett jerks awake just in time for someone to throw him off the bed and hoist him up into a chair.

He squints. Rage boils through his body. "What the fuck do you want?" he spits. "I'm sitting here, I'm being a good boy—I could've fucking kicked down this flimsy piece of shit in seconds but I fucking didn—"

Warm and soft. There's something warm and soft in his mouth, kind of like mashed potatoes but with the additional tang of soap and grass. It is disgusting. Every muscle in his mouth revolts with the urge to spit it out, but the person in front of him—the woman from last night—holds him down by the shoulder and says, "Swallow it. We don't starve our prisoners."

Avett finds himself saying something, but his words are obscured by a mess of uncontrolled fury, bleariness, and drool. So he obliges, for this spoonful, and then the next.

On the third spoonful, he dodges her hand. "Could just untie me."

She stops, puts his spoon back into the tray, and sits down on the ground with her legs crossed. Her eyes remind Avett of the colour of steel, and her skin is an uneven, deep bronze—tanned from living in the forest. "Sweetie, you could've done a lot of things. You said so yourself."

"Don't fucking sweetie me. Just tell me if Lilith is fine."

He watches her jab the spoon into the pile of mashed potatoes and soap. "Is that her name?" she asks. "The name of the Human you so generously exposed to gumboots?"

Avett coughs. "To what? And—you think I used her as bait?"

"Doesn't matter." The woman shoves a spoonful into her mouth. "The other schmucks in the village council forbade me from interacting with you, said they'd send someone else 'cause they can't trust me to use my magic. But fuck it, eh?"

Before Avett can respond, the woman stands and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. White residue sticks to her sleeve. "Let me get your name."

Her words sting with the stench of ether. He finds himself complying with her demands, as the water flows, as the clouds go—it's not just in his nature to spill everything he knows about himself to this stranger, but necessary. "Avett Ironsturm. What are you doing to me?"

"Guess those elders were on to something." She taps her foot against the ground and darts her eyes around the cabin. Then she breathes, steels herself, and says, "That's not your actual family name, but it'll have to do."

Avett presses his lips together. He'll spill if he opens up, but thankfully the woman relents and shrugs. "Guess space pirates get their share of family drama too." The ether subsides, just a smidge, allowing Avett to breathe.

Something isn't sitting right with Avett, but right now, rage is all he can feel. "You think I'm a space pir—"

Another wave of ether washes over him. "We were attacked last month too. Were you aware of this?"

"I did not commit myself to this field for five years, only for some backwater bitch who's never even heard of the IRC Numerical System to tell me I've been collaborating with pirates," he responds through gritted teeth. "No. I wasn't."

Surprise graces her features. She hesitates—then raises an iron-toed boot. "You're a space alien or something, I know that much, but I'm willing to bet that you've got the same set of jewels every man on this damn wasteland of a world's got."

Her steel-cold eyes darken into the shade of water-logged storm clouds.

Avett feels like he's going to throw up from the pressure of her ether alone. So he does. Verbally.

"Actually, we're not space aliens, it's more like we're from an alternate universe where we just evolved in a slightly different way, which makes us pretty much the same genetically. So, yeah, I would have an impressive pair of balls. And my cock's pretty substantial too. My measurements are modest, kind of average, but I've got—"

He throws his head back with enough force to knock his skull against the cabin wall; this instantaneously shuts him up. The chair tips over, and he lands on his side with his face pressed right against the tray of food. He groans, his side and rib cage stinging. At least he's not spewing out inappropriate numbers in front of strangers anymore.

The woman looks worse for wear. She's clutching her head and stumbling backwards, probably because she's just accidentally used up the vast majority of her personal ether by letting it spiral out of control.

A groan tumbles out of his lips. "C-can I see Lilith now?"

Finally, the woman flops back onto the ground. She shoves a healthy spoonful of mashed potatoes into her mouth like she's starving. Then she waves a spoon at Avett. "Cilantro and thyme. It's what keeps us all from fucking going off the edge from gumboots here. You're lucky the council decided to add it into your portions. Coincidentally, it also powers us. Our magic. So eat up."

"So ether," he breathes.

"Is that what you guys call it?" She laughs.

"We've got a whole dictionary of situational jargon for things you aren't even aware of." He raises his arms. "I'm not here to do harm. I swear."

The woman slides a knife out of her pocket and unsheathes it. He's freed within seconds, and it surprises him—though that's probably because he's grown accustomed to Lilith's incompetency. Then he looks at her muscular build, then at her towering physique, and then he's wondering why he'd ever doubted her competence at all. She could easily suplex a lesser dragon and have it for dinner with her family on the same night.

