“I can’t believe we did it,” Kelly wheezed, as she slammed into the passenger seat, careful not to aggravate the already burned skin on her back. The Guard Jet was already lifting away from the parking lot. As it turned, she briefly spotted the top of Jase’s head. “He’s crazy! He’s going to get himself killed. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I did,” Domrik said, pushing the Augmentor Bow against her until she grasped it.

The fake bow was still hanging around her torso. She took it off and held them together as a pair between her legs. “I didn’t hear you. Did you cloak that from me?”

“It was telempathic.”

“How did you manage that at a time like this?” she asked. She knew the basics of perceiving other’s thoughts. It required the utmost clarity of intention, the opposite of what she’d experienced over the last hour.

“It simply needed to be done.” He looked back as the parade of police cars approached, sirens blaring. They did not slow near the car. It was invisible to them. “Talking would have taken too much time. We sensed the action that needed taking. It is a huge risk, with potential for huge reward. If we can discover where this rogue craft came from, we can alert Hector and other public officials.”

“A Guard Jet that can cloak itself,” she said, amazed. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Ridgemire strike, does it?”

“Common technology does not mean common source, but I can’t rule it out. What’s more concerning is their partial piercing of our cloaks. It clearly isn’t perfect, but they sensed something. The three of us would be dead if they could pierce it completely.”

The car rocked gently from the turbulence of the passing police cars. Domrik grabbed the steering wheel, his finger hovering over the ignition button.

Kelly looked at him curiously. “Weren’t you using a higher frequency illusion?”

He chuckled. “I doubt it. I was using my fight-or-flight response to make the illusion more stable. It was likely a mixture of higher and lower frequencies. Who knew how that affected their detection mechanisms?”

After the first stream of police cars ended, Domrik started the car and carefully navigated the streets of Ridgemire. An invisible car not using headlights at nighttime was a traffic hazard for everyone involved. Kelly tried to keep watch for oncoming cars or pedestrians at intersections, but her back began to throb with pain as the adrenaline wore off. She could not bear to lean against the backrest.

She brought a tentative hand to the back of her neck. The lightest graze with the tip of her finger sent a shock through her body and tears to her eyes. Before long, every vibration of the car on the road was aggravating. She wasn’t sure what she preferred, the dread before the mission or the agony afterward.

Domrik kept a concerned eye on her as he sped back to the studio. She wanted to hold a conversation, but the pain sapped her focus. She kept her weight on the bows. The muscles in her back were tender from the blast as well. She remembered the vivid red sparks spraying past her head on all sides. Her ears still rang from the explosion. In the back of her mind, she was thankful for the reactive armor. It had saved her life, but at a price.

Halfway through the return trip, she started to get light-headed. That was when she realized she wasn’t breathing. Even the smallest inhale ignited a web of pain across her back. She relented when Domrik urged her to breathe, and experienced relief and agony all at once. She found that subsequent breaths weren’t as painful, but still bordered on the edge of torture.

She settled for staring down out the passenger window, watching the headlit pavement make lines in her vision. Her mind created shapes out of the blurred motion, trying to find patterns in the chaotic motion. She could never stare for too long because of the tears blurring her vision. She knew Domrik was going several kilometers over the speed limit, but it already felt like they had been traveling for hours.

At some point, she worked up the bravery to do a cursory inquiry of her own mind. It wasn’t just the physical pain that made her cry, it was the bleak future she saw ahead of her. How could she keep this secret from her friends and family after such an obvious injury? Would she lose her job? Would they discover that she had helped out with the heist? Would she need nanotech to heal her back? Sometimes the procedure went wrong. Nanotech healing was only a decade old, and she had been the witness to horror stories of botched procedures and the resulting lifelong paralysis. And the expense! She made good money, but it could take years to pay off the medical bill.

Finally, the car started slowing down and taking gentle turns. Kelly envisioned the route to the studio in her mind. She was too exhausted to look up and see where they were. She gripped the bows for stability and found that she could faintly sense the presence of the Augmentor Bow, more than Domrik’s. It was a soothing oasis in the midst of her barren suffering.

The car stopped. She opened the door and stumbled out. Domrik was already coming around the front of the car to support her. He took the bows from her and ushered her into the studio while supporting her around his shoulders.

He guided her toward the padding in the main training room. “On the floor.”

