The Spirit continued to prod the fire, haphazardly playing with it as though a child with a plate of vegetables might. Passing the time, waiting for them to move on like a wandering wind.

“They don’t look like they have anything to hide,” Evalyn muttered.

“Why?”

“I don’t know…call it optimism,” she said, patting Iris’s head before walking back towards the Spirit.

“We have a few questions. It’d help us if you’d answer them truthfully.”

The Spirit continued to turn over charred log after charred log as the small crackle of dying flames danced with Evalyn’s words. They lived as fast as they died, dancing together in the air while the Spirit offered none of their own. Silent approval. At least that’s how Evalyn seemed to take it.

“You’re working with the F.S.A., and so are some other traders.”

It wasn’t a question, technically a statement. The Spirit reacted accordingly. That was to say, not at all. Evalyn continued.

“The numbers don’t add up. You’re only selling ninety percent of your incoming…stock, but you’re still making the expected earnings.”

The Spirit continued unfazed, even as a passing breeze put down the last vestiges of the flame. It playfully swirled around the small cavern as the Spirit’s limb finally met the ground and stood still.

“Ten…s-s-slaves…s-sell…ni-ni-nine…. One…go-goes-s-s to…the…F.S.A-A-A.”

“And the extra money?”

“They…g-g-give me…r-r-radio…to…s-s-sell.”

Evalyn crossed her arms, a small grin on her face. “Spirits still value entertainment. A long-range radio would be worth ten times more here than in the next country. How many slaves would one radio pay for?”

“T-ten…r-r-roughly…”

“Ten freed slaves for the price of one, huh…clever…alright. One more thing, then. What do you get out of it?”

The Spirit turned away, trotting towards the cooked game. The lump of meat vibrated, eventually dragging across the floor towards the Spirit, albeit with more effort than the voice box had.

By the doorway into the building, the Spirit stopped.

“N-n-nothing...”

Evalyn sighed, frowning. “So, you won’t sell them out easily?”

Even though Evalyn phrased a question, this time, the Spirit still neglected to answer. They stood by the door; the meat pressed against their spindly limbs.

What Iris originally interpreted as a communication barrier at best, standoffish attitude at worse, was something that ran deeper. Indifferent wasn’t the right word for them. In some lived experiences, sympathy, or maybe even empathy, was a curse.

“We suspect the F.S.A. has been murdering our people,” Evalyn said, practically ripping the mask of G.F.P. Batrice off her face. “It’s important to us, to her Majesty Queen Amestris of Geverde, that we find out who is responsible. For that, we are investigating the F.S.A.”

To a sympathiser, any enemy of the F.S.A. would sound like defenders of the slave trade. Iris would certainly think so in the same position, even if being Geverdian held some sort of credibility.

“W-w-we…smug-g-gle…weap-p-pons…”

“How many?”

“F-f-five…s-s-six…every-y-y month…”

“Shit. They’ve got enough for a militia by now.”

“F-f-feeding…time…”

The Spirit trotted through the door, dragging the charred game along with it. Seconds passed in silence, and neither moved.

As though to pay some sort of respect. Deserved or not, Iris didn’t envy the hand the keeper had been given.

“I bet they threatened the other sellers into giving up that ten percent,” Evalyn said, finally uncrossing her arms and making for the exit. Iris followed.

Iris had long since burnt through all her portable entertainment. Stuck in a place where she could not buy more left her in a bind, one she hoped to pass like a hibernating bear, indulging in her springy mattress until the next call to action arose.

And much like a bear, she found it impossible to truly hibernate (as per a useless factoid she learnt in school). Instead, she spent her spare time in a sequence of clockwise trial and error, from her shoulder to her back to her other shoulder to her front.

None of them seemed to work.

The floorboards above her head were rotted, half had holes in them cascading dust and debris, yet she still found it impossible to eavesdrop on the conversation upstairs. Perhaps if she climbed to the top bunk and pressed her ear against the wall, she would catch something more than senseless garble competing with the rain for space in her ear.

