Saia woke up. She immediately expanded her domain to include the whole room she was in and recognized the hostel's platform where the guards had been keeping the prisoner. She realized two days had passed since she was deactivated.
A birdguard was standing next to her, trident pressed against her chest, where her sphere was. She was laying on her back, limbs a bit open as if she was still standing on a moving platform. She slowly lifted herself to a sitting position, the blue plumes on the birdguard's neck tensing at her every movement. She looked at the weapon again: now that she had fought some wind spirits, she doubted it could actually be fast enough to hurt her. She'd still have to use all of her focus to stop it, though, which would give them enough time to deactivate her before she could do anything else.
She'd pointedly avoided turning her eyes toward Serit, even if she'd seen them immediately, standing between her and the entrance with another birdguard by their side. They weren't looking at her either, gaze lost in a corner of the room.
She examined the area inside her domain in a half-hearted attempt to look for her shard. It wasn't there, of course. And something else was missing.
Her shoulder was broken. They’d cut a hole in the stone of her body, scattering fragments on the floor of the room. Some had fallen inside the cavity that was now visible from the outside. The cavity that had contained Aili's shard, now empty.
“Why?” she yelled, her voice exploding from every corner of the room at once.
Serit flinched. The birdguard's hands trembled around the trident, as if they'd been about to shoot.
“It was necessary,” Serit only said, finally looking at her.
“Necessary for what? Control me better? Or…” Her viss buzzed faster as she draw the connection between their words and the last memories she had. “Or to get another sphere? Do you want to give her to the elders?”
Serit sighed.
“We had a deal: you would protect me without harming me, or get deactivated. You tried to hurt me, you've been deactivated. I think I've been fair, since the representatives would just leave you asleep and harvest your viss with our machines.”
Saia didn't miss the fact they had avoided the question. It was an answer in itself.
“You love your deals and whatnot, but all the ones you've made were in your favor. I had no other choice but to accept. How's that fair?”
Serit looked to the side and didn't answer. The direction of their gaze made Saia realize there was another person in the room, hidden under a bundle of cloth. She expanded her domain to look underneath. It was the rebel prisoner. Dead.
“Why did you kill him?” she asked, forceful enough that the guards tensed again.
Serit shook their head.
“It was the healer. The hostel owner called Urnit, and I didn't tell the guards he was untrustworthy. He disappeared after the last visit, but first he must have given the prisoner some kind of slow-acting poison.”
Saia looked at the corpse. It was still full of viss, but it wasn't flowing anymore, shining in small clots connected by broken strands. She noticed that one of them had a different imprint from the rest. It was small and inside the man's stomach. She was glad the disgust she felt was only a thought that couldn’t become a physical reaction when she pushed her view closer, into the prisoner's body.
There was a crumpled piece of paper inside the stomach. Saia looked closer and twisted her vision to follow its shape, until she had read the whole message:
I heard your offer. We'll let you know the answer.
Saia retracted from that twisted space. She wasn't sure anymore about collaborating with them, after they had killed one of their own.
Serit paced up and down in front of the entrance, then stopped right beside it with cross arms, fingers nervously tapping on an elbow as they spied the outside. Saia observed them and the guards, wondering why she had been deactivated, what mistake she had made. Serit hadn't touched the small light nor reached for any other object, she was sure of that. There weren't guards inside the room or in the immediate surroundings.
Her mind was going in circles, so she decided to start from the beginning, examining what had happened instant by instant.
They had entered the platform alone. She had started the argument shortly after, but the platform had kept moving the entire time, so they were quite far from the place where they'd met the elders and not close enough to the bottom of the city, where the birdguards were.
Then she'd pushed Serit to the floor. If someone had actually seen her doing that, they would have deactivated her immediately, but almost two minutes had passed from that moment to her deactivation.
She observed the birdguard standing next to her. She knew they were tasked with protecting Serit. It wasn't difficult to imagine one of them following the platform while it was hoisted toward the meeting. She'd seen how fast they could move while climbing, and Ifse's guards knew not to disturb them. She also remembered how they had known that the platform used to kidnap Serit was empty without needing to check the inside. Maybe they could see through objects, like gods with their domains.
But that didn't explain how they had reacted when she'd poured her feelings onto Serit using her viss. And there was still the question of why they didn't deactivate her immediately, the instant she pushed Serit down. A delay in communication, maybe, since she knew the birdguards didn't have the shard, but plenty of small lights to communicate like the one in Serit's pocket.
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On the other hand, she remembered the guards being lightning-quick in deactivating her after she escaped the warehouse at Iriméze, and it was too dark for them to see her. Which in turn made the communication at the arena even quicker, if they knew not to deactivate her when she’d stepped away from Serit.
She pondered those facts for a moment, then decided to go on with her reconstruction of what had happened.
Once Serit was on the floor, she had decided to scare them to find out how they communicated with whoever had the shard. At that moment she had started to draw the pattern for slashing. Serit had panicked and tried to take out the sphere of light. Only some instants had passed between that gesture and her deactivation. So maybe her mistake, the trigger that had set off the guards, was closer to that moment.
The memories of her days above the clouds were swimming in her head. She felt like she was turning in one direction and another to try and see the whole picture, but some details were always out of her grasp, leaving her to fumble for a firmer hold.