She offers her hand. He refuses it and pushes himself to his feet instead. His wrists feel so nice to rub; Fuck, he's forgotten how it good it feels to be free.

The woman looks off at the door and rubs the back of her head. "I'm Marina. They call me Mari here. Sorry about all of this—I was too quick to judge the situation, and as it turned out, I was wrong about you."

"A lot of people tend to be." He shrugs. "Comes with the profession. And the ears."

Mari doesn't answer, but she does offer him an apologetic smirk as she holds open the door. "After you then, sweetie."

As he walks through the village, he tries his damndest to ignore the armour-piercing stares that the villagers offer him the moment he steps out of the cabin without his restraints on. Despite having Mari's 'protection' at his side, he's still unwelcome—though none of the Humans try to engage him verbally, instead choosing to hastily resume whatever they were doing prior to his appearance.

"I apologise on behalf of their behaviour," Mari says once they're out of earshot. "Most off-landers who visit come with the intention of causing us harm. You're the first we've let out of that cabin unshackled."

Or alive, for that matter. Something uncomfortable settles in his stomach at that intrusive thought before he remembers that he's not here to do harm to them. He shrugs and continues to walk. "I'm used to stares. Another perk that comes with the ears."

Mari arrives at a cabin that's bigger and more intricately built than the others. It has an overhang above the entrance that's supported by two stripped logs. It's clear that someone of authority lives here, maybe multiple, even. As requested by his tour guide, he removes his shoes before entering. She leads him through a spacious kitchen and down a corridor before stopping in front of a door.

Lilith's face is still. And red. The nurse at her side has placed a damp cloth on her forehead, and there are multiple syringes on the table, their chambers filled with a dark, greeny substance. Mari nods to the nurse, and he leaves the room.

"Your partner's a fighter," Mari says. She's next to him, her powerful arms folded. "No one's ever been this exposed to gumboots—and left with just a fever."

"More of a wet rag than a fighter." Avett takes the nearest stool and drags it over to the bed. "But she's got it where it counts."

Silence. Then, testingly and teasingly, she asks, "I see how it is, then."

"Oh?" He turns and props his elbow against the counter. Playful mirth dances across his features. "You think we're in a relationship?"

A low, gut-quaking laugh. "Excuse me. She was all you wanted in the cabin."

Avett glances back at Lilith. In spite of her current condition, this is the most peaceful he's ever seen her. "Relationship is… stretching it. I hardly know her. She's just a colleague."

He looks down at his hands. The word 'colleague' doesn't seem to fit; it's too narrow, too stoic for someone like Lilith. It's a tenuous term that falls apart under scrutiny. She's not 'just a colleague' because that would imply that he puts on airs in her presence. She's the only person he trusts, and he's only just realising that now. It's just a shame she won't return the sentiment. He's only got himself to blame for that.

The soft slap of leather against wooden flooring snaps him back from his stupor. Mari's chucked off her jacket and thrown it against the floor. A stool rattles up to his side, and she sits right next to him, her eyes searching Lilith's face with unhinged curiosity.

Then she says, "Not really seeing a wet rag here, Avett."

"She's more wet behind her ears than anything." Avett doesn't have to force himself to remember all the times she'd thrown herself into the midst of danger at the expense of her wellbeing. If he dares to take his eyes off of Lilith for even a second, she'll probably find some obscure, out-of-the-way method to kill herself under the guise of 'the better good.'

"Wet behind the ears?" She grins. Then she tilts her head. "You look a little light on the years yourself. You sure you're allowed to say that?"

"I've been in the mercenary workforce for three years now, and she's been in for two weeks. I can say whatever the hell I want."

"Three years." Mari briefly counts on her fingers. Her hands are big—they're stubby and coarse from years of woodworking, he presumes, but there's a feather of softness to them. "Jeez—how old are you?"

"Twenty."   

Another laugh. "When I was seventeen, I was a fucking handful for my parents. Not out being… an intergalactic bounty hunter, or whatever it is you do."

Avett catches himself before he makes a quip about his outburst from earlier. Mari's eyes have lost their ferric shine.  

He presses his lips together. "Lilith also lost her parents."

"I know." She turns to look at a dent in the floorboards. "A miracle if she still had them."

The silence that follows after is deafening.

She stands and straightens her back. Her smile returns as quickly as it had disappeared. "I'm surprised that, as a mercenary, you haven't thought about getting back your weapons yet. Am I that distracting?"

