by Ryan Muree
There was a long pause before Cayn whispered. “You could try to connect them.”
“No.”
“Clove, you were meant to be a Scribblist, right? A Scribe or whatever they call it?”
“An Ingineer. And no, I can’t,” she whispered loudly.
“You did before with my gun.”
That was a very long time ago. She’d found out that she could make the ether-fuel move like water when they were in the mines. She’d had daily practice getting ether to fall out of the walls, follow her, or even dump itself in the carts. But she’d hid it.
Ingineers mysteriously disappeared when they were found out and then used by the United Architects for wars against Revel. So, she’d not practiced since she’d accidentally pushed an entire rack of ether-fuel into a wall, shattering and ruining both the canisters and the fuel in one of her favorite shops.
“We don’t really have the option, sis.”
She didn’t even know what was required to get it working. A passcode? A combination of hands or symbols? She pulled her glove off her right hand, flexed it a few times, and pressed her palm up against the panel.
The panel blossomed to life and tickled her palm. Bright blue-green light emanated from under her hand and created several buttons beside her fingers. The laser itself whirred on with a soft hum; Cayn took a step back.
“You’re getting it, Clove!”
“I turned it on. Anyone can turn it on, idiot.”
“But you’ve hooked it up to turn it on.”
“It’s just connected to power. Same thing with lights and air. Doesn’t mean it can shoot.” She gripped the handles and jerked the conical head. It was locked in place. “If it was connected, I think this would move like it was before.”
Cayn sighed through his nose. “So, do it, Clove. Try.”
She had to draw it down from the ethereal plane and communicate with the weapon’s dashboard. That’s what it had been designed to do, that’s what ran Ingini society, and that’s the only way she would keep her shipping promise and remain in one piece.
She closed her eyes.
Sometimes it was easy to do when it was dark and quiet back home in Dimmur. The lamps would be turned up for the night like stars, and Old Ollie would stop singing. She could drift on the fringes of consciousness and project herself into the ethereal plane. It was bright, blinding even, but moved and swayed around her. It never lasted long. She couldn’t do anything with it, other than remind herself of a world her people were denied entrance into.
She tried a few deeper breaths.
“You can do it,” Cayn whispered.
She wavered, trying to ignore the honks of the aptericks in the pastures and the cramping muscle in her neck. She focused on the tickling at her palm, the ether waking up to her. It pulled her along, pulled her out of her space until the telltale sign she’d succeeded—feeling lost.
It was terrifying and not something she could see coming. It was something she could only note or feel after the fact, after she was already adrift somewhere not in Ingini, where she couldn’t feel or hear a thing.
The black world around her floated by and revealed in tiny little tufts of clouds the range of colors of ether. She didn’t like staring at any of it for too long—it stung. But in small doses, it was more beautiful than clouds before a rain or the sky at sunset over Barren Ranch.
She reached her hand out until the ether swirled around her fingers. Bright blue-green was the only kind of ether that came to her, but she didn’t mind. As long as it came.
The gun’s dashboard she needed to communicate with was in front of her.
She lowered her hand with tendrils of ether wrapped around each finger, let it pool in her palm, and then pressed it against the flat surface.
Connect to Pigyll.
She imagined the ether leaving her hand and traveling through the gun into her ship’s ancient system.
The ether disappeared into the panel, and when she ducked down to see if it had fallen through, the ether was gone.
She closed her eyes and rubbed the burn out of them.
Cayn. Metal. Bird crap.
One by one, she recalled her real life somewhere else in the universe, hoping her mind would connect back to her body. It usually worked, and it wasn’t long before she fell back into the gunnery basket in Pigyll’s undersides.
A thunderous hum jarred her memory and slammed her back into reality.
Cayn was shaking her shoulders through the metal cage. “You did it, Clove. You did it!”
She opened one eye, found the dashboard with all green lights, and grinned.
“Come say goodbye to Scuffle, and let’s get out of here.”
