Iris sprouted her armour as Alis’s knuckles flared purple.

“Keep your face covered,” Iris said as, through gritted teeth, his hair disintegrated. Alis bolted for the window, jumping out of the opening and catching onto the roof with ropey limbs.

Iris made her own break, running out of the room only for her eyes to miss the suspect’s coattails dashing down the next flight.

A flash of silver shone in the dull staircase lighting, a steel blade chomping at the bit as she caught a glimpse of Crestana’s attack.

Then no shadow at all.

Floating on a plane above the street below, everything from the walls around her to the first floor far below her exploded into nothingness. Daylight streamed through from the eager sun, kissing the building’s foundations that hadn’t seen its rays in decades.

Invisibility, projecting that onto a manner of objects at will. A rematch of sorts for her and Alis.

She looked down, angling her vision to where she assumed the fourth-floor landing to be; no one, no Crestana, dead or alive.

Calm down. She’s still kicking. The walls were alight with Aether, but three pinpoints still moved in her vicinity.

Calm down. Think.

Three on one, safe house, spy. Fighting was disadvantageous. Running away. Stalling tactic. With this, she’d have no choice but to stumble through the stairs, feel around for the window or physically blow through the building. Two and three weren’t an option, one would take too long.

Eyes, gone. Hear, no. Taste, obviously not. Smell, she wasn’t a dog.

Feel. Feeling. Stretch yourself out. Catch onto something.

Iris whipped her arms forward, morphing everything from her gauntlets to her pauldrons into stringy roots moving at breakneck. Coating the walls, they raced down the staircase, mapping out the wood and plaster in a thin, purple veneer. Iris followed, mounting the forward surge while her boots morphed into the new surface, dismembering moulds past for sections yet to come.

Four, three, two, the roots kept travelling, and Iris found herself remapping the building like a torchlight in a cave, eyes deprived of stimulus as fast as they were granted it.

Closer and closer, coming down to the final floor to see Alis burst through the front doorway, purple matter crawling up his forearms to his vitals and head in a shifting, primitive coat.

A shape appeared between them, one person, yet grasped from behind by another. Crestana clawed at an arm holding her by the neck, head straining away from a gun barrel pressed into her temple. Her sword had parted with her hand, and a gash in her blouse’s shoulder lay bare, putting on show a grisly deformation of her flesh.

“Let. Me. Go,” the voice demanded. Woman, relatively young. Evalyn’s peer. “Let me walk out the door, and I’ll let her go.”

Alis raised his hands, and Iris followed suit. She couldn’t trust an attack of her own to reach her target before the trigger depressed. Against a human, it may have worked, but even in such a mess of Aether, movements were easy to differentiate from the atmosphere, even to a Witch, never mind a Spirit.

And though Spirits didn’t have brains, Iris wasn’t up to test just how human Crestana really was.

“Weapons down,” she barked at Alis, “and you behind me, stand down. I don’t want a peep of Aether coming off you.”

They did as they were told, Alis peeling off his brass knuckles one by one, and Iris dismembering her armour. They both stood bare, faces to match the powers.

The figure started moving towards the door, trailing a struggling Crestana with her.

“For god’s sake stop moving,” the voice muttered as an arm raised the butt of their pistol into the air, heading for a collision course for the back of Crestana’s head.

Then, the air grew cold.

An implosion as real space vehemently retook its territory, shrouding the sunlight and reburying the foundations into place. Iris keeled over, chest collapsing as she hacked the air out of her lungs.

Chocking, but the air was all there. Supreme absence, a very essence of life exited her and her surroundings; her body could only interpret it as choking.

She looked around, vision doubling as she saw someone she vaguely recognised as Alis run towards her, lunging for a centred figure she didn’t recognise.

The sound of slicing air whizzed past her ear as that same, dull silver shimmer glinted past her vision, edge pointed towards that same person.

Her vision cleared as moment by moment, the scene unfolded towards its still ambiguous conclusion.

A gun, a sword, and two sets of knuckle dusters, all colliding in the centre.

Until a flash of golden light coated her blurred and battered senses.

A handful of moments cocooned in an autumnal glow, the air moving around her like a warm current, a thorough cleansing of the environment that left no one any place to argue with her authority.

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Then, it left as fast as it came, and they were chained down by roots sprouting maple leaves.

Golden armour stepped through the hallway, and Iris watched on, half in relief half in dread as they pressed the barrel of a pistol up against the suspect’s head.

“Do I know you?” Evalyn asked.

The woman was recovering faster than Iris, yet her words remained breathless.

“Not the first time I’ve seen that armour at least, Wishbearer.”

“What were you doing with them?”

“Why do you care?” the woman spat.

“Because your next words are what’s keeping me from putting a bullet through your head, now answer my question, what were you doing with them?”

“Your brood is it? Beats me, they came here by themselves.” She shook her head, drooping her face to the ground as the roots held tight around her body, holding her wrists into the air. “Getting them started early, hey? Easier to teach.”

“What would you know—”

“Oh, I know all about it, you half-assed tourist. Same age as you yet I’ve got double your years. You know how that’s possible?”

The trigger finger got more anxious.

“Because people like you just do what they’re told. Get given a kid, train it up, pretend to grow attached, let it loose and see what happens.”

The woman’s voice broke, croaking at the end of the barrel, despair filtering into her vocals.

“You killed the anti-Aether scientist.”

“Sure?”