She eased herself down and lied on her belly. Domrik unclipped her back armor and removed it. She put her cheek on the padding and looked at him. “How bad is it?”

He knelt and scanned her back with a gentle gaze. “On the positive side, there’s no bleeding. Do you have any internal pain?”

“Not yet. My skin burns too much. Will we be able to heal it?”

“Do you believe you can?”

Kelly hesitated. The dread in her chest insisted she was permanently damaged, and she felt that asserting the opposite would simply make it worse.

“Let me put it another way,” Domrik said. “Do you believe you can get out of the way enough so that the Aetheric body can interface more deeply with your physical body?”

“Yes,” she said, grateful for the change of perspective.

“Are you out of the way now?”

Kelly did her best to shake her head in the awkward position it lay. “Still in sympathetic response.”

He nodded. “You know what to do.”

And she hated it. Her breaths had been quick and shallow to minimize the pain. All she wanted to do was to curl into a ball and disappear. Her body trembled as she took her first slow, deep breath through her nose. The fire in her back reignited. She tried to mentally count the seconds for the breath hold. Onetwothree!

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Her exhale was less painful, though uncontrolled. It was far easier to hold the exhale. Beginning the next inhale was like lifting a car. It turned into a gasp of pain, but she had the presence of mind to hold the inhale. She settled into a steady rhythm of inhaling, holding, exhaling, holding.

Kelly closed her eyes and focused on relaxing. She released one arm at a time, then let go of her legs. Her abdomen was stubborn, but when it finally relaxed, she realized her arms were tense again. Her legs were already tightening. She could only relax the area of her focus. Her breathing quickened as panic welled in her chest. She needed to relax in order to heal, but the pain was causing her to tense up.

“I can’t,” she whined. The words leapt from her mouth unbidden. She gaped at the sound of her own voice. It mirrored the desperation she had witnessed all too often at the Haven Center. Patients would arrive panicked and in need of attention. She would have them do deep breathing exercises to help calm them down. Many times, she had to remind them to keep breathing. She remembered wondering how people could forget her instructions so quickly. She resolved in this moment to never get frustrated with her patients ever again. It would be impossible after this.

“You don’t need to relax physically,” Domrik said. “Relax internally.”

Kelly shifted her attention to her emotions. The fear simultaneously recoiled and lashed out. She flinched and instinctively suppressed the fear, but not before sensing something else underneath. In the midst of torment, her curiosity was piqued. She refocused on the fear and identified all the worries she’d identified before. They hadn’t moved or changed much. They were being held together by something deeper in the darkness. Or rather, it was so close to her mind’s eye it had escaped detection until now.

Once she identified it, there was a moment of pure shock. Then, the shards of fear broke apart and dissolved in a torrent of anger. She sobbed as heat surged through her body. All muscles tightened at once in a final effort to resist. The anger continued to build until it found an outlet in the form of her vocal cords.

Words erupted from her mouth with incredible force. “Fuck you!”

Domrik flinched slightly, then smirked. “Excuse me?”

“We could have died back there.”

“I gave you several opportunities to back out.”

“You could have died!”

“But I didn’t.”

“But you could have!”

Domrik paused. “I see. Feel better now?”

She looked internally. The releasing of anger created a small void. In that tiny space was just enough room to relax, to expand. Fear and pain still swept through her body, but they had lost their edge somewhat, dulled by a background softness. She felt it more directly than before. Her breathing became relaxed. Her limbs stopped their tremors and felt as though they might start sinking into the floor.

“Yeah,” she breathed, sniffling.

Domrik moved her arm and straightened it out level with her shoulders. He hovered both his hands over her tricep. “We’ll start with your arm. Ready?”

She closed her eyes in response. His presence was more prominent, now that she started to sense her own. The subtle currents of her Aetheric body responded to this recognition. She directed them to her arm. Energy began to swirl there. It was like someone was shining a gentle light. It was a soothing heat.

Second by second, the intensity increased, until it suddenly sprang up and connected with Domrik’s own energy. Pain flared over that area, forcing a surprised shriek from Kelly. There had been no build-up or warning, simply a perception of clear pain. She noticed Domrik had hissed at the same moment of her yelp.

She breathed deeply against the pain, using the Aetheric connection as an anchor. With each inhale, the energy charged up. With each exhale, the energy released into the connection, the pain flaring. After a minute of this cycle, the discomfort dropped away. The energetic currents settled.

