Second and third periods passed over Iris’s head like a light breeze, not imparting anything of significance but stimulating her enough it made dosing off frustratingly difficult. Mathematics consisted of little more than a brief overview of the year’s work, but Iris already foresaw that there’d be nothing she’d even consider challenging. Topic after topic was already familiar to her, albeit not intimately. Rather than learning, it’d be a process of recalling. That was assuming she’d stay longer than her contract required, which she vehemently refused to even think about.
History was shaping up to be equally as tedious in its content, but unfortunately, her luck regarding her teachers had stopped with her other classes. The beaky-nosed old lady headed their class, and she had seemed to tunnel-vision on Iris the moment she took the lectern. Beak-lady had refused to air out dirty laundry in the middle of class, but that was simply clearing an already low bar; at least her pettiness didn’t openly obstruct her professionalism. Again, Iris prayed she’d be gone before it did.
The bell rang once more, and the courtyard outside flooded with activity despite the layer of snow. Iris was beginning to see where the subtle differences between the various courts arose. Like clans, once a student was placed in a court, they rarely left besides select specialised classes, of which she assumed juniors took none. Everyone from bright-eyed seventh graders to the most jaded of twelfth graders all called Iris’s particular court home, one she now understood to be named Tyrren Court after co-founder Fergus Tyrren, born in 1392 and died—
The golden plaque in the court hall had a lot written on it. In fact, many gold plaques lined the halls, each outlining names, dates and short biographies of famous overachievers who once walked the same halls. She counted two world-class athletes, five inventors, seven politicians—including a Prime Minister, and three celebrated literary authors. No Witches or Wizards, though, but Iris knew that if they had been celebrated, they would’ve shown up every other memorial.
She got up to leave, at least somewhat excited to explore the next court over or at least find a quiet place to continue penning the letter she had started. 'Dear Alis' was as far as she had gotten before the school bell had drawn her back to class, not that she had also spent too long sitting in silence, ruminating over what exactly to write about. It felt as though the type of letter written as days went by rather than a summary of everything that had happened until that point. She had noticed the two distinct types, the former often being longer, disjointed and rambling while the other was anything but.
But before she could leave for the door.
“Hardridge,” a voice called. She turned, recognising it as Crestana’s, “where are you going?”
The contingent of girls surrounding her seemed to all snap their attention to Iris, the girl with white hair and an incorrect uniform they had all but forgotten about since that initial expression. They stared at her with concerned looks as though wondering what significance this girl held to anyone, if at all.
“Another court,” Iris answered before moving to leave again.
“Why?” came another question, stopping her in her tracks once more.
“Because I’m bored.”
Crestana sighed, all the while managing to keep a curt smile through her disappointment. She stood up and rounded her desk, pushing past her escorts and approaching Iris. “Come with me,” she commanded, taking the lead.
Iris watched Crestana leave the room, wondering if she had any obligation to follow her and do what she said. But then she remembered the contract she had signed herself and cursed under her breath. She left the classroom soon after, following the swaying of Crestana’s school-appropriate low ponytail as they traversed the hallway. Her pace was quick, quicker than what Iris would expect from someone simply wanting to chat, and her manner of walking was deliberate, confident in its direction and stride. She was being taken somewhere, and more curious about exactly where she was being led rather than why.
“What’s with that jacket?” Crestana asked, sliding past two giggling senior boys, not bothering to even face Iris while she talked.
“It’s my favourite jacket,” Iris asked, slipping past the same two boys, noticing them sparing a moment from their laughing to glance at her attire. “I always wear it.”
“I feel like we all grew out of that behaviour years ago,” Crestana replied. “But who am I to judge? It suits you.”
She turned a corner and into a stairwell where another stained-glass artwork overlooked their descent. A human in medieval apothecary attire, face obscured by shaggy, blonde hair, shaking hands with what looked to be the Queen. Her figure and her clothes remained unchanged since the last time Iris had spoken to her. But shaking hands with a lowly human was something she could never picture her Majesty doing.
They reached the bottom floor, stepping onto the stone pathway encircling the flat, grass courtyard. Unlike the administration building, Tyrren Court opened its common space for use however its residents saw fit. But joining the students chatting between bites of lunch was not their end goal either, and only served to make Iris hungrier. Elliot had given her money, but she didn’t know how or where to use it.
Crestana stopped somewhere Iris had walked past on her previous lunch break, Tyrren Court sparring gym. She opened the door and held it for Iris, who stepped inside and turned on the lights. It was a wide-open space, the width of a classroom and the length of two. Windows ran down the length of both, but wooden shutters kept the sunshine from streaming in, hence the lights.
“You’re my bodyguard?” Crestana asked rhetorically, Iris assumed. “You’re a bit smaller than what I’m used to.”
“What are you used to?” Iris asked, stepping onto the polished floor. Wooden weapons racks lined the room, mounting melee weapons rather than the modern rifles Iris was accustomed to. Swords, predominantly, but the gym didn’t shy away from a manner of painful-looking armaments. Spears, hooks, scythes, both steel and wood. As long as it couldn’t crush armour and had blunt edges, anything was on the table.
