Iris tugged on Crestana’s wrist as they sped walked down the third floor of Hildrich court, a distinct structure in that its corners were spires. Hildrich court’s west wing was where a living, breathing Greidus Forecer had retreated back into between classes.
Offices were often times a presentation piece, a museum in disguise curated to sell its resident to whatever client or customer walked in. But the second kind of office was the one that held the secrets and witnessed the life and work of its resident in excruciating detail. The second was sacred, while the first was a façade. Iris prayed that Forecer’s was the former.
“Turn right, this door,” Crestana ordered, and Iris followed. They came to a rotted arched door carved along the spire’s curve, a medieval lock keeping it in place.
Crestana looked over her shoulder and across the court, but had nothing to report. Her sniffling was heavy, and apart from the voicebox strainingto recover from her cries, it was stable. Progress did that to those in mourning. Evalyn described it as a replacement for denial. ‘If the hardest part about death is knowing there’s nothing you can do about it, then feeling like you can helps you forget, even if it’s only shallow,’ she had once said after a meeting with a hysterical client, doubtful of the coroner’s verdict concerning their wife.
Crestana was on autopilot for the moment, and Iris had no choice but to indulge her.
“How are you going to get in?” Crestana asked.
“This door is old. Tapping it a bit would probably open it, but I don’t want to break anything.”
“At least then it won’t be breaking and entering," Crestana chuckled.
“No. I just don’t want to get caught.”
Iris hid the lock with her off hand and her body as best she could while she pretended to retrieve a bobby pin from her pocket.
“Turn around and be lookout. Casually.”
“Okay.”
Crestana turned and leaned on the railing, all while Iris kept eyes on her back, looking for so much as a glance backwards. The ends of her hair disintegrated into purple dust and gathered at her hand, filling the medieval lock and setting the spring inside. The bolt detached, and the door creaked open.
“It’s open,” Iris hissed to Crestana, who turned quite naturally before strolling in. Iris took one last look around the court. The school was closing for the day, with anyone unable to return home funnelling into the grand hall. The eyes of students and teachers weren’t what worried Iris, however. The Excalan Metropolitan Police would descend on the scene in due time, and Evalyn wasn’t present with her VIP pass.
She locked the door behind them, Crestana already rummaging through the desk.
The office looked as though there’d been a struggle, and there likely had been. A man against himself, over weeks, maybe months. The walls reeked of alcohol, and the shutters were closed completely.
Iris joined Crestana in their search, eyeing a filing cabinet behind the desk. She started from the top drawer, flipping through paper folder after metal binder, looking for any keywords that struck out. She continued in silence, thinking nothing of it as she moved to the second drawer, but was interrupted by quiet sobbing.
She turned around, watching Crestana as her hands continued through the files. Her voice box betrayed her emotions while her body continued as though normal, the disparity catching Iris off guard. In her concentration, and if not for the mask, she’d never have noticed.
Mother taking her own life; if Iris had to endure anything remotely similar, she was certain her life would never be the same again.
She caught herself, her mistake.
Crestana had no less heart than she did; something in her could be sure of that. Crestana's life had changed irreparably, and she had too. Iris just hadn’t noticed—no one had. ‘Distinctly human.’ Crestana Mallorine was anything but.
And here she was, voice weeping in pain while her hands moved with a single-minded desperation disguised as determination.
“Can you…can you do this?” Iris said, the words coming off stronger than she intened. Crestana’s voice box stifled another weep and emitted a sniffling sound.
“I can. Please, let me…god. There was so much blood.”
Crestana let go of the documents as though they were thousand-pound weights, and her hands fell onto the desk as she tried to restart her rhythm, the voice box twisting her turmoil into shaken breathing.
“Talk to me,” Iris said, mimicking her father’s first steps whenever Iris felt out of her depth. It sounded like a radio order, but it often worked. A simple order for a diagnostic was often the turnkey she needed to let herself go.
Crestana shook her head.
“Is there always that much blood when a human dies?”
Iris approached her, the few tentative steps forward being all she could manage, all she could bear. Evalyn handled distraught clients, not her. She was too insensitive.
“Yeah,” Iris admitted. “It gets messy sometimes. Other times, it looks like they’re sleeping.”
“Really?” she asked. “I heard their hands turn cold…like a Spirit’s.”
“Yeah. Like a Spirit’s.”
