Crestana once again found Alis’s demeanour impenetrable, despite the complete flip it had taken towards oncoming traffic. Jittery, erratic, and utterly blindsided to any sentence that failed to start with the word ‘Vesmos’.

  Moira, much to her growing confusion, had been shelved in his list of priorities once again, except where before she used to be something of a burden, now it was as though she didn’t exist.

  That was what went to Crestana’s head.

  “Let me ask you something.”

  The quiet courage behind the words still wasn’t worthy of his attention. Alis continued to pace, his erratic behaviour mirrored by the wall of shifting books behind him.

  “Alis.”

  “Hm?”

  He still seemed to remember his own name: a promising start. Moira and her meek attempts at being noticed didn’t share the same fortune. Relegated to a corner of their hideout amongst the bookshelves, she at least still existed in Crestana’s vision.

  “Why did you stay in Excala?”

  He frowned at the question, shrugging his shoulders. “Why it’s just…I’m yet to find a way to—”

  “All you think about is Vesmos. If you really hated the empire so badly, you’d be fighting them in any way you could.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to, I just know that what I’m doing isn’t—”

  “But you don’t hate them, do you? You don’t feel that strongly about anything.”

  Finally, a different expression flashed across his face. But, of course, nothing of anger or of frustration, just confusion. Plain confusion, as though Crestana were speaking another language.

  “That’s why Mrs. Hardridge still doesn’t completely trust you. And if I must be honest, as sincere of a person as you are, it wouldn’t surprise me if you betray us one day.”

  Moira’s attention now danced between them both. Crestana couldn’t be sure if the little girl could understand the words, let alone the meaning behind them, but that wasn’t important. As long as the girl was terrified of Spirits, Moira’s safety was in Alis’s hands. All Crestana could do was make those hands a safer refuge.

  And not just for Moira, either.

  Finally, putting words to her concerns and seeing their effect with her own eyes was reassuring progress.

  “I wouldn’t betray you,” he said, the words preceding any evidence to back them up. “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you’re an attack dog. You have training, sure, but you need someone else to point you in the right direction. Your fixation right now is Vesmos and…I don’t know how that came about, but it is.”

  That was all it was, a fixation. A family lost to the regime, and the most he could do for them was address their existence with the word ‘apparently’. A country swallowed by foreign nobles and yet his connection to it remained thread bare.

  “You have training, you have these weapons, and all Vesmos is to you is an excuse to use them. Because without that, what are you?”

  He had training, instincts, experience, everything she didn’t have.

  “I can’t keep putting up with people telling me I can’t even help a child in front of me when you don’t even care that you can.”

  Jealousy was all it boiled down to. Jealousy and frustration after being told she could do nothing about the world she’d been pushed into with the power forced upon her.

  “Tell me that trying to help people is stupid again. I’d rather die by that than live by nothing at all.”

  There. That was everything.

  She wanted to run away, plug her ears and save herself the reprimand, but of course, she’d picked a time where that wasn’t at all possible.

  Still, that frozen look of confusion remained on his face, but the lines on his forehead were undeniably morphing into something else.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered.

  “It’s…no it’s not fine, really. I might’ve overstepped, but…that’s how I feel. I think you’re better than that.”

  She took a step closer, fingers fidgeting with themselves, as all she could muster the courage to look at were his feet, devoid of emotion by nature. “I think you want to do better than that.”

  He seemed to relax, judging by his feet. Tired and abused from non-stop pacing, they were finally ready to rest.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Crestana nodded in Moira’s direction.

  “She’s as good a place as any. Can’t liberate an empire if you can’t help one girl.”

  “We’ve done as much as we can,” he said. “The case is best left with Special Operations.”

  Moira tugged on his sleeve, rounded eyes still begging for his help.

  “She’s your client,” Crestana said, a hint of jealousy escaping with the words. “Until Mr Maxwell arrives, you’ve got to do the best you can.”

  Even if it was only in place of her, it was a better start than nothing at all.

  “What do you want to do?” Alis asked, the question directed towards the little girl instead of her. “It might not make much difference.”

