21: the twins

Auren leads the two frontliners between two towering piles of shipping containers. Aside from the occasional flicker of an overhead lamp welded into the wall, there's no light to guide them through the makeshift alleyway. It's only when Lili stumbles over a stray obstacle for the second time does Avett turn on a torch from his GlassLink and point it at the ground. There's a garbage can that's rolling slowly across the floor. Dust floats into the air and resettles on the walls.

He grins and points at her eyes. "Hu—man."

"Avett," Auren warns.

Lili looks on ahead. The door Auren had told them about is a plain grey, made out of plastic and—unlike the rest of its surroundings—is not coated in dust. Someone's been using this door.

Avett is in front of it in seconds. Auren observes it from a distance for a moment before asking, "What sort of door is it?"

“It’s… certainly not for construction purposes." Avett touches his hand to the surface. "It's old. You can tell from the scratches that people transport things—probably very large things—down here all the time. And they're not very good at it. But that's just a guess."

Lili stills her body. This is knowledge that anyone would know on their first glance.

Avett bristles. "What? Don’t look at me like that, guys. I’m not here often enough to say what it's for.”

Auren strides up to the door and rattles the handle. It doesn't budge. He stands in front of it with his eyes narrowed.

Avett pushes him aside. "Step back. Me and princess are gonna shoulder bash this wide open."

Lili is about to object—she can't fathom how incredibly shady that would look to onlookers—when Auren does it for her with a shake of his head. He floats a finger across the handle instead, and his features twitch ever so slightly.

“It is cursed shut."

Avett studies the handle. "Palerian?"

"Not quite Palerian, thankfully.”

She glances at Auren. “Does it make a difference?”

“Yes,” he answers. “There is something within the average Palerian’s body that causes the ether they expel to be… significantly heightened. They are able to weaponise their signatures, turn their little jinxes into mind and body altering maledictions. Fortunately, no one will be suffering from intestine bunions or inverted lungs today.”

Lili flinches back. She tries her hardest not to recall her encounter with the Palerian enforcer from last night, how he had given her something akin to brain worms in that cockpit. A mere scrap of metal could do so much worse to her.

Auren runs his fingers over the handle again. “I will require my curse dispeller's kit from my ship. I would not attempt to break any curses without the help of my external tools, Eldrakian or not."

He fixes Lili with a stern glare before stepping away from the door. She shakes her head. Now that she knows exactly of the harm that Auren is capable of inflicting, she would never.

Satisfied, he saunters down the alleyway. Avett's trying and failing to look stoic; there's a shudder in his shoulders when he turns back to Lili.

"My gear's back at the Winnow," he says. "Might as well head back; don't know what kind of trap'll spring on us the moment we get down there…"  

Avett is about to follow suit when he turns around and gestures to Lili.

“Coming?” he asks.

“My gear’s all here,” Lili answers, beckoning to the wings on her back. “Couldn't I just stay?"

Something floats across Avett’s features, and Lili isn’t sure whether to call it worry or gratification. Whatever it is, it’s gone the moment he starts to talk again. “Alright. I’ll let Auren know. Don’t touch that handle, Lilith.”

“My hands are tied.”

He snorts. “I wish.”

He’s off before Lili can ask what he means by that.

She slumps to the floor and rests against the door, basking in the rare minutes of solitude. Working aboard has stripped her introverted self of alone time. She can't even get a good night's sleep without someone barging into the armory in the morning, that someone being either Ysh'vanna or (on the rare occasion) Avett on their way to search for a random battery before dawn has even cracked across the sky. Years of living as a hermit has spoiled her. She’s just glad that Auren’s a little more aware of those boundaries.

She chews on the insides of her cheeks. Her face still feels cold.

She searches the door's handle instead, desperate to distract herself from the fear that had come with angering Auren. There's just the faintest of ether signatures on the handle, one that tastes of apple and hot smoked woodchips; it’s not unlike Alexei’s, she thinks. Absentmindedly, she feathers her hand over the handle, as Auren had done.

If this were a Palerian curse, she would be withering away where she stands. All she's getting instead is a brief tingle like she's sat on her hand for too long, and now it's gone numb.

And then she hears it.

