Arguing with Evalyn had given him a nasty feeling in the past. Knowing she didn’t have anything to retreat to besides her work, the few times she’d been angry enough to leave his shoulders bruised both from her punches and sleeping on the couch had led him down another avenue into ‘high G’s’. Or, that’s what he referred to the feeling as.

The feeling of every internal organ forcing its way downwards while his tissue tried to keep intact. But, from personal experience, the same breathing exercises never seemed to work when he felt that feeling on land.

The death of a co-pilot, the failure of a mission, Elliot was one to refuse to get better when things inevitably didn’t go his way. He was confident behind a joystick, able to sense the wind and feel like he could punch a hole through a plate of reinforced steel. Besides, the ace didn’t care much for much outside the cockpit, but one day, the person suddenly did.

There was a gap in his resume for emotional development, and the lessons that filled it were few and far between—life seemed to prefer slinging inadequacies at him instead.

Walking into his old sleeping quarters that evening was life’s latest lecture. Even if it was only superficial, the possibility of starting back at square one, losing all progress, made his stomach churn in a way only nine G’s could.

Preserved after the end of the War of Aether and Diesel, according to one of the airbase staff. For the Sidosians to preserve anything in the name of sentimental value instead of recycling and reusing, something had to replace reason. Elliot assumed it had been rage.

Metal, almost like the walls of a prison. He likened it to the hollowed-out quarters of cannon-fodder seamen on a Navy vessel: not as cramped or full of bodies, but not homely enough for an officer afforded the equivalent space.

His personal effects, as expected, had been long since thrown away. A meagre set of clothes in a boring cupboard—something he hadn’t particularly improved on since—a cheap gramophone, and a semi-permanent lineup of novels were all he remembered keeping.

All burnable. The engineers must’ve held a nice bonfire.

Being placed back into the same quarters when the rest of his entourage, human and Spirit, had been afforded a barrack room and bunk beds meant something about it was deliberate. Perhaps he was still listed as the occupant, or old comrades-in-arms wanted him to reflect on his life choices.

He’d already done so in that room almost thirteen years prior, and those thirteen years since had been the best of his life. That was about all the self-reflection he was willing to indulge in.

He sat down on the bed, the mattress spotless and lively. Something about it made him grimace. It was his room, yes, but besides the four walls he had once slept between, nothing connected him to it.

He could rejoice in that, even if he was still stuck in a room with thoughts he didn’t want to confront. At least it was only thoughts; there were possibly fists outside.

From the muster to the menu, the mess hall hadn’t changed, depressingly.

He had never disliked the food, but now—considering he could cook better himself—found it more of a chore to get through than his younger self had. The unfortunate reality was that everything was cooked in large vats, and that was harder to disguise with some foods than it was with others.

A silent compliment to the chef. An ‘A’ for effort he’d keep to himself, lest he was kicked out of line the next day.

After the meal was another meeting, a formal introduction to the full joint task force. He could expect harassment to begin there if it did at all. His rank placed him above most pilots, but those most inclined to speak their minds would match his rank by now.

Or perhaps he was reading into things too much, looking for meaning in shallow coincidences like he dug through his helping of rice.

“Not used to it?” an unfamiliar voice called from the thick veil of a hundred echoing conversations. Elliot looked up from his food, greeted by someone he didn’t recognise.

Orange hair sprang up in curls from his scalp, stubble at least kept in check by airbase regulations. He wore the uniform loose while he could, one button was undone, and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Either daft and overconfident, or he possessed a rank to back it up. Elliot had long since forgotten which epaulette constituted which rank.

“I get it,” the passerby said, empty plate a sign he was trying for seconds. “But it’s not bad enough to get me to defect.”

A curt smile spread across his lips, giving Elliot a small ember of hope that maybe it was just the stranger’s unlucky day—an ember he had no qualms about crushing under his boot.

Defect. It was a hunch, but Elliot would’ve naturally gravitated towards the word ‘desert’ rather than one that suggested outright betrayal.