Crestana inhaled deeply, the breath croaking as the shutters across her mask closed completely. She was remembering something, projecting it on the inside of her shutters.
“Ironic. My family, our sect insists that a Spirit’s death is more noble than a human’s. But we all seem to end in the same place…maybe that’s what my mother thought.”
“Your mother?” Iris asked. It was her chance to finally ask Crestana what had been bugging her for so long, but it barely felt like an opportunity. If it was, Iris felt no intention to capitalise on it.
“My mother hung herself…I know. Spirits can’t hang themselves. But she uhm…she did, just before the beverage beads took effect. She had taken uh…two hundred and fifty grams, the pathologist said.”
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She glanced at Iris’s lacklustre reaction. “One drink is ten grams.”
“Oh,” Iris mouthed, and it seemed to amuse Crestana.
“You’re so clueless…I’m sorry I mean. I didn’t mean that. It’s just….”
“It’s just what?” Iris asked.
Crestana met Iris’s eyes for a brief moment before averting them in shame. “It’s just that sometimes you seem like such an adult, but other times you don’t know such basic things. I don’t understand it.”
“Basic? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, like how many beverage beads are fatal, how you can’t steal guns or fight in school, how you…talk to people.”
Iris frowned. “Talking is hard,” she insisted. “It’s a skill, and I’m not very good at it. The words are easy, but the…what was it…implicit meaning, I don’t get it sometimes.”
Crestana gave an insecure scoff, “but that isn’t special, anyone can do that—”
“Not as well as you.”
Iris smiled. “Not as well as you can. People…well most people who don’t already think you’re bad love you, you can change the air around you and match people. You can—”
“How is any of that good?”
The whisper seethed from her mask like the fog spilling from a valley.
“I have to pretend that I’m not broken…the people around me know I’m not right, and I have to pretend that I am anyway. I do that all day, every day, and they still don’t accept it. My own…my own mother looked at me like that.”
She lost her human-like gaze in that moment, lapsing on the thousand-yard stare Iris had come to expect from Spirits, looking as though they were enthralled by the whisps of Aether themselves.
“And in the end, she died like a human. And I still don’t know why.”
Her voice box continued to let slip her emotions while the deadened air stood stagnant.
“I don’t know what it’s like when…when people die. I don’t know how it feels when someone close to me does.”
Crestana watched her for a moment, looking for an answer even Iris did not have.
“But I’ve seen a lot of people die, and I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve lost someone. They always leave something behind, some leftover business some…words they didn’t say. They’re there, and they’ll be there whether you find out or not. The world moves on, and those things are only ever as important as they are to the living.”
Dreams reduced to redundancy, ashes burning anew and sparking new grief and trouble. Iris had seen it all and her dear mentors even more. The living decide what to do with the leftovers, to bury them like jewels in a king’s tomb or wield them and continue the fight, whatever that may have been.
“And whatever bonds were left unspoken, are yours to close.”
Crestana stood, inching closer to Iris.
“You’ve seen a lot, haven’t you?” Crestana whispered. “I don’t know anyone who could say something like that.”
“I don’t—there’s many people who could….”
Crestana shook her head. “No. There aren’t. Iris…I know you do this as your…job, I guess. But, I can’t imagine going through this for just money. I mean…not someone like you.”
“I…I don’t know what to tell you I—”
“Why? Iris? Why do you do this?”
Iris’s throat caught itself again, and it was her turn to stifle her speech. The look of earnest concern on Crestana’s face; no one but her closest family had given her that look before, and she had always brushed it off. Someone who she barely knew, who had nothing to do with her, had seen the same fault lines. They were real, the cracks along Iris’s being, not fiends conjured by mere paranoia, but real.
Crestana seemed to perk upright like a meerkat, her senses latching onto something subtle. “There’s magic coming from below…it’s so strong.”
Iris caught a fleeting brush of the sensation run up her spine and spasm her neck. She couldn’t be sure, but the circumstances dictated an approaching police presence, and the Warpers they strung along were more than capable of emitting such an aura.
“We need to go,” Iris concluded, tugging Crestana to the door by her wrist, but she met resistance.
She turned back, finding the girl fixated on a particular document buried under the pile. Iris couldn’t clock the big, unruly blocks of text scattered across the other papers. Simple lines adorned with dots and symbols, sharing more with an etching rather than an essay.
“We have to go now,” Iris hissed, “before the Warpers catch us.”