A cry, a muffle, a sob from a creature that's learned life through pain. It shrieks through the air, and Lili has to clap her hands over her ears and sink to the ground. None of this works. It lacerates through her head like a migraine, kicks at the insides of her skull like a wailing baby.

She finds herself panting hard once the sound goes away. She looks around for the source. Peeks around the corner of the building for any sight of the creature.

Off-landers and crowded markets greet her back. Life in New Therius is continuing on as usual, and for a moment Lili wonders if this is another 'quirk' of the sanctuary. If it's anything like the hearse or the incinerator, it won't be good for Humans in their dollar-store Kattish disguises.

She squints at several passing Kattish men. They're swaggering around just fine; they’re not clutching at their ears or anything. They've even got the constitution to stride right up to her and ask her what her problem is. Lili has to make up some hand-wavey excuse about how she'd mistaken one of them for a friend.

Her heart's still beating fast from the encounter once they've left her alone. She whips her head towards the door and plants herself firmly in front of it again.

"Never again," she breathes. "Fuck that."

Several heartbeats pass. In the bright gap between the storefronts, Lili watches the lengths of legs pass like dark twigs in a musky forest. Her thoughts fly freely through her head: Avett would have done better, Avett would have struck up a casual conversation and left amicably. Avett’s too stubborn headed, too ethereally unattuned to even hear the shriek in the first place.

She catches herself mid-thought. The shriek wasn’t sound—it was ether.  

Lili hesitates to touch the door again. Her cheek is stinging like crazy, and she’s trying hard not to relive the visceral headache of the initial screech. It’s just another relic, she tells herself. This is how relics are supposed to react to trained casters.

She presses her head into the door. They had to hide such an entity, such power behind lock and steel. What does Alexei have in store for the relic anyway? What if he’s not the good samaritan that he’s painted himself out to be, what if the relic’s actually some kind of—Lili struggles to even conceptualise the thought—super weapon that’ll spell the end of the 4th Consortium?

She’s being stupid, of course. This is a door, and this is an artifact.

Until the sound comes back.

It’s louder this time, a conglomerate of sharp prods. This isn’t an artifact’s work, she realises. It’s too trained, too precise and targeted to be the remnants of a dragon’s aura. The scream is too mortal to be immortal.

Lili freezes in place as she regards the door in all of it’s forbidden glory.

Then, with renewed strength, she starts to ram her shoulder against it. She can feel her body bruising with each push, but she soldiers on anyway. She is blood and bone, instinct and muscle. The scream had come from someone, and she’s not about to let that someone down.

On the fourth push, she feels the surface give way. The door swings open, and she hangs for a second in the air before she falls onto the floor.

For a moment, she doesn't move. Her ether eddies inside of her in agitation; her stomach feels hot like she's inhaled smoke and gulped down a litre of acid.

Lili grunts and picks herself up. Auren is going to kill her.

—

The ramp turns into stairs about two metres down. The climb down is still super steep, and Lili’s worried about slipping on a step. The stair hall is so narrow that if she did fall, she’d bounce between the walls on her way down like a rubber ball.

Her legs begin to shudder. She takes extra care from here on out, even hobbling down sideways during the last few steps.

With her cheeks stained red and her lungs heaving for air from exertion, she pushes open another door, unsure of what to expect. She hovers several facets of a shield at her fingertips and peeks around.

It's bigger on the inside, to say the least.

Once Lili's sure that she's alone, she shuts the door behind her and makes her way through the bunker. There are aisles upon aisles of these glassy vats, and though they come in various shapes and sizes they all have one thing in common; they contain a blue, luminescent liquid, and there's usually a dark organic specimen floating in them. Lili observes the label of one such specimen: "scaled eyes." Another vat with something that looks like suspended black mist reads "B6 blood." She pulls away from that particular vat quickly.

The aisles seem to form a maze. She wanders through the haze of blue and black one step at a time. Ceiling-tall glass containers give way to jars of scales and nails. Concrete flooring flows into tarp and patterned linoleum. The sodium lamps flicker to life overhead as she meanders through the facility; when she stops to check the integrity of her shield, she notices that her hands glow orange from the intensity of the light like she's radioactive.

She’s probably made a huge mistake, but her feet are very clearly taking her somewhere; she's taking turns that she shouldn't be aware of, and moving through the gaps in the aisles like she's lived here her whole life. Dark, snaking tubes run alongside the vats and dive into the ground—Lili guesses that they all form some sort of underground piping system. Occasionally, she finds a tube flowing with that same blue liquid.