He swore on his own life to never let Marie live it down if he managed to escape with it.

The night moved fast, and it continued to chug along as his table moved to a briefing room detached from the main hives of activity. Talk of spy planes and rogue facilities was unlikely to make it out of the airbase, but troops could smell instability, and being part of a unit, part of a uniform, made hysteria harder to keep under control.

Twenty-five personnel took their seats in rows of five, the darkened room not far removed from his average class. A ceiling fan lazily spun cartwheels above their heads, pushing warm air around the room while Elliot noted the important points on a clipboard.

Spy plane, deity division support, charting courses, figuring out how it evades detection; nothing he hadn’t heard from the horse’s mouth directly.

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“I’m sure this goes without saying, gentlemen,” the Joint Operations Chief continued, heading the task force’s inaugural briefing while his sagging cheeks slowly swayed with every word. “Unless the spooks over there in Vesmos are braindead, they won’t be sending over a second plane after we try to shoot the first one down. Even then, if we can’t force a surrender, kill and capture is our primary objective.”

The closing notes of his speech deserved a light applause. Not the best briefing from a commanding officer he’d had, but far from the worst. Six points out of ten.

Copies of Alis’s photographs had made it to their corkboard, photographed, blown up to medium format, and pinned to it with metal thumbtacks. The next speaker, an Excalan analyst and one of the twenty-five personnel, began to break them down. She placed them in geographical order on a much larger map of the Sidosian mountains.

“Our teams were unable to find perfect matches, but based on the clues available from the original photographs procured by Special Operations, we’ve marked six points with a five-kilometre margin for error.”

The areas marked out an arching line, and considering Vesmos’s position to Sidos, the aircraft moved on an easterly heading. The points were grouped together, but not so tight as to suggest Vesmos had already whittled down a location, almost like a gun run along the whole Northern Chain, shooting a camera at whatever they could afford to aim it at.

Meaning that much to Sidos’s frustration, no one had any clue as to exactly what they were looking for, nor if Vesmos had already found it. Not Sidos, not Geverde, possibly not even Vesmos themselves.

“We’ve only managed to acquire six photographs, with no guarantee as to how many there are total, or how many each flight might be taking. Analysis of the prints suggests the film being used is commercially available, and likely so is the camera.”

Elliot was tempted to peg it as a wild goose chase, but the fact of the matter was that a spy plane had free reign of Sidos’s skies. His job, his orders, and, most of all, his curiosity were not to surpass that simple fact.

Elliot had learnt to obey orders as he aged, but something about the air in a Sidosian airbase made his old habits itch at his ankles and the nape of his neck.

For now, there wasn’t much the front line could do without actionable intelligence.

On that sour note, the briefing was adjourned. Elliot folded the notes he’d jotted down and stuffed them into his pocket. He had no particular place for them. On his person, or at least in his vicinity until the op was over, that was about the best he ever did.

Evalyn had told him repeatedly to keep a scrapbook or filing cabinet. He’d seen her collection; the woman kept a record of her every movement as a Private Detective. He’d assumed it was for covering her backside in a legal case or to prove more tax returns, but soon he’d found her archiving his notes for him.

He wanted to go home.

The telephone wire tenuously bridged the gap between its wall socket in the living space and the front door, the curls in the dull green wire stretched out until they were only slight waves. She’d left the door open—something Evalyn would’ve blown her top off about if she were there—so she could keep Alis close by. Iris didn’t know who or where to call for either of her parents or Elvera.

Evalyn had promised to call from her accommodation by sunset, and Elliot had said roughly the same, although he was expecting there to be two girls on the other side of the line instead of just the one.

Either one was fine, whoever called first. As long as she told someone: raise the alarm, but not too loudly. Alis had asked what difference it’d make what was being kept in the mystery facility. If anything, the information could add another layer of panic to an already delicate situation.

