His despondent company couldn’t pry their stagnant eyes from their feet, or utter a word from their dry, cracking lips. They all instead eavesdropped on the engines, talking with the wheels in a boring, droning conversation.

  The man was content with it. Watching the desert slowly recede from his view through a sliver in the dark green canvas was enough entertainment for him. There wasn’t any joy in it, but it oiled the cogs in his brain, kept them from stopping completely.

  The sea of sand was silent, so he imagined its goodbyes on its behalf, and gave his own in return. The dancing machines were long gone. As much as he wanted to make peace with it, he knew he never would.

  Even as the towers of tinsel and golden light replaced the quiet dunes, his eyes never laid on anything more beautiful than those dancing machines.

  Even the cars full of comrades, racing across the desert as their laugher embraced what freedom could arise from a blank slate; those too, had long since disappeared. Hidden underneath the dunes, leaving him behind.

  All alone. In a city that hated him.

  The view outside the slit darkened, and the convoy of trucks slowly came to a halt.

  The engines died, doors opened, then slammed shut. That got his present company going. Panic sparked in their eyes, the reality they knew was coming finally actualising. It was a unique thrill to realise time had passed, and that there was no point in dreading any longer.

  It was do or die.

  Do or die. There’d always been a gun in his hand when it was do or die. He grasped at the air: it had never felt so empty.

  In his left hand there should’ve been a wooden hand guard, abused and caked in gunpowder, while in his right was a handle in no better shape.

  The trigger against his index, the stock against his cheek, the iron sights in his vision as he squinted his other eye.

  It all felt so real. So vivid.

  And as the slit in the canvas grew, a pair of distorted limbs throwing open the thin veneer that separated them from the chilly midnight air, he imagined the gun in his hand firing.

  And the Spirit before him recoiled, falling to the ground in shock.

  There wasn’t a scent of gunpowder, but the thumping pain in his shoulder, the shaking sensation in his hands, the ringing in his ears. Somehow, all of that was just as vivid. No, more vivid than he could ever remember.

  Next, a reactionary outcry. The surrounding air seemed to burn in response to him. Words, although ones out of reach of his ears or his comprehension.

  Do or die. That was all he gleaned from them.

  He leapt from the back of the truck, feet touching smooth concrete: a parking lot, probably underneath a building.

  Exposed both to the night air and the glare of an assortment of slave-traders. The air burned with their words, their anger.

  Armour. The safety he felt inside the cabin of that Higher Order. Layers of steel, walls of woven fibre. It wasn’t in him to remember the intricacies: he was a pilot, not an engineer. But that feeling. Certainly, that feeling enveloped him, again so vividly he could mistake it for being real.

  And the burning air that grew even more feverish—swirling around the traders one after another, combusting into colours and shapes and all sorts of different pains—all of it scraped his plates, cutting into the metal but never digging past it.

  The recoil beat against his shoulder, his finger light on the trigger. Soon enough, he was dancing along with the armour in the desert, screaming into the wind with his comrades as they raced down sand dunes. Every memory he recalled brought another smile to his face, all of them so vivid, as though he could conjure them from his mind and place them in front of his eyes, steel and rubber and flesh and wire and bone and all.

  All there, all in front of him, as though there was a still a chance to hold on to everything he cared for. Even if the mirages, products of his mind and nothing more were teasing him, he would take the bait if it meant the sensations against his skin could feel real for another second longer.

  He stopped and looked around. An empty…almost empty parking lot, tucked away behind a nook in an alley down a side street, was now littered with dead Spirits.

  Wisps of golden dust wafted from their bullet wounds, the same that drifted from the folds in his hand and the creases in his clothes. The intoxicating nostalgia left him with the dust, and the cold desert night cosied up to his skin.

  His company, the despondent men and women he had shared a leg of his travels with, ventured outside the canvas beds, their fearful faces now turned towards him.

