“They’re all slaves, Iris. Workers who don’t get paid. Every single human resident in the city.”

The Free Slave Army. That’s who had bought the hostages from S.H.I.A.

The world around her took on new shades of paint and darker hues of evil. The monumental towers snarled into overbearing spires, watch towers scrutinising everything below them—everyone around her. The streets of golden ambience had created a sickly ironic stage for its actors to live on, to survive upon.

Every human, man, woman and child had been painted, no, sullied with a bucket of liquid context, revealing their true existence to her. The farce that was the City-State of Fadaak fully unravelled itself after snickering at her ignorance.

She gripped Evalyn’s hand as the crowd began to feel more and more alien, more surreal. There was a weight to the situation, a gravity too heavy for her to bear, too heavy that her mind would not let her heart bear it.

The implications that came with the word ‘slave’. There were too many.

Not sympathy; sympathy was as genuine as how the billboard signs advertised hollow product after hollow product, and empathy was just about as helpful as the infinite crowds were in helping a stumbling woman.

Iris watched as the woman, no older than Evalyn, tried to regain her footing. In front of her, a spread of groceries escaped from a paper bag. The crowd parted around her like the dogged advance of sand dunes. A relentless forward motion, as if the rule of nature was well and truly alive in the mirage of a city.

“Slaves built this city, and the slave trade is how the city makes its money. That’s just how it is,” Evalyn sighed, leaving her spot on the bench. She walked up to the woman and knelt, offering a hand.

The woman looked confused. Grateful, yet confused about how to express it. Evalyn helped her to her feet and began to wrangle the escaped items back into the bag as the woman watched in astonishment.

Not long after, the woman returned to being one with the unending forward motion, and Evalyn returned to her seat next to Iris.

“That’s just how it is,” she repeated as if it made perfect sense.

It didn’t to Iris.

“I wonder how Smokey’s doing,” Evalyn said nonchalantly, playing with the position of her legs as she gazed at the opposite building.

A circular tower rebelled against the very grid structure the city had risen from, finding its foundations on one of the most frequented streets, and ending in a domed roof, perfect for stargazing, if there were any to be seen. The city’s attempts to overwhelm them with artificial light had been much too successful.

Iris and Evalyn had been waiting across the street for the better part of half an hour, idly watching for any new developments, good or bad.

“Colte-”

“Mr. Colte,”

“…Mr. Colte doesn’t seem like a bad guy,” Iris stated, correcting herself.

“No, he isn’t a bad guy,” Evalyn agreed, “we just don’t agree on some things, y’know?”

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking,” Iris said, fully aware she had never asked a question. Nuances, Evalyn had taught her. Stuff that made humans emotionally intelligent.

“Smart-ass. Elliot’s not a good role model, so don’t take after him,” Evalyn chuckled.

“It’s all thanks to him that I’m where I am now, so he must be doing something right.”

“You’re saying that like I don’t exist?” Evalyn scoffed at Iris’s sudden onset of sass. “What’s he been teaching you?”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“…well, maybe some things.”

“Like what?”

“To call you ‘mum’ whenever I get you mad.”

“You’re not getting off that easily.”

“Sorry, mum.”

“…”

“See? It does work!” Iris cried.

A beet-red Evalyn caught Iris’s flanks in her pincers and squeezed them until Iris begged her to stop. They both were left smiling, and Evalyn sighed, finally ready to speak.

“Colte has a specific way of looking at the whole…Witch and Wizard thing.”

“How so?”

“Well…it’s complicated,” Evalyn said, dodging the subject clumsily. “He just didn’t agree with the way I did things. Keeping a family and all.”

“Did he think keeping a family was a bad idea?”

Evalyn retracted her legs under the bench, looking down as if an answer would fall into her lap.

“No. I think he wanted one himself, but he understood what our line of work entails. How it can be…dangerous.”

“But you’re stronger than everyone else. Why is that such a big worry?”

“…It wasn’t the prospect of death. Having gone through that ritual, he knows what death means better than anyone else. It was the way of life. He and I are the same, but we choose to…we need to think about it differently. Else I don’t think we could live with ourselves.”

Suddenly, Evalyn perked up, like the ears on a cat, her vision trained across the street. Iris followed the line of sight and found Colte at the end of it, glancing left and right before crossing the road.

“Let’s go,” Evalyn muttered as she stood up, beckoning Iris to follow. Together, they strode through the oncoming crowd, meeting Colte in the middle of the road.

“Client’s spooked; didn’t get much out of him,” he said as he passed. They kept walking, and barely a second elapsed before he was lost in the mass of moving people.