Lili ignores all of this. She's getting closer now, and nothing's even stopped her yet. No, that's not quite right; she should've stayed stuck at the first door, and yet she'd smashed through their curses like wet paper. If she had tried the handle, it would've swung open for her. That's how convenient this all feels. Lili doesn't like it.

Like an inebriated lost soul on their way back from the pub, she powers on. The artifact's aura feels thick enough here to catch her if she ever decides to trip forward. Her head throbs, her tongue aches with the mere taste of someone else's ether, but she has to go on. If not for her team's sake, then for the sake of whoever or whatever this artifact truly is.

She stops in an open area, breathless. At some point the tubes resurface from the ground, and they bunch up at a cul-de-sac before twisting towards a common goal. Lili can't think. She can't fathom what this is all supposed to mean.

At the end of her journey lies a vat bigger than any other she'd already seen. It reaches to the ceiling, and it glows too, though not in that shade of neon-poison blue she'd seen countless of earlier. The vat glows a bright blood-red; it's almost too harsh for Lili to look at. The tubes plug into this vat, and they're very clearly pumping blue into the container but instead of changing the liquid to a calm purple or serene violet, everything stays red. There's a single control panel at the base of the vat, and it beeps to the rhythm of a slow heartbeat.

Lili isn't looking at all of that. Because suspended in the centre of this brilliant red display, there is a girl.

—

Avett has probably made a huge mistake.

He follows Auren back into the crowd of off-landers. His 'superior' is a dark storm cloud, and Avett's sure that his drizzle has the potential to turn disastrous in several heartbeats.

"What do you mean," Auren had initially said when Avett broke the news to him, "you allowed her to stay behind?"

They'd just arrived at the Winnow and were preparing to leave. Ysh'vanna was lounging in her seat and cradling a bag of chips.

Avett had snorted. "Lilith couldn't find her way out of a pickle jar even if you tipped it over and shook her out. She's not gonna do your job for you—relax."

It’s been more than ten minutes, and the older Gallian is still silently seething in front of him. It seriously can’t be that big of a deal—Lilith is the Winnow’s certified incompetent, the greenhorn junior to their aged and wisened seniority. She can’t possibly do on her own what Auren can’t do in a few minutes.

His suspicions are quickly proven wrong when they arrive at the door. For one, it’s as wide open as a man at the pub on the night of his first divorce. For another, it reeks of ether. Avett can’t tell who’s ether it is—he’s not trained enough to distinguish between scents and he doesn’t plan on training—but one look at Auren’s clenched fist says it all.

Avett laughs awkwardly. "It—it sure smells like ether here. Could be anyone's…"

Auren says nothing. He starts down the ramp instead, allowing his back to do his scolding.

"She can look after herself." Avett grumbles. His voice reverbs off the narrow walls and throws itself down the steep ramps. "She's a big girl. She's twenty-four."

"Twenty-three."

He rolls his shoulders. "Big deal, I was a year off—"

"So you deem her not competent enough to break a curse, yet competent enough to hold her own in battle."

“I trusted her not to—”

Auren turns and hushes him. He obliges, but not without sending a scowl his way.

Avett already has a hand at his side when they make it to the bottom of the stairs. There's something in the air that makes the fur on his tail stand on edge, and he doesn't like it. Auren stops before he opens the last door; Avett wonders if he's actually scared for once.

"I've got your back," Avett whispers, just in case. “Lead the way.”

He yanks the hair tie from his hair free, allowing his locks to float gently over his shoulders. "I do not need it."

Asshole, Avett thinks. He wonders if all Eldrakians are as cocky as him, or if he gained this part of himself by migrating to Therius. Avett hopes it's the latter, because he can't imagine an entire realm, let alone an entire race, of Auren Draksparrows. He'd sooner swallow a sword.

The door opens, and Avett is greeted by a deluge of blue light. It takes a while for his Kattish eyes to adjust, and they need to adjust again once the sodium lamps start flickering on. He's helpless in this moment; he hears movement before he actually gets to see it, and that terrifies him. Avett hears the hum of the lamps above, the shuffle of cloth against bony limbs, the clack of heel against floor.