  They would disseminate into the crowds, eventually find themselves on another such truck. Ten, twenty, twenty-five in total. Not enough for anyone to notice, let alone care.

  They continued to watch him, watch the gold dust floating around him. The man saw the glimmer in their eye catch the soft hue of gold, utterly betraying their bewilderment, the look of followers finding their next messiah.

  There wasn’t time for playing gods, though.

  Re-consolidate and rebuild. There was still time to salvage what was left and strike while the city was celebrating the death of the F.S.A.

  If not, then his body would have remained lying face down in the desert.

  The convoy finished mounting as the skies turned for the worse. Lined up along the lane with engines idling, the shouts from drivers and group leaders mirrored those of a train’s conductor and the trucks themselves its cars.

  Iris boarded the foremost one. Heading the line, it was filled with cartographers, radiomen, and those too important to be armed like a regular soldier.

  They watched her, almost stunned, as she boarded, but the chief following close behind her seemed to quell their questions.

  “Let her take care of it,” Evalyn whispered, stopping before the edge of the truck bed, eyes pointing to the pin in Iris’s hair. “You’re the last resort, all right?”

  “Where will you be?”

  “A few blocks away. I know the way there.”

  The engines ignited, and Evalyn grew smaller in Iris’s vision.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Evalyn called out after her as she made way for the next truck in line.

  The laneway opened to a main road, and the truck veered onto it, throwing Iris deeper into her seat. Radiomen held onto their equipment, navigators to their maps.

  “They’ve taken interest,” the Queen whispered.

  Iris stood, holding onto the canvas canopy’s metal frame. Stepping closer to the edge, she leaned her head outside.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said.

  “But you can feel it, can you not?”

  The buzz that ran rings underneath her skin: it was there, but dulled. One layer removed from full intensity.

  “They’re hiding,” Iris muttered. “They’re hiding, aren’t they?”

  “The small ones. They were never an issue to begin with, however.”

  A shadow drifted into view—too dark and defined to belong to a cloud—and swallowed a city block three streets down. Iris angled her neck around the edges of the canvas above her and found the underside of a fleshy dome staring back at her.

  Layered in a translucent film, it dragged a series of streamer-like tendrils across the landscape, gently recoiling whenever their ends met the cold, concrete surface.

  “It’s hunting,” the Queen whispered. “It will do us no harm so long as it does not touch us.”

  “Just stay out of its way!” Iris shouted into the truck. The radiomen picked up and relayed her message, and Iris watched as her words of warning travelled down the convoy. The trucks who could still stop did, and the ones in its path accelerated, stopping in line with the head vehicle, leaving their engines to idle.

  The Spirit drifted past, gliding its tendrils along the main road.

  One tendril, its end still obscured by a building to their right, tensed, struggling against a frantic pull. After a few moments, where the main body proceeded as nothing had changed, the tendril retracted its prey: a smaller Spirit perhaps the size of a cow.

  The way its prey disappeared into the hunting Spirit was too vague for Iris to define it as eating. Consuming, maybe.

  The last tendril dragged its weight up a building on the far side, and the radiomen behind her gave the convoy the order to move once again.

  The sky was turning for the worse, and on the hastening wind came a quiet chorus of howls. Different pitches and depths, length and tone, dog-piling on one another until it resembled something of a war cry, howled from the lungs of ten thousand soldiers hiding in the fog.

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  “They react to the wind,” the Queen whispered.

  Those who took shelter in the crevices of the ruined city ventured from its cavities. From windows crawled those with hundreds of legs, and from collapsed chimneys floated entire colonies compensating with quantity what they lacked in might.

  Five seconds flat, and the faces of buildings were crawling with Spirits. None made a move, none seemed to pose a threat.

  “Tell them to stop,” the Queen ordered.

  “Stop the truck!”

  The chief relayed Iris’s word, and she tightened her grasp around the canopy scaffold as the brakes engaged, screeching through the dirt and rust on the wheels.