Scuffle had propped up one foot on the lower plank of the fencing around his pasture with his arms across the top. He nibbled on a strand of sweet grass and watched his birds grazing and trilling at each other. His green, straw-threaded hat was low on his bald head. He was entirely too old to still be running an apterick ranch, but he wouldn’t have given it up for anything.
Gray clouds rolled on in the hills behind his ramshackle cottage.
Clove wiped her hands off on her pant legs, tightened her stubby ponytail, and propped herself up on the fence beside him.
“It’s not safe, Clove,” he grumbled at her.
“I know, but we’re okay. We’ll be fine.”
“You need to come stay here for a while? You got no rent?” His focus remained on his birds as he spoke.
“No, we have rent. We want to upgrade. Set ourselves up.”
He huffed. “What you’ve got on your ship is setting you up to die.”
“Come on. We’re not in the actual war, Scuff. We’re just bringing supplies to some of the forts.”
He shook his head and spat out the sweet weed. “You don’t load up a gun like that and deliver supplies. You’re in it, and there’s only one way out of this. Revel will dry up the land and leave us with nothing, and you two, you’ll be the charred carcasses their troops march on.”
She wrapped both arms around his shoulders and squished her nose into his cheek. “Scuffle,” she whined. “We’re good, I promise. I just want to get enough money to be like you, living the best life.”
He grunted and tugged at his hat. “What am I going to tell your mom when I see her? My time’s up soon, and I’ll be all decayed with worms eating out my eyeholes, and your mother will still be yelling at me for letting you do this.”
She kissed his cheek. “We’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“Don’t die—”
“I promise.”
“And don’t let Cayn get his willy stuck in some hopper clamp, either.”
She burst with laughter. “Thank you, Scuff.” She headed back for the airship, eager to get up and on their way.
“You need drinks or something?” he called out to her.
She shook her head and waved him off as she trotted into Pigyll where Cayn waited for her. “Scuff said to stop screwing in rain puddles.”
Cayn’s eyebrows drew up in the middle before his mouth dropped. “Is he—” He stuck his head out of the back and shouted at Scuffle. “No one gets that disease anymore, thank you very much!”
Clove jumped into her seat. “Ready?”
Cayn slipped into his with a huff. “More than ever. Let’s do this.”
She closed the cargo hold’s doors with the push of a button, turned on all of Pigyll’s engines, and lifted her up. “Let’s go save our skin.”
“Literally.” Cayn lounged back in his chair.
Chapter 23
Medical lab — Zephyr Airship
Adalai fell back into a worn-in, mustard-colored lounge chair that Kayson kept in the corner of his medical lab. Her eyes burned with exhaustion, and her head pounded with hunger. She pulled her aching legs up and crossed them in the chair.
They’d been standing or leaning the entire night as Kayson had worked on Emeryss. Not one wink of sleep, she’d not been this tired since
running drills at the ass crack of dawn in the academy.
Pink dust flurried to life in her lap as Miss Tiddlybottom spun in a small circle and nestled down for petting.
Kayson slid down a metal wall, unrolled another wad of swampgrass, and lit it with an ether-lighter.
“You’re a healer,” she groaned, rubbing the fur under Tidbit’s chin with one hand and the ball of her foot with the other. “That’s so gross.”
He took a long drag and blew the smoke in her direction. “I practically brought someone back from the dead. Let me have this. I can heal myself with the right grimoire.”
Sonora yawned and leaned against the wall beside him. “What are we going to do?”
Adalai didn’t have a clue. Emeryss had to get on that escort ship, that much was clear, but they’d also been so lucky she wasn’t permanently harmed or worse. General Orr’s wrath would have come down on them swift and hard, especially on her. Not to mention he and the Librarian were expecting the escort to drop off a wholly functioning Scribe. Not an almost-Caster who used to Scribe.
“For one thing, I’m glad we could save our skins by saving her,” Adalai said.