He freezes as he hears something else. Someone else. He whirls to face the sound, only to be met with complete darkness again; they’ve already moved, and unless Auren is on a shelf approximately nine metres behind him, they might just be a little fucked.

A bright shield wavers into existence in front of him. All Avett gets to see is the glint of a silver blade in the swallowing black, and the single, golden, trained eye of a killer.

—

Lili has clearly not thought this through.

Drenched and covered in bruises, she struggles to even hold the girl upright. She’d thrown her shoulder at the glass the moment she saw what was in it, and the neon-bright liquid had splashed all over her in the process. This girl is a Gallian, she knows that much. But that doesn’t explain the fragments of blackened scales that are scattered up her arms, and although they lie flat against her skin, they don’t look like tattoos.

What makes it worse is that she knows that this girl is the very artifact Alexei is looking for. She knows this because the voices have stopped calling out to her—they’re placated because she’s done her job.

Lili squints into the darkness. Aisle after aisle of lolly blue vats greet her, their glassy containers turning her sense of direction into slow mush. She struggles past a line of dragon eyes before realising that she has no idea where she should go from here.

Under the orange glow of the motion sensor lights, she shakes the girl gently. “Come on,” she finds herself saying. “Wake up. Tell me where I need to go.”

She doesn’t stir. Lili doesn’t even know if she’s dead or alive, but she’d prefer the latter. She presses a finger into her reddish, partially scaled cheeks, pushes a wet strand of silver hair from her eyes, but the girl doesn’t even move. It’s only after a few seconds of prodding and shaking does Lili get the bright idea of checking for a pulse.

Relief floods her veins when she hears the first beat. It’s painfully slow—there are at least ten seconds between each pump, and Lili isn’t sure if that’s normal for a New Order Gallian—but it’s there, and that means she’s alive.

The girl's deep, red skin glows like fire underneath the light.

Lili grits her teeth and slings the girl's arm over her shoulders. Her surroundings seem to repeat themselves as she tries to find her way through the bunker—she's seen this heart sample at least four times by now, she swears.

She’s stuck between an open bucket that's filled to the brim with some kind of blue syrup and an empty line of shelf when something flashes in the corner of her eye. It’s so fast that by the time she’s managed to pivot on a foot, the thing is already long gone.

Panic seizes up her spine. The girl is heavy, far too heavy for Lili to make a run for it now. There's another rattle behind her—she swivels around again. A vat wobbles on its circumference.

She curses under her breath. Then she says into the open, "Alright, fine. You've got me red handed."

If her assailant had heard her, they make no indication of it. Like a cat tailing its prey, they continue to circle around Lili instead. She gulps.

Her assailant speaks. "You thought you could fool me, didn't you?"

"No, really, I'm giving up." Lili thinks about putting the girl on the floor to accentuate her point, but that would be cruel. They've already practically killed her.

"You vixen," she spits. "You wandered through our laboratory so efficiently that I thought to assume that you were my sister."

"And what are you?" Lili asks, her tone desperate.

Her assailant steps into the light, and it takes every ounce of Lili's willpower to stifle her gasp. If she had found Alexei’s eyes to be out of the ordinary, then this girl’s eyes would be considered otherworldly. Her irises glow an aquamarine blue and don’t seem to be focused on anything in particular—closer scrutiny from Lili indicates that she has no pupils.

“Lethe Mnemosyne,” she breathes, “overseer of New Therius and its half-dragon defender. It would be in your best interests to put the artifact back where you found her.”

—

Avett's blaster shots go unanswered in the dark. Their attacker is fast—immortally so. He catches a rattle from somewhere behind him and he whips around to shoot at it. A vat bursts into shards instead. Auren spits out a long string of Eldrakian swear words under his breath, and another shield wobbles into existence behind him.

"Piece of shit," Avett hisses. “You either fight in the light fair and square or you don’t fight at all.”

He scans the room again, allowing his eyes to fully adjust to the darkness. Silver flashes in the distance.

"In front, Auren," he spits.

The shield takes on a spiked appearance, and Avett feels a surge of power collide with the ether in front of him. He blinks rapidly, desperate to fight off the resulting disorientation.

A grunt—feminine, he notes—and then the unmistakable sound of several retreating steps. Avett takes a good, long look at what they've managed to trip up.