Iris felt the presence beside her shift as Evalyn changed from purely human to just a little more Spirit, denoted by the dull glowing of her tattoo.

“He’s this way,” she said, veering off diagonally, crossing into a side street in the shadow of the club’s effulgence.

They both began to scan the side street rapidly as their surroundings grew saturated with street vendors and food stalls. Those who crowded the market were human, but many vendors were Spirit, fully capable of sensing magic if used too indulgently. Iris could feel that danger, but she nonetheless sensed the dull presence beside her again.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“This way. He’s hopping in and out of shadows, but I can find him.”

Evalyn ploughed through the crowd of humans, dragging Iris on behind her. What Evalyn was too focused to see in the corner of her vision, Iris was noticing twofold. With each flash of magic, another street vendor stirred. With each flash, their gazes were growing closer and closer to congregating on Evalyn. She was leaving a trail of nectar faster than they could outpace it.

A hand reached towards Evalyn from amongst the bodies. An unnatural, Spirit one that disappeared as quickly as it had existed. They were playing a precarious game of cat and mouse, but Evalyn bulldozed through with a one-track mind, and all Iris could do was hold on for dear life.

“Hey. Hey!”

The voice faded into the background.

“The hell was that?”

Another suspicion was lost to the wind.

As they teetered on the border between hunter and hunted, Evalyn dragged Iris down an alleyway, branching at a right angle from the side street. They were sandwiched between the backsides of two multi-storey buildings, and even the overflowing population had yet to make it very far down these secretive passages.

Behind every dumpster and round every corner, the two readied themselves for a sudden attack. Even when fully aware that the ground beneath them could be hosting the enemy, they could not afford to slow down. They were still moving, which meant the target was still aware of a potential pursuer. The maze-like structure of the unplanned, invisible parts of the city only worsened their problems. She could sense Evalyn wanted to go in a specific direction, but which set of pathways and corners would take her there, she did not know.

Yet by now, they were the only ones around. If the target needed proof that they were being chased, that was it. The target’s actions warranted high-speed pursuit, yet even Iris could understand that they’d have lost him a long time ago without Evalyn's magic.

“Fuck. Where is he,” Evalyn hissed as if on cue, her tattoo timidly growing more daring with its light and magic as her frustration grew.

“What’ll happen if you don’t find him,” Iris asked.

“I…someone is close to knowing who I am. That puts you and Elliot at risk. Especially when we’ve gotten this far. Fuck!”

Evalyn’s grip tightened around Iris’s hands, and her movements became more sporadic. The working Evalyn was slowly degrading, melting into a small trail of falsities. This was also an Evalyn Hardridge Iris knew, one that needed all the help she could get.

And so, she asked for help. Nothing lifesaving, but a favour one could repay with an offer for lunch.

She needed to find this person. Hunt this person. He was dangerous, and that was all Iris needed to know.

And the voice in her head liked hunting.

The barbed red carpet of the hallway began to unravel beneath her feet, revealing to her a stained pathway forward. It filled in the blank space between each wall, pipe, and grimy dumpster, adding colour but little vibrance. Yet it served its purpose.

“This way,” Iris said coldly, breaking into a run and tugging Evalyn along with her. Her vision tunnelled as her footsteps turned mechanical. Follow the red carpet, follow the path, the carpet, the path, the carpet, the blood, the path, the blood-soaked path.

Corner.

Alley.

Junction.

Left.

Closer. Closer. Closer.

She could taste it, and the voice in her head was giggling, squealing in anticipation as Iris felt her hair begin to disintegrate. She felt the weight of her waist-long tresses disappear, lifting the burden off her shoulders. She was free, and she knew the orb in her hand to be more capable than the largest of wrecking balls. She could feel it, feel its weight. She could control it with ease.

She felt a putrid smile creep over her face as her predatory presence rapidly approached the far end of the pathway.

Whoever he was, she did not care. He was there, and Iris had found him.

With a wave of her hand, the orb smashed into the concrete of the building, sending tremors all throughout her body, the sheer force and magic of the impact forcing the target out of the shadows and into a physical form. A beak. The suit, voice box and all.

“Holy shit! What the fuck!” the target squealed as it shielded itself from the dust and debris.

The Beak dared not peek at the crater left in the wake of Iris’s assault, his attention was too focused on the second attack, yet it never came.

Iris felt a hand across her face, and something tripped her feet. She was shoved onto the ground, the fall knocking the voices into silence completely. The red carpet was gone, and she picked herself off the dirty concrete, dazed and still dizzy.