He blinks. Then—fuck. He pats down the pockets on his pants; the cloth flattens against his thighs. He turns to face Mari again, but she's already heading towards the door. "Come on," she says. "I'll take you to Will's and show you around the council."

She dips around the corner. Avett flashes one final glance at Lilith as the nurse ushers himself back in with a bucket full of clean water and a freshly folded cloth.

—

When he enters the armoury, his mouth nearly drops at the sheer amount of—shit that's in there. Blasters, auto-crossbows, energy cannons and swords of every make and mark line the warehouse walls. And as he admires the rack of state-of-the-art blasters, he realises, with a fearful lurch of his stomach, just where they're all from. Off-landers used to own these, dead off-landers—and judging from the model, they've been obtained pretty recently.

Mari waves to a figure in the distance. A blond man is hunched over, quite possibly polishing away at weaponry he doesn't even own. "Hey, Will! You got this guy's stuff?"

"This guy?" He turns briefly to look at Avett, looks back, then does a double-take. "You fucking brought him in?"

"Yeah, he's not one of 'em, I checked him myself. He's with the girl."

Will's seat clatters to the floor as he stumbles toward a particularly heavy-laden rack of blasters. It takes a moment for Avett to realise that they'd fully intended to—stars, he doesn't even want to say it. "Christ, Mari, don't fucking bring him in here. Get him out. Out."

"Will, he's not—"

"Fuck, man! Just go! Wait outside, dammit!"

The warehouse door slams shut behind them. Mari shrugs. "He's a bit rough around the edges, but he's a real softie underneath it all." She pauses, bends over slightly so that she's face to face with Avett, and raises a curious eyebrow. "You alright? You're looking kind of white."

He releases a breath. Inhales. Does it again as he's nodding. "Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine." What the fuck is he doing? Dragons try to eat him on a good day, and on a bad day… what happened yesterday probably counted as a bad day, but he's definitely had worse. The day he'd met Lilith was significantly more unbearable than any other day, and that's including the time he had to wade through an endless underground network of broken sewers for a relic. Auren had refused to talk to him, and though Ysh'vanna had been more mature about it, she later suggested for him to relocate to the armoury with a temporary mattress "for the foreseeable future." The smell didn't wash out for weeks.

In desperate need of a distraction, he brings himself to meet Mari's eyes once more. "You're all capable of manipulating ether then?"

She shakes her head. "It's not ether. It's magic. What we can do is different from what you're capable of."

He freezes. Stars save him if he's actually managed to piss off this woman.

"…is what I think the other members of the council would try to say." Mari sheepishly rubs the back of her head and grins downwards. "They think we're different from the pir—uh, off-landers because we can't use those wings or something. That whatever we have is less harmful and more productive, but that's stupid. We're just as capable of destruction."

She rubs her fingers together, and a misty swirl of pure black emanates from her fingertips. Avett doesn't know what it is, but her point is proven regardless. She snaps her fingers, and then the flame is gone.

"Have you ever had someone lose their magic?" Avett asks.

"Eh, not really." She shrugs. "That's not a thing that happens. I'm not as well versed in magic as the other members of the council, but I'd like to think that I speak for all of us when I say that it's a part of me—it's not something you can just lose and still—" She bites her lip. "—still be mentally sound. Why?"

He's about to tell Mari about Lilith when the blond man from early slams the doors open. His arms are full of weaponry. Avett's weaponry. He should not be handling his incendiaries like that.

Avett takes them back the moment Will offers them to him with a swift lunge, narrowly avoiding what could've turned his day from bad to fucking disastrous. Pretty soon, he's got all of his gear strapped in again. Will stands by, his face impassive as he watches him slide his blasters through the holsters.

"This guy is definitely not safe," he whispers. He must think he's out of earshot, but Avett's ears perk straight up anyway. He's about to bristle and cave in when Mari answers for him.

"I tested him myself, I told you. He wasn't lying."

"And we all know how reliable your magic is."

"Yeah, well, it went fine this time." Mari folds her arms, her eyebrows knitted in defiance. "Lilith—the girl, is his partner. They're mercenaries passing through."

Avett's ears lower as Will strides up to him with his shoulders squared and chin tilted upwards. This guy definitely didn't get benched during high school tournaments; on the contrary, he's probably intimidated far more coaches than he's been threatened with the bench. Avett wonders if he could take him, should the need to defend himself ever arise.

"Mercenaries, hm?" Will prods.

"My ID's right here." Avett narrows his eyes. Not like it'll prove anything.