Domrik touched her arm where it used to hurt. “Kelly, feel that? You did it!”

She allowed herself a smirk, but shuddered at the thought of having to repeat the experience for the other patches of burnt skin. Domrik moved to the other side, and they repeated the same experience. After both arms were healed, they focused on her back. Here, the pain took on a new level of intensity. Her back spasmed and convulsed. She could not contain the involuntary wailing, though it was a comfort to hear Domrik growling in pain beside her.

Previously, she might have blacked out, but she found the experience somehow more tolerable. There was a growing sense of softness within, a softness meeting the pain yet not destroyed by it. From behind the discomfort emerged a paradoxical beauty of perception. Her body twitched from the pain, yet the gaps in between those movements contained joy.

As the healing continued, the residual fear lessened. She felt like laughing from the absurdity of the experience. Maybe it was the absurdity of her previous fears, all of which were allayed by her own abilities.

When it was finished, she rolled onto her back, marveling at the feeling of flexibility she had regained. “Wow.”

Domrik was wiping the tears from his face. “I second that. It was excellent practice.”

She looked at him. “Thank you.”

“Always,” he said with a smile. “But remember, it was you who did the main work.”

“I’m still mad at you though.”

He rolled his eyes and stood. “Yeah? I have an idea for that.”

“And what would that be?” She stood and rolled her shoulders. She put a hand on her neck and found smooth skin. There was no evidence of her injuries of minutes past.

Domrik grabbed both bows from the floor and held one in each hand. “These.”

“What about them?” she asked, folding her arms.

“We built a pretty good fake,” he observed, looking at the bows. “Which one is the real one?”

“Do you not know?”

“Oh, I know which one it is. I want to see if you can tell.”

They looked nearly identical. One of the bowstrings was slightly more reflective than the other, and the white stone arms had a sparkling texture. She pointed to the bow in his right hand. He raised it a couple centimeters. “This one?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He dropped the other bow and grabbed her chosen bow with both hands, one at the top and one at the bottom. He turned it so that the bowstring was closer to her than the arms. “I want you to make the sharpest, deadliest Aetheric blade you can, and cut the bowstring in half.”

“Why? Won’t it break?”

“If it’s the real one, it won’t.”

She narrowed her eyes at the bow. “But it’s only metal.”

“Only metal? Do you want to test that hypothesis?”

Kelly looked at her combat gloves. She had forgotten to take them off. Both crystals had plenty of charge left. She put her fist out to the side and manifested a blade half a meter in length. The electrical pain in the channeling of the Red Aether was a tickle compared to what she experienced earlier. She swung it decisively through the bowstring. There was no resistance, as usual, but she was shocked to find that the bowstring was unharmed.

She reached out and touched it. This was no illusion. She created another blade and held it against the surface of the bowstring. Her eyes grew wider as the seconds passed. Metal would have heated to near-melting after that much exposure. The Augmentor Bow showed no sign of heating.

She canceled the Aetheric blade and felt the bowstring again. It wasn’t even warm. Domrik beamed. “It’s the real thing! Some legends are based in truth.”

Her astonished gaze bounced between him and the bow. “How? It should have heated up. That was impossible!”

“Whoever created it used a method of creation unknown to humankind. My guess is that it has something to do with the Aetheric body. No other inanimate object I’ve encountered has a presence like this.”

“Do you know how to use it? Where are the arrows?”

“Nope, and I don’t know,” he said, gripping the bowstring and trying to pull it like he would a regular bow. It didn’t budge. “This thing makes zero sense.”

Kelly gestured to the bow on the floor. “What are we going to do with that one?”

“We’ll keep it. We need to protect the Augmentor Bow at all costs. A decoy will help.”

“Aside from the indestructibility, you haven’t demonstrated its worth.”

“In time, we’ll see what it can do.” He looked around to find the wall clock. “We’ve had an eventful evening. It’s past your bedtime.”

She rolled her eyes, blushing. “Shut up.”

“I’m not wrong, am I?”

They locked eyes, his charming gaze coaxing a smile out of her. “No, you’re not.”

He spread his arms wide and they embraced. Part of her still wanted to lecture him about his recklessness, but there was too much gratitude left over from her healing experience. She let it go. She was sure she could come up with more reasons to be upset with him.

It was only a matter of time.