  “I trust you,” Moira whispered, her grasp on his sleeve still not letting go. At her words, Alis almost smiled. Almost.

  “I’m glad someone does,” he said, making a phrase normally sarcastic sound so forlorn. “The least we can do now is find this name.”

  “Peter Nair?”

  “Yeah. He’s in the city. If there’s any paper record of him, the Great Library is about the best place we can look.”

  “As far as our access to resources goes, you might be right.”

  Crestana's voice box took her relief and produced a sigh. As long as he was giving it serious thought, even if he was pretending for the moment, make believe could easily turn real.

  “Let’s ask Al if he knows anything.”

  “Peter Nair…I mean, I’ll give it a shot. I don’t want you two t’ get in more trouble than yer already in.”

  “You’ll end up searching for the name once Special Operations takes over, anyway. You might as well save yourself some trouble and do it while we’re here.”

  “What kinda argument issat? Look, fine, just the name nothin’ more until Elliot comes and picks ya up. Tony! Run a search for me!”

  The Spacehopper’s face didn’t make an appearance, but another shift in the thick, hanging Aether answered Al’s request. A small bookshelf, suspended by chains from the ceiling, free-fell the infinite length down until it landed a convenient two feet away from their faces.

  “Peter Nair. Exclude fictional characters, and any references before this year.”

  A small selection of documents neatly shelved themselves one after another, and before long, the small shelf was packed.

  “Exclude anything concerning Geverdian citizens.”

  The selection got smaller again, only totalling a handful of documents.

  “That should be a good a start, as any. Give those a read before—”

  Al’s darting eyes grew still, transfixed on the set of documents. The silence prolonged, too long and too fraught to be a simple lapse in speech. He reached out to the shelf with his wings and plucked a small sheet of paper from it.

  “This is an ID sheet we’ve been using for refugees.”

  “Refugees? Declaring you’re a refugee seems like more work than coming as a tourist—”

  “No, no, no, here. The refugees from the Spirit Tree crisis. Peter Nair is somewhere in the Great Library.”

  Feathers ruffled; Al’s eyes pleaded with them to take it no further, to keep their promise. Crestana had a mind to honour him, but at the same time…

  “They’re right under our noses,” she whispered, feeling the dancing candlelight shadows lapping against her translucent skin. “Alis.”

  “What are our options?” Alis asked Al.

  “Uh…well…a lockdown, I guess. Provided they’re ‘ere. Tony! Get yer ass in here now!”

  “All right, all right!” The head inched over the top of the front desk, jaw hooking onto the wooden top as the rest of the body swung over the edge. “What do you want?”

  “Find this person and anyone that’s got to do with ‘em in the library and lock ‘em down.”

  Tony sensed the weight of the air and moved to follow suit, no questions asked. “You’ve got it, but it’ll take a minute,” he said, reading the paper.

  “Both of you, I hate t’ ask this of ya, but I’m gonna need you to stand by until Special Operations gets here. If they spook cus of the lockdown, you might be it for defence.”

  “There’s nobody else?” Alis asked, to which he only received a solemn shake of the head.

  “No one like you two. There’s only so much Tony can do remotely.”

  Perhaps more than what he bargained for, but the assignment didn’t stray so far from Alis’s skill set. Crestana couldn’t say the same for herself: no-man’s-land guarded by walls of barbed wire, and the chance of survival was barely a nugget of gold buried in mud.

  But the most crucial part was that it existed. That had to be enough for her, and if it wasn’t, she’d have to get used to it.

  “Let’s think of a plan then,” she said. Shooting for the stars was all well and good at first; pitching a new business needed charisma. “I can’t keep up with you yet. We both know that.”

  “You’ll have to try either way. What we need to do is play into your strengths.”

  He reached into his pockets, and out came his knuckle dusters, sparkling gems captivating Moira’s attention as they slipped across his fingers. “But let’s be clear. We fight with the intent to kill, all right?”

  Crestana nodded, fighting to keep her confidence from escaping with every dip of her head.

  “Right.”

