Elvera stood and bowed, filing out of the meeting room with the rest of Geverde’s diplomatic entities. Well, except for one member recently deceased, who they had instead reported as being ill.

That day’s bargaining session with Vesmos’s diplomats had been tense for her side of the table. Opinions were split almost down the middle between questioning Vesmos about their missing member. Everything from his mole status to his early death in a Vesmos hideout were burning topics for that day.

The Vesmos side of the table was likely thinking something similar. Eight of their agents were killed in a single night, not as part of a mission but in a pre-emptive strike. They were likely wondering how Geverde’s intelligence had gotten wind of the place at all. Not to mention who had killed them and how.

Either side had new ammunition to rain upon the other, but thankfully for everyone, neither chose to do so.

Elvera strode through the winding corridors of the Capitol building with haste. After several such meetings, the route had ingrained itself into her muscle memory. She exited through the front entrance and began to make her way down the steps. But she stopped halfway, between the landing above her and the grande lawn below.

She looked up at the sky. Swirling clouds shifted ominously, like a premonition of what was about to come. The barrage balloons, ugly blotches marring the sky like blemishes on a gloomy face, did little to help the atmosphere. It still gave her pause whenever she saw them despite it not being the first time. They looked every bit the invader, even more so than the enemy fleet. The black ships on the maritime border were a distant, surreal threat. The barrage balloons were docile in comparison, yet they were ever present and demanded attention.

Elvera pulled back her sleeve and checked her watch. Sixteen thirty; curfew began in three and a half hours. It was just about enough time for some grocery shopping before returning home. She continued down the stairs until she reached the grass. She turned heading left and started toward the closest tram station. The damp grass stuck to her boots as she ignored the paved path, taking a shortcut over the lawn. The ground was wet, yet not enough to be muddy, typical of late autumn weather anywhere else in the world. In Geverde’s case, it just so happened to be the Queen’s fancy that particular day.

Elvera reached the station as a tram slowed and stopped at the platform. The nose-like lamp was shining despite the time of day, and the overhead lights flickered as it came to a stop.

Elvera scraped her boots against the ground before stepping on. She spotted a police officer by the front of the carriage and nodded at him. Elvera had noticed the city increasing its security to enforce the curfew. Even if the nightly lockdown had not started, the city was under constant vigilance. It was a strange symbol of limbo between war and peace. It felt as though the city had pulled all the stops short of firing the first shot.

Everyone was holding their breath, and it was suffocating.

The tram rocked side to side as it began to speed up. The streets weren’t busy, yet Elvera attributed it to the bad weather more than anything else. She saw lingering school children every so often, their distinctive uniforms blurry through the glass. She grabbed her sleeve, wiping off a thin layer of condensation to get a better look.

Excala State High, Martyr Reid College, Alfante Grammar. Harrowville was the one with the bright green uniforms, but Elvera remembered it as a boarding school. Maybe parents felt uneasy about leaving their children alone and had returned from their getaway mansions to care for them.

Positive thoughts. Railing the rich wasn’t going to help in any way.

The average height of the buildings fluctuated as the tram traversed through the neighbouring districts. Zoning restrictions were weak in Excala, and most of the city already stood by the time they were introduced. Yet the subtle change in buildings from commercial to residential, new to old, superfluous to subdued were obvious to an experienced observer.

The lights were shining in many windows, and almost every car had its headlights on. Their tires splashed through shallow puddles, coming out glistening on the other side. Through the faint beams, she saw raindrops refracting light before they reached the ground. They fell leisurely for the moment, but Elvera hoped to make it back before it got any worse.

“I usually like this weather too…”

“My daughter took the ferry this morning. She’s saying I should do the same before it’s too late.”

“That’s all I’ve been hearing from my neighbours; I’m almost glad they’re gone.”

“If it were just your neighbours, I wouldn’t be worried. But it’s the whole city.”

Elvera kept walking past the two middle-aged housewives, their lives so different it made her forget they were the same age as her. She reached the store counter and nodded to the clerk behind it.

“Welcome to Uley Combination Store; what can I do for you today?”

“Hi, uh, do you have a pen I can borrow? I’d like to write down a list.”

“Certainly,” the Beak said, pulling a pen from their apron pocket and finding a notebook behind the cash register.