Will waves a hand in dismissal. "We saw when we went through your belongings. Put it right back, though."

He circles Avett like a hawk.

"They're real," Avett grits out. "Lilith has one too."

"Oh, does she?" He stops circling and flashes a glance to someone that's behind Avett.

Then he leans over. He's like a skyscraper, and Avett's just the dwarfing tourist underneath him. Straight back, he tells himself. Fuck him and his Kattish genes for making him like this.

Then he starts talking again. "They're made out of a grainy, eco-friendly plastic—means there's enough grip on the surface for a pencil to draw over it. The back lists your biological details, and the front lists your specialisation and ship. If you hold the card up to the light, a signature appears on the back—three, vertical strips, with a line running horizontally through all of them. Am I wrong?"

Avett stares at the man, his mouth parted and still. Mari steps in between them. "Will, what's gotten into you? I told you—he wasn't lying when he said he didn't know about last month. He's not dangerous."

Will grabs Mari's shoulder and pushes her aside. "Am I wrong?" he simply asks again.

"How the fuck did you know about the signature?" Avett asks. It's not a thing someone who's never seen nor heard of an ID card thinks to test for, especially not a Human. Unless he's seen them before.

Slowly and carefully, Will reaches into his pocket and closes his hand around something. It takes every ounce of control for Avett to not leap back with a hand on his blaster and the other on his incendiaries. Whatever he's holding is an off-colour white and doesn't catch the sunlight at all. He takes it out and lets them all scatter against the dirt.

ID cards. At least fifty of them. That's, at the very least, ten ships.

This time, he actually does stagger backwards, right into the firm grip of another Human. He thinks about fighting back briefly before he remembers that it's Lilith's life on the line. Though maybe if he makes a run for it, they'll think that she's just a hostage he plucked from the Hive and that she's not associated with him at all. Except it's hard to move when he's been pinned to the ground with a blaster pointed into his skull.

"Will, what the fuck?" Mari starts, her hands clenched into fists.

"Perhaps we can try redoing the interrogation, now that we know what they are." Ether is rolling off his body in waves. "I've always hated the term 'space pirates.'"

A grunt leaves Avett's clenched teeth. The kiss of cold steel against his skull is not a feeling he's well acquainted with. "Waste your time," he spits. "Go on."

"Gladly, mercenary." Will's eyes briefly meet with Mari before he turns back to Avett. "Mari deserves a proper demonstration. But first—a fresh subject."

A second body thumps to the ground next to him. The pathetic, light moan informs him that it's Lilith that's just been tossed to the dogs. Her hair pools around her head. She doesn't bother with picking herself up, instead choosing to lie there with her face against the dirt.

Then—ether. It's powerful, overcoming yet controlled, and it's whipping right past Avett's ear like a narrowly avoided bullet.

"Does it feel good to betray your own people?"

She quivers but stays silent.  

He leans down until his mouth is right above her head. It's then that Avett realises that there's not a single person out. The square is completely empty—and they're the centrepiece. Will is making a point out of them. "Do you find the idea of slaughtering an entire Human settlement entertaining?"

Lilith just coughs. Not to send a message; she's genuinely sick, as if she might pass out at any moment. It's buying her time, but Avett just wishes she would hurry up and answer instead of stubbornly fighting back. Will grits his teeth. Mari is adjusting her stance and raising an eyebrow.

"Do the cat ears make it better?" His tone is cold, smooth, and—surprisingly—even. Like he's a fucking snake. Avett thinks about launching himself at him, but the barrel at his head serves as a reminder for exactly what type of predicament he's stuck in. The Human won't miss shooting both him and Lilith at this range. All he can hope for is sit back and wait for their interrogation to go well. And from the looks of it, he's probably about to move on to Avett himself.

"Will—" Mari starts again.

Still no response. Instead of cutting his losses and moving onto Avett, Will leans back and barks, "Lift her head up. By the hair, please."

Avett sees Mari hesitate for a second. She shakes her head. "No. I'm done with all of this pointless violence—you just want to prove a point. Go fuck yourself. Do it yourself."

"Fine." A loose exhale. This is more of an annoyance than anything.

With conviction, he tangles his hands in her hair. The muscles in his arm tighten into cords as he lifts her head up and off the ground. Avett flinches—then he yells, rage boiling in his veins like he actually gives a fuck about what'll happen to her.

But then Will's shoulders go still. And then he drops her right back onto the floor. He backs off, each of his steps taking a century and a half.