  “I need to hide,” the Queen whispered. “Your Mind Palace, be prepared to use it.”

  “What? Hey!”

  The Queen slinked further into the swirling jewel as the convoy came to a screeching halt; the brakes clamping on rusted brake rotors.

  “What are we stopping for?” the chief muttered as he shuffled down the length of the truck bed. “Has it got to do with this damn howling?”

  “Maybe,” Iris said. “I can feel something.”

  It sounded like a tacky lie, and if the Queen hadn’t acted so hastily a few seconds prior, she would’ve dismissed the sensation all together.

  A soft melody, fingers dancing across the far-right-hand side of a piano. Slow, fast, gaining and losing speed at the whims of something still yet out of sight.

  It teased her, playing the melody atop a building, the sound rising and falling with the tip of a conductor’s baton.

  The baton rose, holding its place in the heavens.

  And swiftly, it came crashing down to hell.

  Iris could barely breathe. Short, sharp breaths through her nostrils sent needles into her artificial lungs. Feet paralysed, shoes teetering on the edge of the truck’s bed, her fingers grasped the chief’s coat jacket through the fear.

  The melody continued, discordant, as though the baton’s tip were following the sketch lines of a deranged, disturbed mind. No rhythm, no comfort of melody, a howling buzz of Aether that overpowered the wind and silenced the Spirits.

  A small, black pinprick glued to the centre of her vision, forgoing an anchor in real space to infect the version of it only Iris could perceive.

  She knew if she blinked, it would find her. Rules to a game conveyed through sheer instinct: she now found herself thoroughly entranced by the baton’s movements. Her eyes strummed mindlessly to the conductor’s whims, hands devoid of light coiled around her own and granted her the courage to paint a picture on its behalf.

  Give me a shape. I am only curious.

  Curiosity guided her hand, and on the obscured, tear-smeared canvas that was her eyes, she painted a self-portrait.

  A self-portrait of a bloodied girl, on the brink of death at every waking moment, dying and resurrecting, dying and resurrecting until the concept of an identity became meaningless. Of a shroud stitched into its flesh, seeping blood with every pump of its rotted heart. Of puppet strings tugging on its skin, moving its hand to her face, an outstretched finger edging closer and closer towards Iris’s hairpiece.

  Stop.

  A royal decree, a command that seemed to halt the puppet master’s overeager hands and induce a coma in the rotted puppet itself.

  Interesting.

  The curious voice muttered its defiant reply, and the puppet reanimated, inching ever closer to the hairpiece.

  She didn’t hear the monarch again, drowned out by the baton’s motions, cut off from everything else, the only sound that reached her ears were the beating of her own heart, the one she could barely tell apart from the rotted one before her.

  It was something besides her conscience that lit the initial fire. It always was. Something that, in lieu of an easily thwarted survival instinct, kicked into motion when nothing but guaranteed success could save her.

  Never herself, never her own power; a purple hand on puppet strings grabbed the baton and wrestled it for control.

  The sporadic melody continued, now muffled as Iris felt a wine-red carpet sprout underneath her feet, and fake plaster walls close in.

  The stifled baton continued its rhythm, but as though she were wrestling with the puppet’s hand itself, the apparition likewise struggled.

  The blur, the mist in her brain, the outward projection of her conscience disseminated her being into the surrounding walls as the flimsy cork and plaster walls stood on their own supports.

  Still, the baton fought back, the decaying mirror image wrestling with itself for every millimetre gained. Every millimetre closer to the Queen was a millimetre deeper into the unknown Iris’s conscience travelled.

  For a single golden spark to find her in oblivion, like bait on the end of a hook made of processed miracles, she would have to measure how much luck she had left in life.

  Reaching out for the spark, she grazed it with her fingertips, and it reacted with a joyous whale call.

  The baton fell silent; a new, more euphonious orchestra for it to conduct, a greater puppet to manipulate boldly advertised itself along the horizon.