It was effort exerted for the sake of it. The same went for trying to decipher one of Evalyn’s books. Whatever innate grasp on language she had three years ago didn’t cover the level of vocabulary her mother could stomach. The sheer number of words squeezed onto one page was enough to make her head spin.

Running through each failed attempt to exhaust or entertain herself was also just another way to count sheep. She had already tried that, too.

What remained were thoughts and questions better left for a future version of her, one that couldn’t afford to leave them unthought and unanswered.

Instead, she turned her head and peeked over the folds of her cushion.

“Yes, Iris?” the Queen muttered, snaring her gaze in an instant. Iris felt her brow furrow, and she considered turning back the other way to resuming her endless routine.

“You’ve been tossing. You’re feeling Wednesday—”

“What does that even mean?”

The words left a horrid taste in her mouth, and they stung at their master in the air. They weren’t her words. Her feelings, yes, the brunt of her ugly, overcast feelings, but certainly not her words.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, your…Majesty.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“What’s bothering…why do you ask?”

“Am I…forbidden from asking?”

“No…just…you’re the Queen. You’re not supposed to ask that sort of question.”

“I still don’t…quite understand.”

Iris dug her face into the pillow. She had lost, or at least felt like she had lost at something.

“What mum said to me this morning. It’s bothering me.”

“In regard to fairness. No?”

“Yeah.”

Rainfall was persistent that night, but had lost the weight of the torrent the night before. Still, the sound that passed through what was left of the walls carried a presence, a third party sitting in on their conversation that had, as of Iris’s last word, stagnated.

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The Queen wasn’t one to vocalise her thinking, nor was any Spirit Iris had met bar the Beaks in her school.

The way utter silence left her hanging in limbo was particularly irksome, and that irritation had a habit of building up like grime inside a pipe. Thorny words scraped the walls of her throat as they threatened to breach her lips.

“Hardridge isn’t wrong,” the Queen began, relieving Iris’s irritation. “But consider that she has known me for only thirteen years. To call it even a fraction would be an exaggeration.”

“So…before?”

“Before, I was crueller. I’ve seen a…change in myself in my twilight years. The last hours of a Sunday.”

Twilight years. Iris had heard many describe her Majesty as ‘past her prime’ in hushed voices, accompanied by light shrugs and haphazard frowns.

It is what it is.

What can you expect?

She’s already been alive for so long.

Hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth gave it a newfound existential gravity.

“I’ve begun to see the…trees for the forest. The individual pieces on the board, now they derive from me sympathy. Yet…”

The rain swallowed the words of the almighty. Even in such a form, she carried so much presence. But, in the end…

“I still protect a nation. Nothing can come before that. Even so, I am glad that I’ve become the ruler that can give someone like you a chance.”

Devoid of inflection, of emotional notes that allowed human and voice box words to prance from mountains to valleys. That was what Iris was used to, the weight of the Queen’s words carried by sheer, instinctual presence alone. Every word a command, every sentence a royal decree.

Iris buried her head into the pillow and decided she was imagining things.

“So, it is not as though I cannot sympathise with you, nor Hardridge,” the Queen continued, once again returning to the manner in which she always carried herself. “Perhaps you, considering your family, have never felt the fear of a circumstance you can’t control. A war your loved one dies in; a famine your family perishes in.”

“Just because—”

“Let me finish. Please.”

“Okay…sorry.”

“I don’t mean to offend you, but I mean to say that I have watched mortals, over millennia, pray to gods for the power that you have. Your magic, the responsibility you hold, is gruelling, but having none at all is…paralysing. Hardridge talks from a place of knowing that pain.”

She knew that. Mum’s been through a lot. Dad too. That’s why they do what they do, that’s why they are who they are. That’s why their footsteps are so wide, too wide to fill.

