This time, needling fears and seeded guilt could not contain her legs from bounding at that jet-black mess of hair. She had not seen his face for too long. Those sharp eyes, that contradicted a jovial kindness, those intelligent, lazy movements. All of it. All of him had been just as present in her new life as Evalyn.

She barged into his side like a freight train, squeezing his waist tighter than a belt around a fat king.

“Whoa, whoa, easy. I’m not going nowhere. You caught me,” Elliot said, the nonchalant phrasing of he who would never say anything authentic with absolute sincerity. It was so him; a contrast to his strait-laced wife, a balance in Iris’s life.

She felt a hand rest on her shoulders, gently dissuading her from continuing her iron grasp.

He knelt in front of her, and they watched each other.

“Welcome back,” Iris said. Even if they were not yet home, it felt right.

“Good to be back,” he said, giving her a skyward thumbs up. Perhaps it was a pilot thing. She could not be too sure.

They had spent another few days in the city before Elliot’s shift at the base was over. Deals between Geverde and Fadaak had been met, and, as Evalyn had put it, any loose ends had been neatly swept under the rug. Only a few days prior, Iris and Evalyn had watched from their hotel window as the Royal Intelligence Bureau packed their bags and left, leaving their—not so official—personnel behind for a few more days.

Geverde’s business was done and dusted. But, Iris could not help but stare at the looming visage of Workar tower, forever mocking her as she sat on the edge of the city docks.

Her and Elliot sat side by side, the cool breeze carried by the waves fiddling with their hair and clothes. Seagulls. They now seemed so ordinary. Their squawks were odd, but their feathers remained, for the most part, monotone.

Strange. Strangely normal. Normal would never feel normal to her. She had seen everything as a gradient between true and false from the beginning. Such was being exposed to a world where everything was bigger than oneself.

She was reminded of the dance floor, the stage of the world where the most that could go wrong was a spilled drink or broken heel. She had seen beyond that already, where a stray screw could cause a stage light to fall, and at worse kill some poor dancing couple. Perhaps, she had seen more. Seen all the way to the engine rooms, where the same screw could send everything crashing. Not only a few on the dance floor, still blissfully unaware of the forces that kept them alive.

What did the seagull think of that?

She was sure it did not care much for dance floors.

“What happened after I left?” Elliot asked, legs swinging. An odd display of wasting energy.

“After you left?” Iris repeated for no reason in particular. “After you left, we went back to the cars. I couldn’t walk, so Evalyn carried me. We met the uh…Rib?”

“R.I.B. Don’t call them ribs, they might get butthurt.”

Iris noticed he talked as though from personal experience.

“We met with the R.I.B. people halfway, and they took the hostages and brought us back.”

“Did you talk with any of them?”

Iris could not recall much of the return journey. Her head had erupted like the belt of a car engine, and it had felt as though nothing above her brain stem still functioned. But she had a vague memory of Evalyn talking to a particular Beak amongst the hostages.

“I didn’t. But Evalyn was talking to the person she was supposed to find. I don’t remember what about, but he didn’t react much.”

“Must have been a little shell-shocked,” Elliot assumed.

“No. He said something.” Something Iris could just grasp from the back seat. Even over the sound of car engines and deafening wind, the mechanical voice had said something in whispering solemnness.

“They were good people. That’s what he said.”

Elliot took his time in replying. His eyes ventured forward while his back turned to the city in subconscious rejection. Iris did not know where he was looking, for home was the other way. But he looked at peace. Not peaceful, at peace. At peace with something Iris could not grasp yet.

“I wonder who he was talking about….”

Not long after, Evalyn returned holding three paper tickets. She gripped them tightly as she waved towards Iris and Elliot.

“They only had economy class left!” she hollered into the wind. “I hope that’s alright!”

“Why is she asking us that?” Elliot muttered to Iris. “She’s the one who’s going to be contemplating suicide the entire time. Sure sweetie! Thanks for waiting in line!”

“Watch your tone or you’re going straight into that ocean,” she said, feigning a swift frontal kick into his back. She sat between the two, pocketing the tickets and turning her attention to the ocean.

“All the diplomatic business has been taken care of, and all the hired help have left for their next contracts.”

“Where’d Colte go off to?” Elliot asked.

“Aerilia. He’s going to be staying there a while. Has some funerals to get to as well.”