  A golden, six finned whale breaching over the waves of decrepit buildings, shedding a light that could’ve inspired the sunset.

  The howling paused, and the graveyard of a city was spellbound.

  The whale crashed into the city’s skyline, orange light spilling over the rooftops and disseminating a magical warmth through the city streets.

  The rain returned, and the needles in Iris’s lungs retracted. Reality crashed atop them along with the downpour, and Iris wiped the tears from her eyes.

  She looked around to the people in the truck: all were recovering, sputtering coughs like the engines as groans leaked out of their lips, probably squeezed out of their diaphragms by the same migraine Iris was nursing.

  “Iris.” The Queen’s voice was still sharp enough to cut through the rain. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she groaned. “But…good timing.”

  “Timing?”

  Knees still shaking, she got to her feet. “Ordering my Mind Palace.”

  “That was not my hand.”

  “What?”

  The chief rose himself, entering her peripheral vision, gnashing his teeth in pain. Still, through it all, he roared for a casualty report. Iris covered her ears as his booming voice began the recovery process.

  “You opened your Mind Palace before I commanded you to.”

  The truck began moving, sending Iris stumbling forward, grasping for the canopy supports. Even as she recovered, the chief helping her back on board by the scruff of her coat, her mind remained ensnared by the Queen’s words.

  The trucks parked a block away, slinking into a back alley and offloading their armed cargo. The soldiers dispersed into the crevices in a practiced manner, leaving a small fire squad to guard the trucks.

  Iris followed a few paces behind the main body of troops sporting the explosives and faster firing weapons, their hastened march dragging her out into the open. Towering over her were the remains of a stadium, grandstands laying bare around a lake of swaying reeds, dancing to the tune of the light rain.

  Like the bulb of a lighthouse, a pulsing, celadon-green light tainted the falling rain, effusing from a symbol carved into the concrete above the entrance. The handiwork of a Spirit, but unbelievably crude, as though a giant had scraped into the wall with the tip of a knife.

  The mark of a Spider’s web.

  Another buzz hung in the air like high humidity; the drone of a silent, collective mutter wormed its way into her pores.

  On the other side of the grandstands was a crowd, spectating something hidden in the swaying grass.

  “Are there a lot of Spirits?”

  “Enough to drown out a little magic,” the Queen whispered, suggesting they were thinking on the same page.

  Iris raised an arm and shaved the ends of her hair, reforming the matter into a tendril tall enough to splash and stick to the roof of the grandstand. She let it pull her up, building the velocity to clear the rusting steel before repurposing the purple matter into padding for her landing.

  From her new position, the gathering’s nature revealed itself, blossoming into a poisonous flower.

  Decrepit mannequins, their fabric rotting off the metal skeletons, swam the grassy expanse, each posed as though they were dancing. They seemed dispersed at first, each cavorting a lonely path forward. Yet Iris’s eyes unconsciously followed their shoulders, down their arms and to the tips of their fingers. From there, her vision leapt to four wooden pillars, the same symbol—a spider’s web—this time made of ropes and sticks, crowned each one.

  They caught her eyes, then directed them deeper into the rotted ring where, above the sea of dejected green, drifted a line of unconscious men and women, heads shaved and figures haggard.

  The buzz under her skin died down, and the crowd of Spirits aligned their attention to the centre. The imprisoned slowly rotated, an unseen manipulator displaying their faces to one end of the grandstand, and the condition of their bodies to the other.

  The smell of rotting wood mingled with petrichor. Iris watched as one man, early thirties and of little muscle, rose above the rest. Each pillar’s crown burst with light, one after another, second after second. Another minor explosion would take their brightness higher, out-competing the other three for their own spot in the night sky.

  Gradually, the glimmer slowed, feverish competition trading for a cautious game of chicken. Eventually, one small increase turned out to be the last, and the buzz of silent muttering exploded across the arena. The lights faded, and the unseen hand ushered the gaunt man out of sight and out of the sale.