  She let her shutters fall over her mask and relinquished the world around her to black and white. Light and shadow replaced the soft oscillations of dusty air and washed out the inconsequential details.

  Simple, silent, and, for the first time, comfortable.

  “I still don’t have an answer for you,” she heard him say.

  “It’s okay. It’s not like it’d be any better than mine.”

  Protocol written for the worst-case scenario. As his feet moved in a trance, guided by nothing but the words written in that protocol, the city spun around him, projecting phantoms into the back of his eyes so as to stay utterly inescapable. It was all the antitheses of the sand dune’s peace, the simplicity and sincerity of the grains’ movement.

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  Everything, every shimmering light, had purpose—a greater desire for world domination, of which he was to be another small, superficial footnote. Cog or cockroach, it’d grind him up for fuel the longer he stayed on the streets.

  The man threw up, the searing lights tattooing his retina with immeasurable pain.

  The street cleared a bubble around him, yet the flow of foot traffic didn’t slow, let alone stop. Invisible to the surrounding crowd was his face, the filthy blanket draped over his shoulders, the worn and battered clothes and the quivering knees.

  Only bile on the sidewalk.

  The man continued, his feet treading over the small puddle seeping into the grooves between the concrete slabs.

  The remnants of the map in his mind, tattered and seared around the edges, lead him by the hand through half the city, to where the buildings weren’t so prideful, the roads so fat nor the cars so boisterous. Street lamps were few: small islands of light and refuge where, ironically, he was most vulnerable.

  Under one orange glow, clouded by moths, and small Spirits, his legs stopped moving. The building he came face to face to with was run down, yes, but occupied by a law-abiding, small business management firm.

  His eyes pointed towards the front door, but the tips of his shoes instead faced downward: the access staircase, the small door hidden by a faded-green dumpster.

  Before his brain could catch up with his body, he’d already struck his knuckles against the door. Conscious now, he followed instinct, and struck the door again.

  The handle turned, and the door’s edge parted with the frame, leaving behind flakes of peeling paint.

  “My God,” the door’s voice seemed to mutter. “Josef?”

  He found himself nodding. Something about the words was pleasing to his ears. He wanted to hear more.

  The door opened, much to the dismay of its hinges, and a dishevelled face greeted him. Still, the eyes seemed to smile through the sun-worn wrinkles and a set of battered teeth through the bush of facial hair.

  “Boy, you look terrible?”

  “Do I?”

  The vibrations in his voice box startled him, but the man behind the door didn’t seem to think so, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him inside.

  Four solid walls had never looked so foreign. Nothing about their make or material was alien, simply the concept itself. The world felt smaller, tighter, both like and unlike the cabin of a dancing machine: halfway comforting, halfway claustrophobic.

  They walked down a tight corridor, shoulder to shoulder, under weak electrical light. More moths and Spirits, more words that flew under his conscious thought, straight to his mouth and lips. They were managing things just fine without him.

  The conversation didn’t drag on for long, the enthusiastic greeting fizzling out in a few steps as they came to the first and only door. ‘Authorised access only’, it read.

  “Another’s come back to us!” his comrade shouted. The announcement, addressed to many more of that same convenient title, was received with a round of excited mutters that slowly grew in volume. More calls of his name, more malnourished and dishevelled faces growing a few notches kinder as the tension in their scrawny bodies relaxed.

  His comrade walked him through the door, and soon, Josef found himself surrounded by congratulations.

  His mouth kept moving by itself, leaving him free to analyse their faces. Perhaps they’d changed too much since he saw them last, but no face was as free as he remembered; the gleeful expressions as they raced across the dunes were gone, relieved smiles now girt by fear, by anxiety.

  He could only say they looked familiar, similar at a stretch. None were the comrades that he remembered, the comrades his mind would conjure to keep him company. He had left those behind in the desert.

  They had packed the small room wall to wall, and the collective hand of the crowd guided Josef, offering him a seat atop a humble soap box, just as withered as the building and its inhabitants.

