Axis V
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"Jorah, mind if I catch the train with you?” Axis was standing outside of Jorah’s again.
“You want to go to Elias?” she asked, wiping down the counter between her and Axis. “What for?”
“Not Elias actually. Junia. I want to talk to Bibi.”
“Far enough. And you can spill your slush on the way!”
***
“You can’t be serious.”
“I wish I wasn’t. Bibi’s good friend lived in Lazarenth. Maybe she’ll know something I don’t. Take care!” Junia was rapidly approaching.
Waving goodbye to Jorah, Axis slipped her bag back over her shoulder and dismounted the train. It was drizzling, a warm, misty rain that tickled the back of her neck. She rushed under an awning at the train station for a moment to escape the rain, taking in the familiar sights and sounds of her city. Yes, in a lot of ways Junia was similar to Persis, but she’d grown up here. Ran through the streets with her hair loose and tangled by the wind. Eaten at Zoe’s and played in the Autumn River. Helped her mother weave blankets occasionally—when she had to. And gone gallivanting across the entirety of Junia with her Bibi and Babu.
“Miss you, Babu,” she murmured.
Bibi lived close to the train station, conveniently. Accepting the inevitable frizzy, wet hair that would follow her trip, she left the safety of the awning, her bag tucked under her jacket, and jogged toward her grandmother’s townhouse.
The same cobblestones were under her feet as in Persis. Same tall houses so close they could be mistaken for extensions of each other. Same tan clothing Cir despised. But the smell and feel of the river were here. The humid blanket that so many found uncomfortable but she welcomed. The river actually ran through the town. Junia had somehow been built around the river—it cut through the walkways, roads, and even a few people’s businesses.
Bibi’s townhouse was glistening in the rain, the white paint shining as though it’d been freshly done. Axis rushed under the house’s small awning and placed her palm against the door’s metal sheet. It opened and she entered, dripping.
Once in the house, she released her hair from the bun, shaking it free and wincing as water sprinkled the floor.
“Bibi?”
“I expected you’d show up,” a voice called out from upstairs. “Give me a moment.”
“Ok, Bibi. Mind if I get a snack from the kitchen?”
“Go ahead. And you can grab a towel too and clean up the inevitable mess you made.”
“Yes, Bibi.”
She was snacking on fruit from the wooden bowl in the middle of the large oak table when Bibi strode in. She was closer to Cir in height, and her severely cut short black hair and long black eyelashes made her both intimidating and appear younger than she actually was.
“And Cir? Why isn’t he with you?”
“He had to report to the Concord today with Smoke.”
“I don’t think you came here for excuses. You were wondering about Weals, weren’t you. I don’t know where she is. She didn’t show up for lunch today. But I guess you know all that. Do you know where she is?”
“Uh, no.”
“What are Cir and Smoke reporting on today? I didn’t think it was common for them to need to report to the Concord.”
“It’s not, but they—”
Bibi, who had been rummaging through the kitchen, throwing dishes into the sink and watering her many plants—gifts from Cir—looked toward her suddenly, her dark-brown eyes sharp.
“Cir should be the one to tell me. If your Babu was still around, I wouldn’t be running around Lore without him.”
“But Babu’s gone, Bibi. And what was I supposed to do, sneak around and follow Cir to work? I have my own job to take care of!”
“Which you left early to visit me, hoping I would give you answers or sooth your conscious.” Bibi’s grin was triumphant. “The person you need to get answers from isn’t me. Although if you’d like to join me on my evening run…”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“No thanks. I got in plenty of running yesterday with Steele.”
“Now, there’s a girl who knows how to run! Good for you, Axis.”
“It wasn’t necessarily voluntary,” Axis muttered under her breath as she attacked the bundle of starberries clustered at the bottom of the bowl.
“You want to know where Weals went? Go find her. And then tell me all about it! I’ll be eagerly awaiting your return.”
Axis sighed, massaging her temples. “So you won’t help me at all?”
“Talk to Cir. You two make a decent team, you know. And here, take some fruit for the road.” Bibi shoveled some fruit into a food box and handed it to her before gesturing toward the door.
“You want me to leave already?” Axis fought to keep the whine out of her voice.
Bibi only smiled and walked Axis to the door, quickly redoing her bun and giving her a peck on the cheek.
“Tell Cir I love the star-crossed lover he sent me last week,” she said, looking over at the slender plant entwining the front-facing window fondly.