The dead they had seen in Workar Tower, their bodies spat out like a snake hurling bones.

“Are you going, Evalyn?” Iris asked. Evalyn looked sour, her serene expression losing a bit of its radiance.

“No, I didn’t know them all too well,” she admitted. “But I guess I just don’t like funerals either.”

A quiet droning, clinging to the coattails of the wind reached their ears. It came from behind her, so Iris stood, turning toward the city. A plane with little wings and a fat belly flew high overhead, growing in size with each passing second. For now, at least, she could imagine herself crushing it between her fingers.

She turned down to the city itself, the skyline jutting like an irregular heartbeat, glistening in undeserved sunlight. A disgusting place. A disgusting place where Spirits lived innocently and died innocently, relying, for their whole lives, on the oasis built atop nameless corpses.

Did those Spirits know of the price paid for such a miracle? Did they care?

The fat little plane, now orders of magnitude larger than its namesake, roared overhead. Iris followed it as it crossed the bay, scaring seagulls out of their bickering and adults out of their daydreaming.

Colossal monster of Aether and steel. A world in the sky full of dance floors and desire. Another shepherd of the city, shipping clueless tourists from one place to another.

Until the Day Utopia Begins.

Iris wondered how long that man had been waiting.

 

Kurael Farehn watched the orange brick buildings leisurely pass the window of the Police cruiser, welcoming him home. Home.

Yeah. He was home.

Excala offered him the promised love and character of its streets. It shared with him the colour of people as they walked through the close knits boroughs. His home reminded him that walls could be so beautiful, that green could be so soothing, that canals could run with so much water. So much water.

Desolation, which he had immersed himself in so fully, was nowhere. The old life he had taken for granted when filtered through newfound senses, almost felt like a dream. There was safety in its walls and plenty in its promises. Everything was lovingly personal, unlike the thoughtless desert.

None of it felt real. Perhaps, he now knew it to all be a temporary state of being. He considered that the death of the desert was the truer, more final normalcy. The state of things where everything started and ended.

He gripped the crumpled letter in his fists as the last grains of sand dislodged and fell out of his mask. The desert escaped him. It took the length of a continent to do so, but it admitted defeat. Kurael was now truly a survivor.

The same name floated across the gears in his voice box whenever he thought upon it.

He barely knew Kerry, but Kurael was sure he would have liked the city too.

 

The cruiser parked adjacent to the sidewalk of a painfully narrow brick road. He thanked the officer on the other side of the grille and stepped out, checking his seat for anything left behind. Nothing but a brown coat and a leather briefcase remained in his possession. Considering his circumstances, the fact he had held onto so much at all bewildered him.

The cruiser’s engines hummed once more as it pulled into the road, beeping playfully as a farewell. Kurael waved with his free hand as the car disappeared over a small hill. He turned to the building he had marked as his home address. A tall, orange, intensely familiar midrise, sandwiched between two other identical complexes. Nothing special, at least from the street.

He could not remember the door to the building ever being so tall. It loomed over him, scrutinising the now-changed man standing on its porch.

Beyond the door was the mother he had never said goodbye to. The person he had given up so easily once his end came too close for comfort. Even if she forgave him, he would forever sit by her side, knowing that he had broken that bond once and survived. The letter in his hand—which he had promised to deliver himself—now felt nothing more than a crude insult. An appeal for mercy from a coward at the end of his wits.

He had run from home, fell into trouble immediately, worried the life out of his own mother and then had bid farewell to her memory. How could he have the gall to come back alive?

The door watched him skeptically. He could not find the door handle, no matter how hard his undeserved hands tried, no matter how—

“Kurael?”

The old rattling voice box he had offered to repair at least once a month still had one or two screws loose. The way the voice spoke was alien to him. A weak timidness, as if the gears had not moved in weeks. The voice spoke with such caution its words could be erased from history with a simple whistle of the wind.

Kurael sometimes envied the facial expressions of humans. Such intricacy and detail all illustrated succinctly yet eloquently. Too beautiful to be called a simple survival mechanism. But the way the voice’s owner gripped the paper bag of mundane groceries, and the way the shoulders tensed when he turned told him everything he needed to know, and more.

There was nothing in the world that he could take for granted, not even the ground under his feet let alone the life he led. But that made some things all the more worth it.