  From there, the crowd, the heads, the faces and the words turned back to the centre. The congregation itself was familiar; the start of each week would see similarly large gatherings take place, even though those of old were livelier. Larger too.

  Where the unbearable heat of the desert kept a chokehold on their morale, the weekly meetings would loosen the bounds, the inspiring words always garnished with a healthy serving of cheers.

  That felt like a lifetime ago, but the current meeting fell into step with its predecessors, adhering to the weekly schedule: a stark reminder of the flow of time, and how in its cruelty, it could bend to draw out a painful moment for lifetimes.

  The key voices reached his ears where the shape of their faces was blocked by backs. Talks of hard times, of great losses and a vast restructuring of the operation.

  Once again, in one ear and out the other.

  “—will give up our operations in Fadaak.”

  Until a simple declaration, sick of his indifference, shocked him with a rude awakening.

  “The manpower, the weapons, and the resources to fight the city on our terms no longer exist. There are other ways to fight the slave trade, ones that will help us rebuild and spread our influence further.”

  Even his memory of the dancing machines seemed to fade with every subsequent word. The memory of ever living the past few months, years even, in service of the F.S.A.’s goal.

  “Our campaign in Fadaak is over. We have lost, but refusing to see ourselves beyond our current boundaries will rob us of the chance to even fight again.”

  “I was prepared to die,” Josef whispered.

  The words continued, drowning the fumes of his despair, demanding that he pour out his heart for any hope of being noticed at all, being heard.

  “I was prepared to die!”

  The first words he conjured himself, shocking his mouth into a silent quiver.

  The meeting paused, and all heads turned back to him, all eyes, all the silence.

  “We can’t…give up now.”

  “We aren’t, Josef. What you’re suggesting is suicide.”

  The shoulders parted again as though subservient to the voice, creating a path from the outskirts of the crowd to the centre. On the other side of the clearing, another familiar face greeted him, one he had glanced over before.

  Sitting at a small table in the room’s centre was one of the few faces wrinkled by age instead of sun. One of their many chiefs missing the honours ordinarily required to head a meeting. Him taking on the mantle was confirmation that anyone better suited for the job hadn’t survived.

  “Our fight is here,” Josef argued. “Our brothers and sisters are here everything we—”

  “We know,” the Chief said. “In the days you were gone, everyone in this room has had the time to make peace with it. Our momentum has died, and we can’t rebuild unless we change.”

  The hint of pity in the Chief’s eyes extended to all those in the room. “It’s best you get used to it,” he said.

  The partition in the crowd tightened and closed like a breathing throat, and again, the world was free to run circles around his head.

  The rest of the meeting was inconsequential in comparison. Nothing beyond that short, and perhaps final interaction with the F.S.A. mattered.

  The meeting concluded and adjourned without him; the bodies filing out of the room one by one until the crowd disseminated into the broader public. To masquerade as homeless, no more or less worthy of sympathy than tumbling scraps of waste.

  If only to avoid that fate, Josef remained even after the last body left, wallowing in the aftermath of a dead dream while trying to grasp its tatters.

  The hours dragged, the city continued its bustle, the building above came alive and died once more. The cycle concluded, and the door to the room opened once again.

  “He’s here.”

  It was the Chief’s voice, quiet now, almost sombre when compared to the authority his words had commanded the night before.

  It was subservient to something: whatever or whoever wanted business with him; it wasn’t the Chief.

  A pair of well-mannered footsteps approached, measured distances between one another. Polite and poised, making the bare, musky wooden floorboards sound polished.

  “Josef?”

  The dull sparkle of gemstones caught his eyes first. Although too dark to discern the details, the head of the walking cane made do with the sparse light and shone.

  The crystals gleamed in their brassy-golden seat, and the wrinkled hand that curled around it protruded from the dark like the bow of a ship through fog.

  “My friend Takari says you witnessed the assault and survived. I’m interested in knowing more.”

  A smooth voice, as low as gravel but far from grating.

  “Can you tell me what happened that day?”