“Thanks,” she said as she began to scribble down her order. The counter stretched around the entire store from corner to corner. The product was stacked in tiers behind it, everything from meats to breads to vegetables. Lesser products—items that went for a few tens of Ixa or less—were stacked on low shelves throughout the rest of the store. They all seemed to be things the owner could risk getting stolen if only to make the place seem less barren.

She handed the diverse list of ingredients back to the clerk, who glanced over it before nodding. “I’ll be back with everything soon,” they said, taking a paper bag and fluffing it. Elvera watched them leave the counter, but she did not do the same. Her body, tired as it was, refused to move a muscle once it had found a second of stillness. The same had been true when she got off the tram. Her job involved a lot of sitting, and she was finding it harder and harder to remember to move as of late.

She glanced behind her and saw the two ladies step outside and open umbrellas. The sound of the rain gradually picked up volume and quickly drowned out their voices.

“Do you sell umbrellas?” she asked the clerk.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“They’re by the door, eight hundred Ixa each.”

She pushed her elbows off the counter and floated to the other end of the store, passing trinkets, stationery, and cheap tea as she went.

“You police?”

“No,” she said, picking an umbrella from a bin of twelve. “Military.”

“Military now?” she heard the clerk say, followed by the crinkling of the paper bag. “I didn’t know the war broke out already.”

“No, not yet. You’re still right to do business.”

“That’s good to hear. You from around here?”

“No, I do my shopping on the other side of town. I’m staying with someone that comes here, though, red hair and tattoo on the cheek.”

She turned around and saw the clerk pause and scratch their mask. “No, I’d remember a tattoo on the face.”

“She probably doesn’t go shopping then. It’s the man with the black hair and the mean-looking eyes. Probably hyper-specific about his orders, too.”

“Ah! Mr Maxwell, yes. He’s a pilot, is he not?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s he doing?” the clerk asked, returning to the counter with a full bag of groceries.

“All right. The schedule’s a bit hectic, but I’m sure you figured that one out yourself.”

“Yeah,” the clerk sighed, punching numbers into the cash register as Elvera watched them appear on the cylindrical counter. “Two thousand seven hundred and forty,” they said as the machine pinged. Elvera found her wallet and sifted through it, pulling out the coins she needed to receive a clean note as change.

“It’s good work you’re doing for us, I know it,” the clerk said. “Ain’t nothing going to happen as long as we’ve got people like you around.”

She gave a stifled grin and a small nod before taking the bag and leaving.

“Citizens of Excala. Be aware. Curfew starts. Eight o’clock tonight. All who do not comply. Will be arrested. And questioned. Citizens of Excala…”

The sluggish public announcement played on repeat as Elvera waited for a tram. The paper bag was heavy enough that she wanted to sit down, but the seats behind her were already occupied. A mother watched over her two children, one rowdier than the other. She barely heard their chatter over the rain, but it was sweet, even with a lack of context. They were talking about something trivial, maybe the latest episode of a children's radio drama.

She looked down the street and saw a pair of students walking towards the stop under the cover of two umbrellas. White blouses, grey skirts, and dark red accents. It was Elvera’s high school, Excala East Secondary. They were chatting unevenly, one much louder than the other, yet not at all in a way that suggested a power dynamic. One was simply taking the lead, and the other was perfectly content with listening.

She watched the two walk past, perhaps a little too hard.

“Can I help you?” the loud girl asked; she was attractive, with good posture and short brown hair. Her face suggested she was spooked, but not enough to refrain from confronting a stranger.

“Nothing, sorry. I just went to your school is all,” she said, smiling at her and her friend, a Beak with a rose engraved on her mask.

“Oh, I see,” the girl said, turning away. Elvera watched them go but couldn’t help herself.

“Is the school okay?” she called. “I mean, is everything still normal?”

The girl turned around and smiled. “It’s all right; classes are in session. We’re just being told to go straight home, and all our excursions have been cancelled.”

She straightened herself, clacked her heels together and gave a sloppy salute. “It’s all okay, Ms Army Woman,” the girl reported. Elvera smiled to the point she felt her skin wrinkle around her eyes. She saluted back and watched the girls leave, the confident one giggling while her friend scolded her.

Elvera looked up at the sky, wondering when the rain would stop. She wondered when the people of the city would not have to live undercover anymore. For a brief moment, she thought about the city in a way she had not in a very long time.