“I’m home, Mum.”

 

Iris had remained in her bed since she arrived back home. Barely able to walk, she had jellied herself to her room and collapsed onto unused sheets and a fresh mattress. Not even a concussion could have knocked her out so efficiently.

But even then, she could not find herself completely losing consciousness. As chirping crickets traded places with birdsong, Iris lay in bed thinking—or at least trying not to. She kept her ears open to every footstep from beyond her door, every scratch and snippet of conversation. Slight chuckles and frustratingly quiet whispers.

The telephone rang, startling her oversensitive ears. Three rings later, it stopped, and a reposeful voice answered with a greeting of few words. The talk was hushed, interrupted by frequent silences and restive pauses. She heard the receiver clunk lightly back into place. Not long after, she heard a set of bare feet ventured down the hallway.

A soft knock at her door. Another one soon passed, but she could not find the voice in her to speak. After a third knock, she managed to force a grunt through her dormant throat.

Evalyn creaked the door open, poking her head through first. She had set her hair free, as was the custom in the house's walls. Her pyjamas, although still boxy in cut, reminded Iris that Evalyn was not as broad as her trench coat made her out to be. It was instances such as these which still caught Iris off guard.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, a tired tenderness to her voice.

“Mmm.”

Evalyn giggled, entering the room. She walked over, placing her feet as though she was treading on glass before she knelt beside her bed. “I got a call from Elvera.”

“Another job?” Iris asked, serious.

“No, god no. She’s not that cruel. She just called to tell me that everyone was accounted for. Kurael Farehn, the one we originally got commissioned to find, remember him?”

“The one you were talking to?”

“Yeah. The Police delivered him to his mother, so they’ll be alright. They’ll be alright now.”

Evalyn stroked Iris’s head, resting her own on the mattress next to her.

“You helped save them, Iris. You can be proud of that.”

…how had she saved them? What had she done that warranted praise? Colte and the others had found the hostages and brought them back to safety. Evalyn had fought off the hordes of Higher Order Armour while Iris—

Iris had retreated into her mind, met death, and succumbed to the power older than the end of life itself. She had—

They were good people.

“I killed them….”

“What...No, Iris!”

“I killed them!”

“Iris, no. Stop.”

“They were just trying to save people—”

“Iris! Calm down!”

“And I killed them! I—I….”

“Iris!”

Evalyn grabbed her, stopping Iris from retreating, feet kicking the covers as she tried to escape the reality she had created. Evalyn grabbed the little girl’s shoulders and forced her forward into her arms. Iris only continued to mutter as Evalyn held her tight.

“If I didn’t kill them.”

“Then the Spirit would’ve killed everyone before I could stop it. Even I couldn’t split my attention thirty different ways, Iris. Maybe what you did wasn’t all intentional, but you saved people that day.”

“But I killed—”

“You can’t save everyone, Iris. Please, learn that now,” Evalyn said, gripping the little girl tighter. Guilt. Shame. An act of pure sacrilege against everything the word Mother—or even Guardian—stood for. Evalyn knew this, but coming to terms with it was easier said than done.

“Colte said whatever I do is up to me. Good or bad,” the little girl muttered, voice hollow and teeth chattering.

“And Colte told me that anything isn’t the same as everything,” Evalyn said as the Ash Man’s first pupil. “You have to fight for something. One thing.”

“But I don’t want to—”

“Everyone has to, Iris. Everyone, especially us. Especially us.”

The weight of power, the control of almost godlike ability was a burden never meant for conscious beings. Iris had not learnt how to numb herself to such ideas yet, so Evalyn could only empathise.

Killing is killing, but if one had a reason to fight, one should go to any lengths to achieve it. Like a rabid animal, a horse with no peripheral vision, or a starved dog in the desert. That was the only way someone forced to fight could ever hope to live with themselves; to not see their existence as a burden on the world.

The wailing did not end that night, and even between the arms of the two she loved the most, the little seed of hatred lying haphazardly between the bristles of that hallway’s red carpet, finally sprouted.

Saving the ally was paramount, and killing was killing, terrorists or freedom fighters. That would be the currency of the world, the degenerate transaction of power between human and Spirit, human and human, Spirit and Spirit.

Until the day utopia begins. How long would Iris be waiting?