He's surprised to find that his foe is not only a young girl no older than seventeen, but a Human.

Auren looks like he's about to start firing into the distance; there's no way Avett's letting that slide, not on his good conscience.

He raises a palm in the air. "Stop. It's a kid."

"He was quite dangerous for just a child," Auren says.

"She."

The girl scowls, but she doesn't make any move to attack again. "You two don't look any different from the mercenaries that frequent New Therius."

"Expecting someone else?" Avett asks. His blaster remains by his side.

She jerks her blade, catching a sliver of orange light against the tip before soundlessly sliding it into her sheathe. Passive, yet poised to kill. Not just a kid, Avett reminds himself, but it’s hard to see beyond the doe-like shape of her eyes and the slightness of her frame.

"Yeah, like that fox-faced asshole from the Hive that we had a run in with a few months back." The girl rolls her shoulders, tosses a stray strand of red hair behind her. “I don’t have to ask to know he sent you. All I want to know is how much this all matters to you.”

“Romanov provided us with a proposition,” Auren begins.

Avett cuts him off. “We were blackmailed. We’re just mercenaries.”

She groans and rubs her hand on her forehead. “And… how much do you know?”

“There’s an artifact down here, and he wants it.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Auren glances over at Avett like he’s just cut the wrong wire on a hydrogen bomb. He leans into his ear. “What are you doing?” he hisses.

“Saving our careers, clearly.” Avett says this loud enough to raise the eyebrows on the girl. “We got caught in some legal trouble involving tax fraud and identification, so naturally Alexei extorted us to do his bidding.”

“That’s annoying.”

“You don’t say.”

She turns around and motions towards the two. “I might not know my way around Therian law, but I could probably do something about your case…” She sighs. “Being the overseer and all.”

Avett stiffens; Auren physically recoils. They follow her back through the way they came anyway.

The girl continues. “They’ll listen to me—no idea why though. Granting a sixteen year old administrative power solely based on the fact that they happened to be at the right place at the right time is a bit stupid. But I digress.”

“You will not stop us?” Auren asks.

“Nope.” She pops the ‘p’ perfectly. “The best defense is no offense at all. What’s happening down here is far bigger than anything you could’ve imagined. Best to keep out of it. I’m Claire, by the way.”

“Claire. I’m Avett. The stick in the mud’s name is Auren.”

Avett shoots a totally genuine, totally apologetic look backwards. His colleague narrows his eyes and glances around the laboratory, taking in his surroundings with apprehension. Then he raises his chin at Claire.

“We arrived here with another Human—of similar stature and build to our irritative frontliner here. Have you by any chance seen her?”

“Haven’t seen anyone else in here, nope.” She steps between two shelves with ease. It’s easy for Avett to do the same, but not so much for Auren. They stop for a bit while the taller Gallian struggles to inch his way through the gap.

“She broke the curse on the door,” Avett elaborates.

Claire raises her eyebrows again. “My sister’s finest work. Hm. She’s been working on her seals ever since that larper from the Hive broke in all those months ago.”

“How did he get into New Therius without being caught?” he asks.

“He didn’t.” She gestures to the lab around her. “This all used to be in the city. We moved our base of operations to New Therius both for ease of access and so Alexei wouldn’t be able to enter without…” She shrugs. “You’ve seen how he looks. He’s lucky to even pass for an extremely bulky Gallian.”

Claire has a point. Auren can hardly push himself through the gap in the shelf, but Alexei wouldn’t even make it halfway before getting himself stuck for good.

And another thing; Avett looks back at Claire. “What’s a larper?”

“Forget I said anything. If anyone knows who comes and goes through this lab, it’s probably my sister.”

Auren is panting hard once he’s finally squeezed himself through. Avett’s never seen the man this pale before—it’s a far cry from the immaculate stillness he’s been acquainted with.

“Ethereal sensory,” he gulps out. “I was not aware that Humans could be capable of such a feat.”

She laughs. “As expected of a Gallian. How did you know?”

His nose scrunches up. “Your sister has laced the very walls of this laboratory with her ether. It is a crude method, but her range of power is impressive. I would imagine that her vision would be significantly impaired as a result.”

“Don’t need to see if you’re constantly tuned in with your surroundings,” she answers. “I can see why Romanov chose your team. You’re pretty good.”