  Josef looked up before he could gather the courage to do so. Unprepared, his eyes met those of a stone wall, its hollow smile nothing more than a thin, very thin coat of paint. The man before him wore the wrinkles, the fat, the texture in his pores that culminated in a greedy ugliness with an unquestionable authority.

  “Y-yes,” Josef croaked. “But it’s all...slipping my mind.”

  The portly man, bent over his cane, craned his neck further and lessened the intensity of his smile, and quickly, as though practiced and entirely intentional, he expressed polite pity.

  “May I take a seat?” he asked, a finger lifting from his cane to point at another discarded soap box.

  Josef nodded, shifting himself over to make room. The man moved the rotten box into place with the tip of his cane, a mighty, tired groan escaping his lips as he brushed his coattails aside and sat.

  One designer, the other dishevelled, yet for the first time in a long time, the eyes that looked at him were at his same level, and if anything, at the very least sympathetic.

  “Humans don’t have a tongue for victory. As though with some sort of disease we don’t....we don’t recognise it is sitting on our tongues until it’s so overwhelming we grow addicted, or worse, hurl it out again.”

  Manufactured, yes, but the eyes that seemed to move by wire smiled, and Josef’s body reacted accordingly.

  “Because, for us, victory can be as small as this,” he continued, pointing to his chest. “as small as a still beating heart. Because what the Gods gifted us which they withheld from the Spirits is tenacity. To be...stubborn, but fragile, to ignore the blood in our mouths because there is always, always an unlikely chance of victory still possible when we don’t give in to rationality.”

  He leaned back against the wall, satisfied in his words and convincing Josef that at least he could act as tho the sincerity behind them was real.

  “Now, in my latest campaign, my newest exhibit of my tenacity, I want to find out who did this to you and your comrades. It doesn’t have to be illustrative; I’ve already pieced together a rough recounting from your comrades, bless them.”

  He summarised his life before the rubble into little more than a blur, tainted by the overwhelming loss of what could have been. The only details, useful and pleasant ones, were hour by hour slipping him by.

  In amongst the blur were the painful edges dulled by the flow of time and compounding fog swirling in his brain.

  Tenacity. That word suited him just fine. If he was already crippled, what more would a few scars from painful memories do?

  Josef closed his eyes, walled off the present and delved into the past. From his current point backwards, he recalled the past few days in broad strokes, skipping across days at a time until he returned to his small, human-sized hole in the rubble. A painful recollection, but he moved past it, swallowing his spit and squeezing his eyes tighter as he did so.

  Explosions were the first thing that came to mind. Impactful, shocking to every sense, but most of all in their frequency.

  Gunpowder was second. The smell alone was enough to make him nauseous, but the way it blackened his fingers was what truly stuck with him.

  Scream. Cries and pleas for help were nothing new to him, but no longer did they come from the mouths of strangers, of the deranged piled in alleyways.

  He found cover behind a pile of supply crates with nothing more than a pistol in his hands. Having heard the cacophony start, Josef had left the safety of the barracks, but to what end he could no longer remember. One pistol and a measly handful of bullets would count for nothing.

  Even their connection to the outside world was severed. A golden dome stretched from one end of the camp to the other. Josef couldn’t make sense of even something as simple as his whereabouts, let alone enter the fray, knowing which way the enemy was, never mind who.

  With nothing else to do, no obvious front line to reinforce, Josef cowered, shooting at anything unfamiliar, his own gunshots disappearing into the thickening storm of war.

  His own efforts meant nothing, did nothing, contributed to nothing but shell casings in the sand, and the battlefield continued to evolve without him.

  The dome quivered, and with it everything inside. Once, twice, over and over until the cracks forming in its golden surface burst, and through the shower of shards came two bone-white limbs. Cascading to the tune of gravity, blotting out the sky, the conflict had surely reached its peak.

  But once everything was awash with purple, it was as though nothing before it had mattered at all. Like a dam, the gates were open, and the memories were flooding through, pressure so great he no longer had control, or the capacity to wrestle it back. The purple, shapeshifting monsters, the crushing dread that salivated like hounds to their beck and call was infectious, even after so long.