‘I can see the accusations flying like a food fight already,’ he’d warned as he sat on the other side of the doorway. It was tense, yes, and S.H.I.A. was still fresh in everyone’s minds.

But she’d decided to anyway, at least Evalyn or Marie, someone she could trust to be smart with it.

“Someone that can smooth it out, I guess. So, when they get around to destroying it, they’ll—”

“They won’t destroy it.”

Alis played with a fraying piece of string he’d plucked out of the lobby’s carpet, turning it over between his fingertips as though he were analysing it.

“They won’t…no, they will. They have to.”

“They can’t,” Alis rebutted, not even bothering to look up from his feet as he flicked his plaything away. “Technology like that, the fact that it exists is inevitable. The best you can do is capitalise on it first.”

“Capitalise…Alis, this isn’t Vesmos—”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, pursing his lips. “I know this is your home, and what you think of your country is fine…but we’re talking about the people who wanted to execute you here.”

He finally looked at her, and the concern in his eyes made them no gentler. It was like looking into Elliot’s but worse. She could find the courage to look into them, or else hers would begin to water.

“You really think—”

“Yes, Iris. Sidos and Geverde can’t trust that Vesmos hasn’t already found the technology, they can’t trust that no other country already has or will ever discover it.”

He tried to sound apologetic, she could hear it in his voice. Alis’s voice was easier to understand, his mannerisms more straightforward than Crestana’s, or anyone else’s for that matter.

She knew he was telling the truth as far as he knew it, a truth that she almost felt better off being oblivious to.

The same people that had tried to put her to death. Paranoid and scared; dispose of a weapon they couldn’t control, and scramble for one they didn’t have yet. She understood it, and yet it didn’t sit right with her.

Geverde wasn’t like that, she wanted to believe it wasn’t.

More than its people, more than Evalyn, Marie, and the Queen combined. She knew her thinking would mean the shrinking of its borders one day.

“People don’t survive because of their ethics and morals, Iris. We live by them to gloat that we can afford to, like some sort of handicap. And even then….”

Even then.

Even when they could afford to, it was all too easy to forgo ethics and morals. Iris felt like she was doing something similar, lying to herself in some way, at the very least.

“When you said you…killed that guy. The guy who, you know, sprouted that massive tree above the city. Are you okay now?”

Iris tightened her arms around her knees, pulling them closer to her chest as she eyed the telephone.

“I think. I don’t want to think about it…even though there’s nothing to think about. One second, he was there, and then…not. He probably didn’t even feel anything.”

All she could remember definitively was the patch of carpet where he had sat before she’d blinked. It was empty, not even an imprint was left over. That was all he was afforded in the end, an empty space he used to occupy.

“I saw…well, didn’t see…but two Police Officers got shot in the train station I frequented. I saw the men pull out their guns and…pop. Four times. I counted.”

“Does it happen a lot?”

“So much you get used to it. People on the brink of death, people already passed. Sometimes quick, sometimes slow…sometimes you can only imagine what had happened before they passed.”

Her right index twitched, unsure what to reply with to fill the dead air. It was that mood, where she couldn’t help but feel like she was beginning to fail the conversation.

“And…I don’t even know…where I was going with that, to be honest,” he said, chuckling to himself.

Iris guessed her feelings were mutual.

They relished the silence a bit, taking it down her throat like the sip of beer Elliot had let her try. Sour, fuzzy, but something she’d understand one day.

Until the moment was snapped in half by a shrill ring.

“Hello?” Iris asked, ripping the receiver from its body.

“Iris? It’s Evalyn. You okay?”

“Mum, did you find the site today?”

“What? Oh, yes. I did, it’s in the forests near—”

“There’s a weapon there, mum. It can destroy Aether.”

“…what do you mean it can destroy Aether?”

“I don’t know! Someone was going to explain it to us, but he was killed. But you have to destroy it mum, you have to—”

“We can’t, Iris. Destroying it is too risky.”