“You might not have that same motivation, but with circumstances as they are—”

“Stop. I know…I’m tired of hearing it.”

Dead air again. There was something about a dying conversation that poisoned silence. Iris revelled in crystal clear peace, but in between words, the missing pieces of an awkward conversation injected hit after small hit of anxiety into her veins.

If she started counting sheep now—

“One day, Geverde will no longer need you. Not you, nor any other unwilling Witch or Wizard. I wish that…one day…I might rule such a kingdom.”

It wasn’t her responsibility to shoulder, not a world she needed to create. It was barely even a promise she could hold her hopes up for…

Yet it still made her heart flutter.

“Are you up yet?”

“Half,” Iris grumbled as she tried discerning Evalyn’s face—a knotted mess of pink and orange—through her blurred eyes.

“Half?” she chuckled. “Let’s get more than half going. Here, breakfast.”

Canned food again.

It was on a plate, at least. The dry bread in her mouth distracted her from the saltiness, and she washed it all down with tea.

The leaves were weak. Third cup, probably. First come, first serve.

She watched the small pool of brine on her plate glisten in the morning sunshine. Oil and salt from the depths of the ocean.

No. That made it sound too fresh.

Pressed in a factory, injected after the fact to simulate ‘freshness’.

Then she looked at the hole in the wall beside her and figured she shouldn’t be complaining. Still, a small glimmer of hope remained: maybe Evalyn was doing just as badly without Elliot’s cooking as she was.

But the woman was steely, licking her lips and her fingers as she rinsed her plate in last night’s rainwater.

“What?” she asked, catching Iris’s glare.

“You don’t deserve dad.”

“Huh? Where did that come from?”

“All right ladies, I stayed up all night for this, so don’t squander it.”

Terrence cut their morning short, his ever-energetic voice preceding him up the staircase. Next thing Iris knew, he had crossed the creaking room and slammed a map in between them.

The entire floor rattled under the abuse, and Iris was left blinking sawdust from her eyes.

“You were busy,” Evalyn muttered, walking along the structural supports hidden underneath the rotted wood. It was a talent that took years to notice—she was silent on creaky floorboards.

“If it’s a shipment you want, then that makes things easier. You flagged four places yesterday, so I monitored their communication.”

He looked at both of them one after another, so thoroughly chuffed in himself she could see the dog tail wagging.

“There’s one coming here,” he said, finger landing on a circled X, “in less than two hours.”

The city had imprinted its legacy on history pages across the human sphere of influence, and like an ancient lifeform, left its physical remains to be fossilised, pondered over for a million years to come.

Being in such a city, where life was exceptional, where movement stood out like a tree growing from a fifth storey window, already put the pair on the back foot.

“You can make something of a skeleton, can’t you?”

Wiring purple matter across her body like puppet strings no thicker than a length of twine. It was enough to reinforce her movements, make her stronger, faster, more agile.

But for combat?

“Worst-case scenario,” Evalyn said. “Can’t afford the entire city to bear down on us. Not now.”

She loaded a magazine into her rifle and slung it over her shoulder, finishing her sentence in a language Iris had now come to know well, one that dealt in metal scraping against metal, in springs and gunpowder and shell casings.

They’d do things the good ol’ way.

Evalyn handed Iris her sidearm, and Iris looped it around her waist. No further questions.

She pinned the Queen into her hair.

It was lighter than the day before.

“Are you still there?” she muttered.

“Of course.”

Iris pursed her lips. Now she felt stupid for asking.

They left via the front door, Evalyn once again in the lead, nose buried in the map. Left, left, then another right, passing a main road in favour of a backstreet that ran more or less adjacent. This time, Iris kept pace with her mother, and they walked side by side in a quickened march.

One, two, one, two.

Evalyn checked her watch.

“We’re almost there,” she said as a rumbling lorry tore through the stale, graveyard-like ambience. The screeching brakes engaged close by and turned somewhere in front of them.