“The lean muscular type,” she said, “could lift my weight fifty times over before running a hundred-yard dash in a few seconds type. Can you do that?”
Iris wanted to say that she didn’t need to do either, it came across as suspicious no matter how she phrased it in her head. “No, I don’t think I could,” she answered, settling on selling herself grossly short.
“I thought as much,” Crestana agreed, locking the door behind her before joining Iris on the floor. “And I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but I don’t see why I need protection, especially from you.”
With her hands on her hips, she looked Iris up and down, and it became even more apparent to Iris what was so strange about her client. Besides the uncannily human hair and the faint outline of nails on her shadowy fingers, her movements carried weight. Beak movements were graceful, often moving from position A to B as though weightless; their arms never swung, their fingers never shook, and it seemed as though their limbs ignored basic laws of physics. Crestana’s movements exhibited none of that. She was distinctly human.
“I propose a sparring match. Choose any weapon, and we’ll act out a fight. Each would-be lethal blow is a point, and the first to three wins. Understand?”
“…yes,” Iris lied, understanding the basic principle but not wholly internalising it. One of those things one learnt while doing, as Elliot always said. A school of thought exceedingly concerning coming from a pilot. Nonetheless, Crestana nodded, accepting Iris’s resolve and picking a weapon from the racks. A longsword, by the looks of it. Very knightly, not the most practical, and definitely not Iris’s first, second or even third choice. But she didn’t judge, it’d make winning all the more easy.
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Crestana turned to her, brandishing the tip of her sword. “Bare-handed?” she asked, the shutters on her mask angled downwards.
“Not exactly,” Iris muttered, looking around the room. “Do we start?”
“Get a weapon then! Take this seriously!”
Iris couldn’t. She was hungry.
“Duel starting in three….”
“Wait you don’t have a weapon!”
“Two!”
“Take this seriously!”
“One! Go!”
Iris reached into her jacket and drew a handgun, and Crestana yelped in response, dropping her sword and cowering behind her arms.
“I win,” Iris stated, re-holstering the pistol in her jacket. “Do I do it two more times?”
“No! I mean what! Where’d you get that!” Crestana screeched, acting more of a sore loser than Iris.
“The armoury. Where else?” Iris shrugged, taking the gun out of her jacket. “It’s not loaded, but since this is a sparring match, it doesn’t need to be, right?”
“No! I mean how did you get in? That should be locked!” she continued, still cowering as Iris dangled the gun by the trigger guard.
“I picked the lock.”
“That’s for the shooting club! You can’t just go in there and take a gun whenever you want, you’ll get expelled!”
“Really? That’s the first good news I’ve heard all day.”
Crestana slowly lowered her arms once Iris’s nonchalant demeanour overrode her fear of being shot. “We need to put that back,” she said, panicked, “before a teacher finds you.”
“Okay,” Iris said, stuffing it in her jacket for a final time. “But what about the sparring? Do I win?”
Crestana sighed, picking up the sword. “No. You pulled a gun on me, that doesn’t tell me how strong you are—”
“Why does strength matter?”
Crestana paused for a moment, hands falling to her side in apparent disbelief. “Sorry?”
“Why does strength matter?” Iris asked. It was an honest question, one that seemed to stump Crestana. “What does proving I can beat you in a sword fight have to do with anything?”
“It shows that you can fight,” Crestana said, still perplexed by the bluntness. “That you can fight, at least better than me. To protect me.”
Iris tilted her head how she always did when something didn’t make sense. “Every fight I’ve fought has been won because someone had better weapons…more people or…because they struck first. If you have to use your strength to win, that’s not good. You’ve probably messed up.”
Crestana was dumbstruck by the reasoning, but she didn’t strike Iris to be the type to be so dense as to never consider such a reality. It was odd. As far as she was concerned, it was common sense.
“I’m not your bodyguard because I’m strong. I’m your bodyguard because I’ll get rid of threats to your life before they can get rid of you. That, and that contract.”
Iris scratched the back of her head as she ran out of things to say. Crestana still seemed out of her depth, and so Iris walked up to her, took the sword and placed it back in its rack for her.
“Who are you?” Crestana asked. “You don’t sound like you’re thirteen.”
“Twelve,” Iris said, correcting her. She wouldn’t stand for her age being mistaken. “And I told you this morning…well the whole class. But, y’know, I’m also an…what was it…assistant private detective…or was it detective in training?”
Crestana turned around, meeting Iris’s eyes with little of the confidence she had walked into the room with. What she couldn’t gather through facial expressions, Iris could sense through the subtle change in Aether. It almost felt as though Crestana was intimidated. She felt sorry for her client, at least knowing the feeling of having to interact with someone you didn’t necessarily enjoy the company of.
“Don’t worry,” Iris said, “we don’t have to be friends. That wasn’t part of the contract, and you already have your own.”
She gave Crestana a wry smile, but the girl didn’t look any happier.
“So…you really think I’m in danger?” she asked. “It…doesn’t feel…real. No matter how I think about it.”