"Lili," he breathes. He says her name like she's a fucking unicorn—a manmade cognition of pure fantasy. He could pass his hands through her body if he tries hard enough. A laugh rattles out of him, and he covers his eyes as he looks to the sky.

"Sir?" The Human that has Avett pinned to the ground loosens his grip for a second.

"Release them. They're not dangerous."

The Human rolls away from Avett before he gets the satisfaction of throwing him off. As he crawls up to his knees, he manages to catch precisely how Will regards Lilith. She's a cloudy reflection in his eyes. He's not focusing on the fact that she's there, but on the fact that she's Lilith. Like he's looking at an ant that's managed to escape the hoard.

"Will?" Mari asks. "You know her?"

He stops laughing. "Man. Oh, man." Draws in an over-exaggerated breath. Exhales loosely. "The girl's incapable of evil. Incapable of making her own decisions too—but she'll draw the line at evil."

Lilith digs her nails into the dirt. She clenches her hand and leaves five deep gashes in the ground.  

"Lili, I'm defending your cause." His voice turns soft, as if he's talking to a child and not to someone in her early twenties. "The least you could do is be grateful. Say thank you. I didn't get to relieve my stress today, and I'd like a little compensation."

Even Mari is taken aback by his tone. Avett's just glad he's not getting fed a mouthful of blaster pellets. He slides Lilith's arm over his shoulder. Her body remains hot against his, and her head slumps against his arm.

At first, she lets him pick her up. But then Will tilts his chin upwards with a sly grin plastered onto his face.

"You're like a cancer cell that's dropped off from the main body. You won't last long without your host." He's still using that mockingly soft voice. "Say thank you, Lili Wang-Rosales."

Something snaps in Lilith. Avett feels it in the way her cheeks have tightened into knots. It reminds him of the ship, when she'd blinked and—for the first time in the short days he'd known her—exposed her foundations and steel beams and metal pipes and just screamed at him. She'd told him that everyone she knew was gone. He meets Will's eyes for a split second. Not everyone.

"We've come to fucking kill and plunder and pillage your village," she spits. Quite literally too; she's somehow managed to pool her saliva in her mouth in her delirium. "We've got tens of thousands of mercenaries and space pirates just waiting behind our backs, and they're going to kill all of you—"

Avett slaps a hand over her mouth, turning her empty threats into wordless muffles. He's about to tell her that the amount of brain cells she's lost is clearly in the quintuple digits when he meets Will's eyes again.

They're glittering with a satisfaction Avett can't quite place his finger on.

Then Will turns to Mari and says, with a demeaning smirk, "That last part was a lie. That's how you interrogate."

He leaves and slams the door of the warehouse on his way in.

Mari almost follows him, but she stops mid-step and bends down to sling Lilith's other arm over her shoulder. They stand up at the same time. Lilith's body is awkwardly tilted upwards.

Avett blows his hair out of his eyes. "I can take her. It's fine."

"No, it isn't." Her voice is tight and quick. She corrects her tone not a moment after. "I need you in tip-top shape for tomorrow. So go get some rest. Some real rest."

He doesn't say anything as she effortlessly lifts Lilith from him. The idle bumble of the village is back, and he's thankful it's providing him with an ambient noise that isn't the occasional rustle of the trees in the mid-afternoon breeze. He does, however, start talking when Mari starts heading off without explaining herself.

"What for?" he asks as he paces next to her.

A thoughtful pause. She glances over to the village gates—two wooden stakes that have been stuck into the mud and sharpened at the ends. "There's an abandoned department store off to the east from the village gates. It's huge, there's always another shop to pillage—but it's not exactly safe there, and our powers seem to weaken when we're outside of the village. We send out retrieval teams often when we're short." Her attention turns back to Avett. "And we're kind of short on food right now."

He looks towards the small patches of tilled farmland that every cabin has in their backyard. There isn't a single garden that doesn't have rows upon rows of leafy vegetables, and he's willing to bet that there are plenty more growing underneath the dirt.

"You think Will's gonna like me more if I'm directly helping the village," he finishes.

She only shrugs. "See you in the morning, Avett. Sleep in the room opposite Lilith's tonight."

—

Avett's eyes snap open. An urgent sense of wrongness shoots through his body, and when he stops to catch his breath, he hears the soft, front-heavy footsteps of a certain frontliner and the click of the front door. He swears and reaches for his jacket, but by the time he's dressed and ready, Lilith is already gone. The giant double-doors of the cabin have been left wide open.