“Against the wall,” Evalyn said, and Iris followed.

The vehicle rumbled past the end of the alleyway, oblivious. It was a personnel carrier, large enough to see action in war.

“That’ll be them,” her mother muttered. “Let’s pick up the pace.”

They ducked further into the backstreets, battling disarray and entropy, watching their footwork until Evalyn came to a screeching halt, heels planted into the ground.

Iris crashed into her nose first.

“Come on, stairs,” her mother muttered, eyes finding the lip of the roof colonised by moss and vines. She opened the rusted service door inward as Iris nursed her nose.

It screeched on its hinges like an alarm, but for all her effort, Evalyn could only force a few degrees out of it before the hinges locked in place for good.

“Can you slip through?” she asked. Iris measured the gap, trying to ignore her nose.

“Yes,” she said.

“You go first.”

Iris sucked in her stomach and sidestepped into the crevice. Rust flaked off the metal and littered her jacket, but otherwise, the ancient door hadn’t taken a toll for the passage.

But just in case, she checked her face for cuts. There was a disease she couldn’t pronounce yet.

Tetris. Apparently, that wasn’t it.

Beside her stood an old dresser, its glass broken and its left side mangled by something large. Something sharp.

But the years had taken its toll. If the former residents had used it to barricade the door from inside, if it had failed when inevitably torn from its place, strewn against the wall and discarded, that was all her own conjecture.

She found a secure handhold, stuck her feet firm against the concrete floor, and pulled as Evalyn pushed.

It was her mother’s turn to squeeze through, and she, too, made it inside unscathed.

“Any scratches?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said, smiling to herself.

They found themselves in a stairwell— bare brick walls on all four sides stretched further upwards, whereas another door led deeper into the building.

“Up,” Evalyn said.

Shielded from the elements, the stairs hadn’t decayed as severely as lumbered wood elsewhere. Still, it was dry and groaned like the risen undead. Disregarding the personification, it might as well have been.

Five flights up, and Evalyn pushed the service door open into a hallway.

With the walls relatively intact, nature had found its way to seep into the crevices, but otherwise, the building was almost airtight.

The carpet was still red under a thousand layers of dust and the wood above them still brown above a million strands of spider silk.

The only evidence of disarray was the signs of struggle. Scratch marks, smashed furniture, opened walls and stains of blood so faded they looked indistinguishable from simple discolorations in the paint.

Iris could see them. She’d spent too much time sitting in that hallway in her head not to.

They stared down the hallway for only a few steps before Evalyn laid a hand on the first door they came to.

“Do you think we’ll see any skeletons?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Right. Sorry.”

She pushed open the door, and a wave of dust enveloped them, stinging Iris’s eyes and drying out her throat.

Evalyn pulled a pair of handkerchiefs from her coat pocket, handing one to Iris.

The room they walked into was sparsely furnished, clearly a hotel suite. A moth-ridden queen bed the centrepiece, it had gone the quickest out of all the furniture bar the curtains.

Evalyn moved for the windows, sealed with rusted locks, the decaying metal tangling together into a mess.

“Handgun,” she said, holding out her hand. Iris reached into the holster and pulled it out, giving it to her mother.

Rather unceremoniously, she struck the lock. Once, twice, three times. Number four did the trick, and the snarl of metal came loose. Evalyn pushed the window open and handed back the handgun.

“Don’t peer too far over,” she whispered, pushing Iris’s head back down. “My hair blends in a little better.”

The uncharitable angle only revealed the far edge of a set of concrete courts, the remains of their nets could barely be described as evidence.

The tops of heads—sometimes everything from the neck up—would flit about along the edge of her vision. Nothing conclusive, frustratingly so. But Evalyn’s gentle push against her scalp was proving more than enough to keep her in line.

She exhaled through her nose, trying to keep her nerves quiet.

“Weapons. They’re on the move.”