Iris pursed her lips. “It never does until it happens,” she said, “but I have to worry about that, not you.”
Crestana nodded and headed for the door. She held it open for Iris, and Iris obliged.
“Put the gun back before you get caught,” she said, voice once again carrying confidence and at least a mild sense of authority. Iris nodded her head as the bell rang through the court.
“Tell me all about it,” Elliot said as he helped Iris with her belongings while she pulled off her shoes. The house was spotless, meaning her father had probably gotten bored at one point. A rarity, considering that when he wasn’t working he was sleeping, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was cooking.
“Weird,” she said. “It feels weird to be there like it’s a small city with a lot of stupid rules that I don’t like.”
“Well,” Elliot sighed as he placed her things on the dining room table, “it’s where we send kids to prepare for society, so it only makes sense it’s built as a practice run for the real world.”
“Practice?” Iris scoffed, “I don’t need practice.”
“Yeah you do,” Elliot warned her. “It’ll hit you at some point.”
Iris crinkled her nose as she sat at the table, her legs turning to jelly once she finally got the chance to rest. Exhaustion caught up with her, and she felt a wave of fatigue wash over, starting from the numbing of the brain.
“Did you talk to your client?” Elliot asked from the kitchen as the kettle began to scream for attention. “What was she like?”
“She tried to fight me,” Iris said.
“Well, that isn’t a good start. How did that happen?”
"She took me to the sparring gym and said she wanted to uh…duel me. To see how strong I am.”
“And what did you do?” Elliot asked, pouring two cups of tea.
“I pulled a gun on her.”
Elliot sighed as he picked up the mugs and brought them over, muttering to himself. “Okay, be a good parent, don’t get mad.”
He sat down and interlocked his fingers, staring Iris down with his razor-sharp eyes. They felt colder than the snow piles outside but cut through her like they were a thousand degrees hot.
“What did I say about taking from our stash, Iris?”
“Wait! No! I didn’t—”
“Then where did you get the gun?” The look didn’t change.
“The school armoury! I swear!”
“What did I say about lockpicking, Iris? Locks are meant—”
“Locks are meant to keep people out! Yes! But the point of an armoury is to—”
“If it was a free-use armoury, of which none exist, then there wouldn’t be a lock on it, would there?”
Iris gave up, shying away from the all-powerful gaze that seemed to melt her dead every time she received it. She hung her head in shame, putting her arms by her side. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I hope not!” Elliot insisted. “What a way to get expelled on your first day! I’ve got to get down on my hands and knees in front of this girl and thank her, assuming she doesn’t snitch on you!”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s not about being sorry—you know what. Did you put it back?”
“Yes!” Iris said, grasping at the lifeline thrown to her, hoping beyond hope for a way to avoid the guilt, but more importantly his judgement and Evalyn’s wrath were she to hear about it. Elliot inhaled, relaxing his muscles and letting the air out between his flapping lips.
“Fine. Fine. Just…never do that again, anywhere. Not to mention pulling a gun on a civilian, all right?”
“Okay,” Iris said, elated, but keeping it to herself.
“So I’m guessing you won the duel,” Elliot said, sipping on his tea. “I’m hoping you did, considering you went that far to win it.”
“Yes, I think,” Iris said. “She was upset that she couldn’t…test my strength or something like that. I told her that how well I’d be able to swing a sword wouldn’t matter at all.” She crinkled her nose again, sitting up as she thought out loud. “I mean, what does ‘strength’ have to do with it? I can’t cut a bullet in half with my powers, let alone a sword!”
Elliot put down his mug and slumped forward, resting his head on a palm as he looked at Iris. She noticed a flash of concern across his face that quickly vanished as though he was trying to hide it.
“Iris. She’s thirteen.”
“And I’m twelve! What does that have to—”
“You might be twelve, but you’ve seen and done things people never experience in their lifetimes. Think of it this way.”
He sat forward, shifting his hands across the table like a professor’s pointer. “Someone is born into a normal household because, face it, we aren’t normal. One parent goes to work at some office in the city, and another who might have a job might stay home. You grow up and go to school every day. That’s all you do. The only violence you ever experience is on the news and maybe in a book or radio drama.”
He pursed his lips. “Do you remember that ballroom on that flight we took to Fadaak? How that dance floor could only exist because there was layer and layer of worlds and people behind the scenes keeping it afloat? If you’re on the dance floor, you can't see what happens beyond it, and once you step off it, it’s hard to unsee.”
He grabbed her hand from across the table. “You’ve never even stepped foot on the dance floor, Iris. Your mother and I have always been worried about that.”
Like many things, she understood the concept but nothing of what it meant practically nor its implications. “What should I do then?”
Elliot smiled. “Meet her halfway. For now, just think of it like gaining a client’s trust. Sound good?”
“Sound good,” Iris repeated. “Can I eat something? I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Why not?” Elliot asked as he got up. “I gave you money.”
“I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You go to the cafeter—you don’t know what that is, do you?”
“No.”
“Right. My fault. I’ll make you something now.”