Kayson shook his head and blew out a line of gray smoke toward the ceiling. “And she can’t scribe anymore. Shit.” He rubbed his forehead with his thumbnail. The bags under his eyes had bags.
“Grier’s right,” Adalai said.
“Would you have helped her cast even if she couldn’t have scribed?” Sonora looked up at her. “Even if it wouldn’t get you a promotion?”
Adalai pursed her lips and nodded. Of course, she would have. Even though their situations were different, she saw herself in Emeryss.
Sonora undid her bun of haphazardly tossed back hair. “I was suspecting she couldn’t scribe anymore. Whatever she did tonight, though, it was terrible.”
Adalai leaned forward stretching the muscles in her lower back. “You heard it?”
“Sort of.” Sonora ran her hands through her hair, loosening the ringlets at her shoulders. “She had to have connected to the ether on a different level. When we’ve been watching her, I’ve been wondering if she sends stuff out through it. And then tonight, she was outside practicing. I only tuned to her because I heard something not quite real—”
“Real?”
“Well, here.” She motioned to the ground. “Versus here.” She pointed to her head. “Then I heard it.”
“Heard what?” Adalai was bent so far forward Tidbits was slipping off her lap and digging in her claws to hang on.
“A cry for help. It was in my head, like when I talk to you guys. It was distinctly Emeryss’s cry, but I couldn’t figure out how she’d done it. And it was pure terror.”
Adalai shuddered, and Sonora reached over and pulled the swamp grass from Kayson’s lip. It was barely balancing since he’d fallen asleep sitting up.
“And she casted,” Adalai whispered.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Did she have a sound grimoire?”
Sonora shook her head and helped her sleepy husband stand. “Vaughn said she had an air grimoire. It was open to Air Slice, which explains her wounds, but I guess maybe it reacted against her? Is that possible?”
“Maybe.” Adalai wrapped her arms around Tidbits and pulled her in closer. “I had things backfire on me when I was just starting out. Mostly because I didn’t control it. I pulled the ether and let it do whatever it wanted.”
“As opposed to pulling the ether and guiding it.” Sonora sighed. “Vaughn didn’t say she’d pulled the ether off the page though. It was still there, so maybe she pulled something else? Let’s hope we can keep her alive.”
Kayson bobbed his head up for a moment, more awake than Adalai had thought. “And if she can’t scribe, I don’t think she’ll be telling her family or the library about all this, either.”
Adalai rubbed her forehead. The others needed to know. “Can you call a short meeting, Sonora?”
Sonora had the rest of the crew in the medical lab within a few minutes, yawning and stretching.
“Did she die?” Tully asked. “She better be dead to wake me up this early.”
Adalai crossed the room, shoved her against the wall with one forearm across her chest, and yanked out Tully’s wrist with the other. Several white ethereal symbols shimmered on her skin.
Tully smirked.
“You lied.”
“You all can kill yourselves at the wedding if it goes bad. I’m looking out for me. I’m not wasting my ether on her and her idiotic wishes and dreams.”
Mykel sneered at Tully.
“I’m reporting you when we get back to Aurelis,” Adalai said. “I’m reporting everything—”
“Fine. See what happens. You might be General Orr’s little bitch, but I’m Revel’s only time Caster. Go ahead and try and get me removed.”
“Not removed, just not anywhere near me.”
Tully shrugged, and Adalai released her.
“Jahree, we’re settled, right? No need to move?” she asked.
He gave a curt nod. “We’re good and settled in the trees for cover. The wedding will be off in the clearing in view of the city and that ugly ass wall.”
“Thank you.”
“Vaughn said she was using Air Slice?” he continued.
“Yeah, it seems so.” Adalai went to run her hands through her hair, but stopped when she caught the blood in her nails and on the back of her hands. “I want to thank you all for helping, but don’t let her cast again. We don’t think she will, all things considered, but please stop her, get me, call for Grier if he’s not around—anything.”
