22.5

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

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

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

“What is—what is it?” he pants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She doesn’t say anything.

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

The girl shakes her head.

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

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

22: the encounter

Lili can't possibly fight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the fuck are you saying?”

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

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

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

“I beg your pardon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

“So your ether protected your eyes?”

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

“Please don’t be so dramatic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His ‘superior’ is deathly unfit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avett hits another shield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What an idiot.

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kashira raises a single, red arm to the ceiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her eyes narrow, and she accepts it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Lili slumps to the ground.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auren falls silent for a bit.

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

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

“Avett.”

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

Another pause. “Are these your true thoughts?”

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looks to Auren with uncertainty.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He does. He wishes he hadn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So you killed her—"

"She was going to kill you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."