He shivers as he steps outside and closes the doors behind him. He doesn't worry about locking it—none of the houses in the village have locks installed anyway.

Lilith is nowhere to be seen. But then he catches it on the wind; the slightest hint of their ship's cheap and shitty three-in-one shampoo. He heads towards the forest. He can't believe that he's the modern descendant of a proud, 200,000-year-old race and that he's using their evolved traits for something as menial as this instead of—fuck he doesn't know. Hunting, he guesses. He could've been hunting rabbits right now.

The forest is incredibly dense. Branches stand from their trees to prod him in the sides, and sometimes the grass gets so tall that he has to whip out his utility knife and scythe it down. How the fuck had Lilith managed past all of this with her painfully average Human eyesight, he has no idea. He just knows he has to find her before she does anything stupid in that fever-induced psychosis of hers.

He pushes past another clump of foliage, fear gripping his stomach as he accesses his surroundings for an idiot in a white dressing gown. Her scent is strong now, unbearably so, but he still can't find her.

"Lilith," he hisses. Then he realises she probably can't hear her, so he raises his voice just a smidge. "Lilith, you've got a fucking pair on you, I swear."

Lilith doesn't respond, even though he knows for a fact that she's within earshot. Avett holds back on pounding the nearest tree trunk with his fist and continues his search instead. Then he thinks about turning back briefly because his jacket's proven to be absolutely useless against the midnight chill.

He winds up a kick, faces the tree—then whirls and sends his foot into a bush instead. It rustles softly. He's going to kill Lilith if she doesn't do it herself.

But then he sees her. She's sitting down with her back leaning against the tree and her face streaked with tears. Her cheeks are still very red.

He freezes, then takes off his jacket. "You've still got a high temperature, Lilith, stars."

Avett moves to drape his jacket over her shoulders, but she jerks away at the last second. "You need that," she says, with difficulty, "more than me."

"I'm not the one here whose organs are getting cooked from the inside." He lunges to drape it over her again, but she dodges—and promptly falls onto her side. Avett does what he's come here for and props her back up onto the tree.

"You'll be cold," she says.

He flicks at an invisible fleck of dirt on his shoulder. Today's interrogation is still a pain in his ass, and he's willing to bet it's been one for Lilith as well. The way she'd snapped sticks with him more than the actual garbage she'd spat at Will in the heat of the moment. He's still not quite sure what she was thinking at the time. No one gets accused of crimes they didn't commit and then doubles down on them without a motive.

Avett settles in next to her. "The reason why I haven't just picked you up and taken you back to the village is because you're crying." He slides a packet of tissues from his pocket. "So tell me what's wrong."

"I don't feel so good." She sniffles.

"Duh. You're sick, and you're cold."

"The cabin smells, like, really strong wood. I wanted to get out, that's all."

He ignores the fact that it doesn't actually smell that bad. "So you came out here?" He motions to the forest. "With the Equaliser at large?"

She coughs. She's so pathetically out of it right now that she doesn't even bother refuting what he's insinuated. "Sometimes, when I get a fever, I start crying."

"...Really." He feels his stomach lurch in what he thinks is disappointment.

Lilith shrugs. Then she lets out an angry moan. "The stuff they inject me with every morning, I don't know what it is… but it's making everything worse. Could you tell them to stop?"

"It's cilantro and thyme. It's meant to stave off the dragon's aura and amplify your magic or something."

"It's garbage. I doooon't want it."

"It's good for you."

"No, it isn't."

Enough is enough. She's clearly too sick to carry out a conversation, let alone to be outside in the chill of a midnight breeze. He scoops her up in a carry and stands up. "We're going back to the cabin, and I'm fucking making sure you stay in bed this time. There's a dragon in the woods, Lilith. Be scared or something."

She breathes. It leaves a hot brand on his neck that quickly fades in the cold. Then, with a quiet stillness, she says, "That's not even remotely close."

He shoves past a particularly annoying branch. "What isn't?"

"The dragon."

Another delirious ramble. He finds himself smiling and exhaling. "How so, princess?"

"Could you look at me when I say this, Avett?"

"Is this another one of your young adult novel things—"

Lilith coughs again. "So you know I'm not lying."

He stops in his tracks. "Fine. I'm looking."

Her eyes—usually an iridescent hazel—are now pure obsidian in the darkness.

Then with her words carrying the pin-prick precisity of a woodpecker, she says, "It's the other way around. The dragon protects them."

Lilith's words ring like toll bells in his head. He blinks—he's about to ask why, but she's out cold in his arms.

Leaving him alone with her warning.