Tully snorted. “That’s definitely being babysitters.”
“Shut it, Tully. She nearly died.” Vaughn crossed his arms as his white eyebrows narrowed.
Adalai squinted at her. “According to Grier, Vaughn, and Sonora—she casted. Something just went wrong. We don’t know exactly what, but she succeeded. She can cast.”
Jahree shook his head. “No disrespect, but you’re not a Caster if you nearly kill yourself in the process.”
Adalai paced. “Which is why we can’t let her try again.”
“Tully is driving me crazy, too, but how are we going to make sure she doesn’t?” Vaughn asked.
Tully hissed.
Adalai rolled her head on her shoulders to stretch the muscles there. “General Orr’s escort is taking her back to Stadhold—”
“You told her she’s going home.” Urla leaned heavily on her stick.
Adalai dipped her head, chin to chest, and looked at her feet. “This was decided when we got the assignment for the wedding. After Delour.”
Sonora crossed her arms. “You’ve known this whole time? That’s why you practiced so much. You felt bad.”
“I couldn’t tell you because if she found out, she’d—”
“She’d run,” Urla said and nodded. “That makes a lot more sense.”
“And she’ll still run if she finds out,” Adalai added. “I’m afraid Grier will even help her this time if she does. They can’t find out until they’re on that ship.”
“What does that mean for us?” Vaughn asked. “What does that change?”
“We can’t let her out of our sight once she’s recovered, and we have to get her on that ship,” Adalai said.
Mykel shook his head. “I understand, but I feel bad lying to her. I don’t want her to go back to Stadhold either. I can’t believe you lied to her so easily for this long.”
She balled her fists. “I wanted to get in as much time as possible to help her. I don’t want her to go back to that stupid place either. Avrist and that Librarian are nasty people to do what they’ve done, but General Orr said our group would be grounded if she’s not on that escort ship out of Marana. He threatened our jobs over it.”
Tully scoffed. “Finally. Some logic.”
Adalai rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s over. There’s nothing to worry about—”
“Until you
pick up another useless person and hope to teach them how to cast,” Tully snapped back.
Adalai lunged toward her again. If Tully didn’t watch herself, she’d cast her into a Remapped Mind. “I’d like to remind you that you all weren’t being given second chances. I asked Orr to let me on this team, so I could help Urla make the Zephyrs into something—”
“You joined for yourself,” Tully bit back. “Lie to yourself, lie to the Neerian, but don’t think you can lie to us.”
“And so what?” Adalai countered.
“So, I own my selfishness. You still hop around like you’re doing good for others.”
“You want me to own it? Fine! Yes, I want to become a general, but I don’t think any of you wanted to be out of a job either. Every single one of you had been ditched by your previous group for insubordination”—she scowled at Tully—“for lackluster performance”—she eyed Mykel—“for laziness.”
Vaughn sunk a little.
“Had I not agreed, you’d be benched at base doing paperwork,” Adalai continued. “I gave Emeryss a chance, too, and she was harder working than half of you. She put you to shame.”
Tully rolled her eyes. “She nearly killed herself—”
“No!” Adalai pressed two fingers below Tully’s collarbone. “She did. She worked so damn hard, she wanted something so badly, that she actually killed herself trying. And then she came back. Have you ever been willing to put something that important to you on the line?”
Tully curled her upper lip in a snarl but kept her mouth shut.
“Okay.” Jahree rubbed the back of his neck. “So, what about us and the wedding? What do we do with her? We can’t do our jobs and watch her.”
Adalai relaxed her palms and paced away from Tully. “The escort should be here before the wedding starts, but I haven’t heard anything from Orr since. He’s not responding to anything I’ve sent him.”
“He’s blocked incoming messages from me, too,” Sonora said. “He might be that busy. He’s probably coming here himself. The war still hasn’t been officially called, but the Messengers are saying things are bad.”