  But just as it had days before, the destruction subsided as quickly as it sparked, and it left Josef in silence. The pain dulled, having sanded down the spikes around the memory. A little more pain, but his tenacity hadn’t betrayed yet him.

  He opened his eyes to another cloud of golden dust, disseminating into the air as it carried past sensations back to wherever he had drawn them from.

  “Josef...you...that was magic.”

  There was fear in the Chief’s voice. Fear leaving room for not a shred of wonder, even bewilderment. Fear so great he drew his gun and aimed the barrel directly at Josef’s head.

  “Please friend, let’s not get ahead of ourselves—”

  “That’s not Josef!” the Chief sneered.

  “Rest assured, your friend is safe and sound. He is here, and his blood is still warm. We do not have to spill any to confirm, either,” the portly man said, turning this time back to Josef.

  “It is another gift, and it is yours. Now, Josef, I must thank you for your recount. I asked for nothing so detailed but...you expressed such painful memories so...beautifully.”

  The smile, through small twitches in the wires and gears, once again changed its meaning. Excitement bled into his lips.

  “A very, very powerful Spirit gifted you your new talent because they took notice. Dont be afraid, Spirits so powerful don’t move through malice, only by their defining principle. That and nothing more.”

  The man stood, leaning on his cane as he did so. He offered a hand to Josef, who looked at his own hand and marvelled at the difference. The same species, but with differences that threatened to outweigh the commonalities.

  “Now, Josef, we both can see that circumstances have changed and...your brand of tenacity no longer fits with our friend Takari. The F.S.A. must live like rats for the foreseeable future. Hide like rats, survive like rats, multiply like rats until their swarm overwhelms their enemies. But you, you have a fire and fires are strong, but noticeable and easily put out.”

  The man took Josef’s hand. “Fire needs to be nurtured.”

  He then looked to the Chief, and Josef followed his gaze. The gun was lowered now; the finger tapping the trigger guard while he wore the most remarkably distressed expression Josef had ever seen on such a man his age.

  “Sure,” the Chief said. “Sure.”

  The man pat Josef’s hands. “Won’t you show me that fire?”

  Wired, intentional, manipulative, every single twitch of his body manufactured to achieve a specific emotion, to elicit a certain response. That was the brand of sinister untrustworthiness that the man before him relished in, as though an alien educated in human interaction. But Josef was wanted, wanted by someone who he at least shared a common goal with.

  “Yes,” Josef said, every feeling from relief to gratitude to everything in between and beyond packed into that single word.

  “Brilliant. Well, my business here is done. I have pleasantries to exchange with our dear friend here, so I will meet with you shortly, but there is someone waiting for you outside.”

  He leaned again on his cane, straightening out his coat as his expression grew a tad graver.

  “A man of my standing residing too long in Fadaak without an item of Help & Labour is admittedly suspicious. I tolerate many things on our good green earth, but even I couldn’t conform to this culture. Although they may look like a slave, they are nothing but a stray cat I coaxed with bread, I assure you.”

  And with a curt smile, he turned back to the Chief, leaving Josef no opportunity to interject. The intentions were obvious: the questions, the details would come later.

  Josef left the room, only noticing the presence beside him when he closed the squeaking door.

  He looked down at the silhouette of a young girl leaning against the doorway, with a piece of bread in her hand and a chunk in her mouth as promised.

  He caught her eye, and they shared a silent exchange of acknowledgements. The girl seemed satisfied, uninterested in anything besides the bread in her mouth, so Josef, again consciously working his mouth, spoke.

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl didn’t respond; the slim jaw only continued to work the food. Her body shifted away from his, the set of rags softly scraping against the concrete walls.

  “What’s your—”

  The girl shook her head. Josef understood.

  “Then it’s Moira,” he said. A name he remembered from an F.S.A. comrade’s discussion on baby names. They were likely dead. He could think of it as passing on their memory.

  “You’re Moira, I’m Josef, and...”

  A detail irrelevant to his connection with the man, hence why he had so readily neglected it.

  “Peter Nair,” Moira explained. “That’s what he says his name is.”