She opened her umbrella and left the bus stop’s cover.

There was a view in the city; a view that she had fallen for so hard that she had spent all her savings on it as a young woman. Eighteen and fresh out of high school, she had begun to look for an apartment. A combination of inheritance and minimum wages had managed to buy her a small room in a sleepy part of town. Slightly worn was one way to put it, but for a first house, she had not found much issue with it.

Her first morning in her empty house, she had woken up on a mattress with no bed frame, her Defense Academy uniform hanging from a windowsill. The mosaic window scattered the morning sunshine across her room, and she had yet to open it for the first time.

For as long as she could remember, she felt suffocated in the city, restrained to a life in her small corner. She was an only child and a daughter, facts that led her mother and father to develop an insufferable parenting style. She loved them, but she had chosen a career path more out of spite than anything else.

The city was just that, somewhere an extraordinary number of people lived. Yet when she opened the window, she found a view of the entire city waiting for her, as if it was some last resort to get her to fall in love with it. It worked.

Three years from then, she would meet Percy and Florence Hardridge and four years from then, Evalyn would be born. Twenty-two years from then she’d meet her goddaughter, and thirty-two years later, she’d find herself with a god-granddaughter. A petite and peculiar child—a sign of things changing in both her and the world around her.

But the view remained, still beckoned her to give the city all her love once more. No matter how many times she renovated and no matter how little the apartment resembled its past self, the view stayed the same.

She stood there, groceries in hand, back home for the first time in over a fortnight. It felt quiet, achingly empty; the thought that, for so long, her life had been so silent pained her to reflect on. She had learned so much about being close to someone in particular instead of hearing fleeting conversations in passing. She had learned the love most people associated the word with, and it had taken over her life.

But the view still remained, the reminder of the duty she had given herself. She used to live on the perch, the outpost atop the city wall, looking down on citizens and enemies alike. She had seen the rest of the world and it had only made her fondness for Excala grow.

Autumn, her favourite season. She had almost forgotten how beautiful it looked.

The world wasn’t changed by people like her. Looking back on what she had worked so hard to protect, that sentence now pained her. She wanted least to pick and choose between family and her home.

‘What will it be?’ it seemed to ask. What would it be if she helped raise a powerful enemy of the kingdom? No one would note her good intentions or her love then. They would scold her and look down on her for not indoctrinating the weapon to their side. They would ask why she had been too human, why she had allowed the ticking time bomb a choice.

They would ask her if she really loved her country.

The door slowly closed behind her, and she turned around.

“You crying?” Evalyn asked.

“Am I?” Elvera said, wiping her eye.

“Marie, you okay?”

“Why are you here?” she asked, only just noticing the tears in her nostrils.

“I figured since you’ve been so busy, I've been coming here every few days to clean the place. As thanks, you know. For holding the fort and keeping Iris entertained. Are those the groceries I asked for?”

Elvera smiled, “I was just thinking about her.”

“What, Iris?” Evalyn said, placing her shoes by the door and pulling off her damp trench coat. “What about her?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it hits me, you know? The fact that she’s going to have to make some big choices soon.”

“I know the feeling,” Evalyn smiled, taking the groceries off her and leaving them on the kitchen counter. She walked over to the window, and her hair fluttered in the wettish wind. Even with the storm outside, neither could bear to close the window and shut out the view. “Sometimes it keeps me up at night, thinking about what’ll happen to her if she butts heads with the kingdom, or the whole world for that matter.”

“What would you do?” Elvera asked, turning to her and stepping closer.

“I’d like to think I’d support her. I don’t believe she’d destroy anything out of malice or for no good reason. It’d be hypocritical of me to criticise whatever direction she picks. But I guess…”

Evalyn turned around, meeting Elvera’s gaze and speaking her mind as if they were connected. “I guess my loyalties don’t lie with the world, do they, Marie?”

“No, I guess not,” she chuckled weakly.

“Hey,” Evalyn cooed, coming closer and embracing her godmother. “She won’t turn out like that, okay? This country convinced me to stay by its side, and I’m sure it’ll do the same with her. And if not, I can always slap her on the wrist.”

“I won’t condone violence,” Elvera said, wrapping her arms around Evalyn.

“You won’t have to choose between us and this view. I promise.”