Avett doesn’t need to look back at Auren to know that he’s smirking up a storm at him. “You’re milking compliments from a kid, dude,” he says, but he’s scowling at the ground anyway; a lost battle is what it is, no matter how stupid the wagers are.

They’ve walked a fair bit when a ringtone—the GlassLink default ring, Avett notices—starts playing out of Claire’s pocket. She groans before looking at the screen.

“Your sister?” he asks.

She motions at the two men to stop while she takes her call. “Cass, you can tell I’m kind of busy at the mom—”

The voice on the other side sounds like she’s already lost her temper and her wits. “Must I remind you to refer to me as Lethe in the laboratory? Were you aware of the intruder in our bunker?”

Claire looks to Avett and Auren. “...You mean the intruders, plural, right?”

Silence. Then, “I assume you mean the two readings by your side.”

“I’m just escorting them out.”

“Stars, look—I am rather busy, if you could perhaps lend a hand once you’ve finished with your escorting—”

Avett’s stomach drops to his toes. He composes himself as Claire whirls around with a hand on her hip, her eyebrows crossed and her features aggressive.

She says, “Get to the point.”

“Forget that—look up, look up!”

Streaks of hot blue light filter in from the next line of shelves over. Something flies above them and lands in a heap on the floor.

Avett can't believe his fucking eyes.

Lilith groans. It looks like she's got a body slung across her shoulder like a sack, and the body in question is another seventeen year old girl of New Order Gallian heritage. His partner is picking herself up, but she's not picking herself fast enough to avoid her attacker vaulting across the shelf to deliver a head-cracking blow—

Auren aims upwards, and his ward lands true. Light pours down from the ceiling, and when Avett squints to look up he sees a girl who looks exactly like Claire. Her irises are a flat blue. Her sister.

The girl whips back her hand, and the light cuts itself off. She lands neatly next to Claire, whose expression is the clear picture of blank realisation.

"That's the artifact," she says.

"Indeed." The new girl dusts off her cloak. "My sister, you've been had."

No, no, no—they're so close, so close to getting out of here alive and unscathed and legalised and Lilith's gone and ruined all of it in one fucking heartbeat. No, not yet. Avett can still save this.

He takes a step towards Lilith. "Lilith. We're going to be alright, these overseers are gonna help sort our shit out, it's going to be ok."

Her fingers dig into the girl's flesh. She's wobbling on her legs and she's shuddering like a twig in the wind, but her features are fierce and scalding. Avett bites into the sides of his lower lip.

"Lilith," he says again. This is like calming a tamed dog gone rabid. He looks to the girl in her arms, and then back at Lili’s sweat-soaked skin. Where’s the artifact? Who’s the girl? He doesn’t care. "Drop the artifact."

"Do as Avett insists, Lili," Auren adds.

Claire holds her breath. So does Avett.

But his partner gnashes her teeth together instead, her shoulders quivering in pure, hot white rage. "You were going to kill her in that vat by keeping her down here—she’s even the same age as you! What the fuck is wrong with you two?"

Avett can feel his hairs thinning already. "Lilit—"  

"I'll never, ever hand her back." She snarls. "Over my dead fucking body."

Fuck.

20: the hearse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avett tilts his chin up and smirks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is that?" she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aw, you're too kind."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then what are they?”

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

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

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

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

It is.

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

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

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

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

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

"So everything you said earlier—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lili clenches her fist.

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

"Fuck you," Avett snarls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lili finds herself swallowing down a bubble of air.

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

“Avett.”

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

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

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

Like socking her in the face.

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

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

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

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

What was she thinking?

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

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

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

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

She gulps—holy shit.

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

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

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

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

19: the long talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hm?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck you.”

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

“Like hell it is. Fuck you.”

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

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

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

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

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

Lili echoes him. “You set us up."

Alexei nods. "Indeed I did."

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

"Because I was interested in you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder?”

“This is my harder.”

“Bet you're terrible in bed.”

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

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

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

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

In a rare moment of genuinity, Auren chuckles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not legal,” says Avett.

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

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

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

“I’m a busy man."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She feels herself shrink. “...What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Unavoidable?” she parrots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ysh'vanna's stare remains hard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A little," she mumbles.

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

“Um.” She motions to her ears.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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