  The process began again, this time a woman rising above the rest.

  “There’s too many for the F.S.A. to deal with.”

  “But none are significantly powerful, although I’d expect the F.S.A. to incur a loss. They most likely expect the same.”

  “But that’s suicide.”

  A pair of boots landed on the corrugated metal behind her, crushing the rust and Iris’s sense of security in one fell swoop.

  “It might be suicide,” Evalyn said, “but they do it, anyway. They believe that what they do is greater than themselves.”

  Her mother strolled across the roof, avoiding patches of rust before coming abreast of Iris. “They decided that this is worth giving their life for.”

  The forlorn smile she wore as she explained perhaps told Iris more than the words themselves. The antithesis of everything Evalyn taught her, and yet her mother couldn’t help but respect them.

  “People like them, with nothing but bombs and guns and…the strength in their arms and legs, do things that you and I never would. Makes you think that the world has the order of things the wrong way around, don’t you think?”

  The smile faded from her face as she gestured for Iris to take her hand. Iris obliged, standing next to her mother and clasping her fingers.

  “But I’ve tried it, Iris. Maybe it just wasn’t my thing. And perhaps this is me being a selfish mother, but I don’t want that to be yours either.”

  Evalyn tightened her grip on Iris’s hand as the marking on her cheek glowed.

  “You have one life, so do right by yourself and no one else. But…you have heart. You have a lot more heart than I could ever stomach.”

  “That’s…a good thing?”

  “That’s a very good thing, Iris. But don’t ever let it blindside you.”

  Evalyn bent her knees and jumped, the marking on her cheek bursting with Aether as the simple movement sent them both flying backwards. Iris watched her feet part ways with the roof as the view beyond her boots was engulfed by a fireball.

  The sound hit her not a moment after; she felt it stronger than she heard it; the shockwave making drums of her lungs. They landed on the roof of a complex across the road, its ancient walls quaking in the blast’s immediate aftermath. Their feet were light on the shingles but managed to hold.

  The crackle and echo of gunfire came next, the sound of machine guns from beyond the collapsed grandstands concealed by a wall of thick smoke. Muzzle flashes from either side of them soon followed, more measured and interjected by racking bolt-actions.

  The chaos continued, the ash swirling amongst the rain mixing with the silent buzz, now transmitting a deluge of screams and wails. Yet, as haunting as they were, they fell to the wayside as the rain’s infinite and constant chorus drowned it out and fed it to the gutters. The city drank its small act of revenge a hundred years late.

  “Call it even,” Evalyn said, untying her drenched hair. “Maybe this makes up for what we did three years ago. Maybe not. Two wrongs don’t make a right unless you want them to.”

  Iris stood still in the rain, screams washing over her as guns continued to sing amongst the hellfire, the only solace in the scene, the trickle of slaves escaping from between the rubble, making a mad dash for the trucks hidden amongst the ruined buildings.

  She watched from the outside; the fray from an arm’s length seemed infinitely more absurd than when personal investment had a part to play. Without the weight, the needed weight to make the surreal feel important, the absurdity of the situation was all that was left.

  Every facet that led to the bloodbath she watched, the very world that orchestrated events like the break in a game of billiards, the very idea that someone would have to lay a finger on the trigger of a gun, the hilt of a sword to get what they wanted out of life.

  “It’s all so…”

  “I know,” Evalyn said, taking a seat beside her. “I know.”

  Perhaps that was what felt most absurd: the resignation in Evalyn’s voice. The lack of care, or rather the lack of energy to care. The lack of capacity to care for a cycle that gnawed at its own tail, the lack of trust in a game of chance that only had one outcome.

  Iris took a seat too, watching the poisonous flower burn to the ground and tracing its spores with her imagination, wondering where the horror would spread to, where such a flower would rise and fall next.

  “And with that, we’re back to square one.”