She focused on the guards' blindfolds again, the only thing besides the blue plumes that caught her attention. It was to protect their eyes, Serit had said, and yet they were always wearing them, even inside a dark room. The only time she'd seen them without it was while giving chase to Serit’s kidnappers. They hadn't seemed debilitated by the morning light.
Then one of the birdguards had left to reassure the wind spirits, while the other had remained with them. Only at that point they had put the blindfold back on, even if their colleague hadn't. Probably, Saia had guessed at the time, because the light of her viss shining through her body was too intense.
She was hit by a realization, a cold wave plunging her into the water: the birdguards could see viss.
The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became: they were part of the hunting division, which meant they could hunt birds or sprites in a sky covered in clouds because they could spot their viss no matter how many obstacles were in the way. They knew Serit and the rebels weren't inside the tent because they didn't see the viss moving inside their bodies. They could perceive the energy flowing from her to Serit during the argument. They had seen her viss forming the pattern for slashing, or at least a pattern they didn’t know, and had deactivated her to save Serit.
Not only that, but they were probably the ones tasked with surveilling her even at Iriméze. They could know where she was even from the top of the city, since the concentrated viss of her sphere was as bright as a small sun to them.
She wouldn't have been surprised to know that Héshe had kept one of them close enough to see whether she was cheating, during the match.
Still, Serit had a way to communicate with them, probably the small light they always carried inside their pockets. Otherwise, they'd have stopped her during the first trial with the Doves, or in one of the training sessions that followed. Since Serit’s viss wasn't as bright as her own from afar, it probably didn't matter whether she was next to them or not, as long as she moved in a prearranged area. Once she stepped outside of it without the guards being alerted beforehand, they would deactivate her without asking for anyone’s permission.
She imagined they could see the specks of viss floating free inside her domain if they were close enough, even if they weren't so bright they could be spotted from a distance. That meant they could avoid her domain easily, making sure the shard was always out of her reach. They could have kept hidden forever, flying away with their sprites every time she approached too much. But as much as their eyesight was good, it couldn't cover all the distance from Iriméze to Ifse, so three of them had to join the expedition. Since that moment, two had always followed her and Serit, while the third hung back. The first two to distract her and slow her down, in case she decided to attack, and send a quick message to the third, who then contacted whoever had the shard back at Iriméze.
It made sense that they would follow her and Serit from afar when they'd been summoned by the elders, since they could see her from a distance and move freely inside the city. They’d noticed what had happened and given the alert.
She'd made a huge mistake, yet another huge mistake, and now they had Aili's shard.
“Can I enter?” Filsun's voice came from the outside.
Serit gestured to the guard beside them to move the body aside and to the other to let Saia stand. The trident was retracted with reluctance.
“Yes, come in,” they said.
Filsun floated inside. The simple white cloth that wrapped his body almost didn't move, pressed down as it was by the two bags he was carrying. The straps hung diagonally, crossing over his chest.
“My wife and I are ready to depart.”
“Depart?” Saia asked, looking at Serit.
“I thought he was still a suspect,” she added in their ears.
“We're going back home, Saia,” Serit replied.
She raised her chin.
“Iriméze isn't my home.”
They didn't answer, taking out a letter from their pocket instead and holding it open for her to read.
Engineer Serit,
I'm sorry to announce that your expedition will be cut short. You will return to Iriméze immediately and without further discussion. Representative Izha has returned, despite the odds wanting him to be gone for far longer, and has news that can't be told by letter. Unrest has been brewing in the city, since many more people who should have returned from the rain-voyage didn't, despite more than six months passing from their departure. We're declaring them dead as it's customary with such a big delay, but it's causing upheavals. We need all of the citizens inside the city and the sphere secure in our hands.
Representative Héshe
Saia nodded, and Serit folded the letter.
“I’m coming too,” Filsun said. “Serit has told me about the elders' plan. The resistance is under-equipped, so they'll try a direct fight. They'll most certainly lose and be torn apart, and I don't want to share their fate.”
They gave Serit a glance full of guilt. They stared back at him, impassible, but Saia could feel the tinge of contempt in their viss. And something else, more akin to pain.
“My wife will leave with you,” Filsun continued. “I’ll go by myself, and if the guards don't capture me first, we'll meet again at Iriméze. I'll stay in Hilon's house until she returns.”
The last words were trembling, uncertain. Saia remembered that Hilon had rained recently.
“Let's hope for the best,” Filsun concluded, forcefully cheerful.
He squeezed Serit and Saia's shoulders, then left the room.
“The other participants of the expedition don't know anything about you,” Serit said quietly. “I’ve told them you've met an old friend and spent the last two nights at her house. Please play along.”
Saia shook her head in disbelief.
“I don't know how you can expect my help again.”
“I thought you were about to kill me!” they shouted while stepping forward. “They told me you were preparing to attack while I was pinned to the ground.”
“It was just to scare you.”
"Easy for you to say, now that I'm in control. How am I supposed to know what your intentions were? Dealing with you is terrifying, knowing you can easily kill me in an instant.”
They stepped back and breathed deeply, keeping their gaze fixed on her.
“I just took extra precautions. Can you really blame me?”
It was Saia's turn to step forward, the guards immediately grabbing their tridents.
“Can you really blame me?” she hissed.
They endured each other’s stare for an instant. Then, Serit turned without a word and left the room.