“And the assassination just coming through, I’m guessing you’re on the way back from that?”

“Check my magazine. Your runts know I’ve only fired once.”

“At who?”

“Beak. Oh, come on! Put some skin in the game if you’re going to be in this business.”

They stared into each other’s eyes, one pair hollow, the other on the edge of sanity.

“Why are you doing this—”

“What kind of question is that?” the woman scoffed. “Because we have to! Because I have to make myself useful to someone—”

“Save me the basics. Why are you doing this commission?”

“Why are you doing yours?”

“Because I have people to protect.”

“And I don’t. Make sense? So don’t feel bad about pulling that trigger, me of all people, oh I know it’s nothing personal.”

She goaded and goaded, luring the bullet closer as the barrel pressing into her skin started to draw blood.

“Just do me a favour, don’t let them turn out like me.”

Finger quaking, the end of the barrel already seeped in blood. Iris’s vision had returned fully at the worst possible moment. She squinted her eyes tight, hoping it might not happen if she didn’t witness it.

A crunch, and the weighty sound of a body hitting the floor. No deafness, no gunpowder. The stinging in her ears was absent, but life wasn’t going to let her off so easily.

“What are you three doing here?”

Iris opened her eyes, and they met Evalyn’s cold pupils. Autumn, but winter was quickly settling in. They then turned to Crestana who averted her gaze to the floor, then to Alis, who seemed to be choking on his words, a battle between loyalty and honesty fighting in his throat. He looked to Iris, and so brought with him those cold eyes again.

The suspect was on the floor, unconscious and slowly bleeding from a dent in the side of her head. The doors were blocked with roots, and the staircase was barred in much the same way. Iris was cornered, matched like a cage fight.

“We were following clues, trying to find out who killed that scientist.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because—”

“Iris we already discussed this.” She felt the roots loosen around her wrists and ankles as Evalyn holstered her handgun. “You aren’t destroying this research even if you find it first.”

“Why not?” Iris backfired, upping the ante against the exasperated Evalyn. “We can’t keep it around or else—”

“We can’t go back either. Don’t you understand that?” Hands gestured through her pockets as her voice struggled to keep at a level pitch. “It’s out there, people know about it, we need to make sure we’re ahead.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Another step forward. Another inch closer. “They tried to kill me a few days ago but you still want to help them?”

“Help? Iris, I do this to keep us alive! I do this so that they don’t throw us out or worse and this is what you do in return? Chase a lead and almost get you and your friends killed?”

“I—”

“Shut up!”

The firestorm turned to the next person in the circle. “Crestana? A sword? Really? I have no clue how far your powers have gotten to your head but you are years behind for this line of work. Your Aunt’s lost so much and you feel the need to do this.”

“I—”

“Not right now! You!”

The next victim swallowed his spit.

“You’ve been walking on thin ice buddy from day one and if this had been your idea then it’d have been off with your head. Say no! Say it with me: no Iris, that sounds like a terrible idea!”

The fury passed back to Iris, centring squarely on her. Iris’s hair stood on end as the scowl across Evalyn’s face flared like a rabid dog’s, eyes now lit ablaze in summer fires.

“We, are not, gods, Iris. We don’t get to control who’s who and what’s what. We do what we can, when we can to make sure we don’t end up dead.”

The woman who had burnt down cities, the girl who had once decimated them into fine mist. And yet, somehow still so scared of stepping out of line.

“I’m not playing God,” Iris sneered. “I’m doing what I can, when I can, to make sure hundreds don’t end up dead. My life isn’t worth starting the civil war again.”

Iris watched a pang flutter through Evalyn’s eyes, and they seemed to defuse.

“I can’t live selfishly like you. Not after all I did before.”

She stood breathless as the beast bore down on her with all the authority in the world that mattered, all the opinions of value, all the respect worth paying.

“Let’s move. One step out of line I’m chaining you all to me.”

He’d seen pilots tape photographs of their wives and children to their instrument panel, and Elliot had always thought of it personally as some sort of jinx; an omen of bad luck. A murdered victim’s final act, to clutch to the photograph of their smiling family.

Superstition, but if he was going to live in fear of being jumped at any second, what difference would one photograph make?

Word of his past had spread; he could tell in the number of eyes trained on him that increased with every passing day. Glances and glares to the point even his coworkers were beginning to notice. They knew themselves, of course, but were more receptive to it considering they worked for the benefactors.

Elliot sat ruminating in his room, bed quickly becoming his place of refuge for whenever his presence wasn’t missed in a meeting or briefing.

The last such congregation had ended with speculation from the analysts. Standing in front of the corkboard, they’d traced the string from one end of the map to the other, pointing out the same consistencies in timings Elliot had noticed. The flight path had been almost identical, and the times matched up well enough to eliminate mere coincidence.

Intake, no turbines, Aether design through and through. It made sense: Aether engines were markedly quieter than turbines over a long distance, but maintaining Aether engines without consistent Aether…

Intake. It wasn’t a stretch. Vesmos wands and weapons relied on Aether, yet no one was quite sure how a wooden stick could turn atmospheric Aether into something usable. Assuming that, the only limitation left was the Aether itself, its intensity, its density.

There was no way to easily map such a metric across an entire section of the country, but Elliot didn’t need to.

Owing to his past as a hunter of them, somewhere in the back of his mind was shelved a piece of the puzzle only a White Devil could memorise.