“Warpers?” The word seemed to latch onto her like a grappling hook and pull her from her own mind. “But wait, Iris, this paper—”
“Tell me later or take it with you,” Iris hissed, panic rising. “Actually no, I think that’s illegal. Just come on!”
Confirming Crestana was closely behind, Iris rushed to the office door and dared to ease it open. The magic was still firmly below their feet, and luck had it that their floor was still cop-free. She took the leap of faith and betted on their continued streak as lawful citizens, sticking her head from the doorway.
The gods were with her, while the police on the other hand, weren’t, instead milling around the courtyard and the floor’s lower levels. Iris didn’t know the metropolitan police as the most efficient, but such a high-profile event was sure to light a fire under their blue trousers: the higher rank, the hotter.
Less time for them to escape, less leniency to their excuses.
“The paper was important—”
“And so is not getting arrested,” Iris hissed. She looked back to Crestana, confusion strung across her shutters like a banner. She grit her teeth, looking out into the court again and eyeing Warper units climbing the floors.
“Fine,” Iris said. “Go get it, but we’re leaving now.”
Crestana’s shutters crossed each other, and she nodded, sprinting to the desk and taking the paper. She ran back, and Iris joined her sprint, leading the way as they kept their bodies pressed against the concrete barrier. A staircase leading downwards began in the spire ahead of them; whatever happened once they got to the bottom was a problem for future Iris.
“There’s something coming up those stairs,” Crestana whispered, “turn, now!”
Iris followed the order and abandoned her first attack plan, rounding the corner and picking up her pace. She turned behind her, the vague shadow of something climbing the last few steps of the staircase.
“Classroom,” Iris hissed, eyeing a classroom with closed shutters and an open door and taking the opportunity. Crestana followed close behind, and they ducked into the vacant room, pressing themselves against the closest wall.
Iris covered her mouth, sensing the magic presence draw nearer. To her, it was muffled like sounds underwater, but she knew that to Crestana there was an orchestra booming behind her. Her shutters were squeezed closed with all the force their motors could muster, and she sat perfectly still while the vague shape in the back of their minds drifted past.
The Warper moved with the elegance of a stalking predator, the only cue announcing its presence besides its magic being the footsteps of its handler closely behind. Blue scales and bone-white claws. All Iris could remember clearly were the teeth, the threat her eyes would refuse to peel away from.
The Spirit passed, its atrocious aura passing with it and further down the hallway. Iris paced her sigh, ensuring the sound didn’t leave fast enough to be audible.
She looked over to Crestana, her shutters flickering open.
Iris nodded to her, and Crestana returned the gesture. She turned her attention to the room around her, looking for any way they could escape their prison undetected.
“What are you trying to do?” Crestana asked.
“Find a way out of here,” Iris said. “Escape, somehow.”
“But that looks too suspicious; we can't risk that.”
“What other way is there?”
Crestana thought for a moment, and then she scoffed quietly. Her hand came down on Iris’s shoulder, softly patting it as though to reassure her. “Trust me.”
She brashly stood up and headed for the door before Iris could catch her. Even her voice was too slow, cowering underneath the shutters much like she was. Crestana, on the other hand, had summoned some sort of phantom confidence from thin air. Whatever shapes Iris could carve from her hair would never be as impressive.
She swung the door open, and Iris’s heart sank into her stomach and leapt into her throat all at once.
“Officer!” she cried. “Over here!”
Iris covered her ears as she felt the Warper’s presence surge forward and growl. It was right beyond the wall, and Crestana was still somehow holding in her fear.
“What are you doing here?” the officer asked, a tone the teachers employed in their scolding but never truly mastered. Evalyn would always explain away their unwanted presence in a crime scene, but Iris knew how vulnerable she was without her mother.
“My friend and I were early for class, but something started happening outside the court. They told us to stay inside, so we did. Then you came, and we were frightened, so we hid.”
A pause followed, and Iris’s ears zeroed in on every small rustle the copper’s clothes made, every grunt as the excuse sifted through his brain, teetering on the edge of the ‘buy’ pile and the ‘can’t buy’ pile.
“There’s been an accident,” the officer stated. “It’s over now, and we’ve asked everyone who can go home to go home. Do you and your friends have anyone that can pick you up?”
Iris dared open her eyes and look up, catching Crestana’s glance backwards. Iris smiled, and Crestana winked, slipping the paper into her pocket.