***
The return trip hadn’t been nearly as pleasant. The rain fell harder, it had gotten darker, and visiting Bibi had been useless.
Axis had gotten back to Persis three hours later—the train traveled in a ring, and while getting to Junia was only two stops away, getting back to Persis took hours.
“Babu wouldn’t have sent me back… in the rain! Didn’t even talk to me…” Axis growled in frustration and finished drying her hair with a towel. Cir still wasn’t back. After a warm shower, she was feeling much better. She was sitting at her desk, puzzling through the Outender markings she had seen the day before, when she heard the front door opening.
“Cir? Thank Lina, I missed you!”
“So Cir’s not back yet either? This is becoming a bit of a habit for them, isn’t it.” Steele’s voice. Axis took a deep breath to mask her disappointment and turned to face Steele, who was one of the few people with access to their house.
She strode over to Axis’s work desk and leaned over Axis’s shoulder.
“Deciphering?”
“Trying to. Can’t concentrate though. What would be taking them so long?”
“Not sure. Do you think their meeting with the Concord went south?”
“I guess it’s possible, but I talked to Cir about the meeting this morning and told him to be discreet. Not to mention what we saw yesterday.”
“But then what would they have had to report?”
Axis crinkled her nose. “I don’t know. If only they had a mistpad like you, then we’d be able to get ahold of them right now. Couldn’t you just track Smoke with your tag?”
“He took a different jacket today. The nice one. You know, wanted to impress the Eliasans or something.”
“Blasted bullets. Did you have a chance to look over the notes you took yesterday?”
Steele’s expression grew dark. “All my notes are gone. I checked first thing this morning and the entire folder I’d created on my observations had been deleted. Backups gone. No trace of who it was or how they got in. My mistpad is locked. I don’t know how anyone could have gotten in or out without my noticing.”
Axis wasn’t sure what everything Steele had said meant, but the missing notes didn’t need explanation.
“The Concord? Loreian rebels? Outenders?”
“The Concord has its own set of problems, but I’m not important enough to merit a search. And my mistpad is secure against common hackers. I haven’t heard of any Loreian rebels, and if there were, they likely wouldn’t have this kind of tech or anyone who knew how to use it. Technics, as you know, are rare.”
“Ok, so Outenders. Warped Outenders. Do you think they took Cir and Smoke too?”
“That wouldn’t make much sense, given that they could have done them in yesterday. Smoke told me about the ‘illusions’ they saw. Floating books. Spinning knives. Suspended candles. Reversing gravity itself. The creatures were playing with them, taunting them. Smoke and Cir were completely alone yesterday. It would have been the perfect chance to remove them if that was their goal.”
Axis was about to interject, but Steele continued, “So although I don’t think Outenders took either of our husbands, they very well could have wiped my notes. We just don’t know enough about them to know what they’re capable of.”
“Actually, there’s whole libraries about Outenders,” Axis interjected as Steele pulled over a chair from the kitchen table and sat down next to Axis.
“Really? Then why don’t we know anything?”
“They all contradict each other. At first I thought maybe some of the scholars were making things up or exaggerating their research to draw in followers, but you and I both saw those things yesterday. We were at the same place, at the same time, and yet we saw totally different things.”
She suddenly sat up straight. “Do you think they could have possibly?”
Before Steele had time to respond, Axis had unfolded her legs, leaped out of her chair, and rushed past the kitchen and her small reading nook by the kitchen window to her room. Yanking a cord, light cascaded over her slightly wrinkled bedsheets, small pile of books, and a neat pile of folded laundry she hadn’t gotten to stowing yet. Reaching under the mattress, she thrust her arm into the darkness and reached for her large stack of sketches from Cir. Multiple sketches were taped to the walls—her favorites—but she hadn’t had time to do more than add Cir’s most recent sketches to her collection before running off to work that morning.
Could they have changed the starstraight sketches too?
She didn’t bother sorting through the pile of drawings, taking the entire collection and jogging back to her desk where Steele was staring at her, her gray eyes wary.
“Cir was up all night sketching out some strange carvings and statues he noticed around the monastery. I only had a chance to glance at them this morning before running to the central library, but—”
“Have they changed?” she asked quickly, catching on to Axis’s assumption.
Axis didn’t bother responding—the sketches said plenty.
“Dark matter,” Steele growled.