The target stood against the wall, hands raised above his head, and a gun pointed directly between his set of hollow eyes. Evalyn watched him with the barrel of her handgun and glanced at Iris with her eyes—a mix of worry and relief.

“Don’t move. You’re coming with us.”

“‘Opening your mind to new possibilities’ is a sentence I don’t exactly feel cool saying, but that is one of the few ways you can describe Rapacian fighters in a nutshell. While Sidosian fighters may carry present-day technologies to their logical conclusion, the Rapacian fighters work off entirely new systems,” Elliot explained, flipping through a notepad. On each page, a pilot and their statistics were listed. Name, age, rank, experience. Nothing more, nothing less, and precisely in that order.

“A fixed-wing configuration will allow the pilot to control the plane with no assistance whatsoever, much like what can be expected from a regular fighter. However, the free-wing configuration allows the magic to play a more active role. Much like a bird, you trade stability for agility, provided you can handle the G’s.”

In front of him were forty students in beige-grey uniforms, sitting frighteningly at attention behind their desks. Elliot was never used to such disciplined attention; it was often more of the listless kind. Often the muted one-way conversations with his classes would be filled with an ambient soundtrack of the Steel Whale, yet his teaching space was deathly quiet. Where the atmosphere of sweat, metal and work echoed throughout the steel whale, out in the desert, the wind swallowed any sound too soft.

He worked his way to the end of the notepad, having recorded the information in his head as briefly as possible. In summary, most were amateurs who only knew how to fly their previously assigned aircraft in training, and many had only recently earned their wings. Only a choice few had seen any deployment, and even then, often for scramble alerts that went nowhere.

A relatively new Air Force with no foreign interests to defend. They were neither expansionary nor did they have any enemies to their borders. Everything centred around money, and as far as Elliot knew, their Navy was what kept their trade routes secure. They kept the lifelines alive, leaving the Air Force to pluck any thorns that might get in the way.

“Over the course of the next two weeks and beyond, you’ll be trained in several free-wing dogfighting manoeuvres only possible in the Rapacian fighters. More specifically, you will learn how to escort bombers, engage with bandits who target said bombers, and destroy anti-air instalments when it is deemed mission critical.”

He stopped his pacing, returning the notepad to his breast pocket. “And that’s pretty much all it says. Any questions?”

Silence.

“Good. I didn’t think bombing terrorists would be that complicated to understand,”

A hesitant chuckle awkwardly shifted through the cohort, catching Elliot off guard.

“What? Bad joke?”

The students scratched their necks and looked away, some even turning towards each other and whispering. Finally, one brave, perhaps daft soul spoke out on behalf of the entire class.

“Forgive us, sir. Being taught by a human is a…new experience,” they said. A smaller runt, near the back of the classroom. “We didn’t think any human would call the F.S.A. terrorists, sir.”

He took the answer and glanced around the classroom, gathering the sense of a unanimous agreement. He nodded, fingers curling around the chalk, whitening his hands.

“Well, humans call each other terrorists all the time. You end up getting used to it,” he said, realising just how badly his efforts at fitting in had backfired.

“No, sir. We’d never group you with Help and Labour, sir.”

Elliot felt his skin crawl as he processed those words, opting to return to preparing his blackboard. The sound of the wind blew against the hangar walls like a mocking chuckle as the words Help and Labour refused to leave the back of his mind, a gentle yet potent reminder of exactly why he hated visiting the city.

Like the only sheep conscious of the slaughter, he could feel the churning gears of the slave trade as an unsettling truth bearing down upon him. He was not as ignorant as the average tourist, yet he knew he could do nothing about it, even if he wanted to. His thoughts drifted back to Iris, wondering how she would take the truth, and if she would try to be any bit heroic about it.

How would she feel knowing he had a part in crushing the dreams of those who wanted to be free?

“Captain Maxwell,” a voice called from the classroom entrance, followed by a brisk salute. “Phone call for you, sir. Line seven.”

The messenger turned to leave, and Elliot followed, frantically ordering his class to sit still and refrain from doing anything outstandingly illegal.

A phone was mounted to the wall only a few paces down the hallway. The messenger beckoned Elliot forward before saluting and taking his leave. Elliot picked up the receiver and dialled the correct line, playing with the cord as he did so.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Elliot Maxwell speaking.”

“Hi, this is Michelle,” Evalyn said from the other end of the line.

“Hi honey, I’m at work; what’s the problem?”

“I need to talk to you about something regarding the bookings, but I don’t want to bother you if you’re busy. Mind calling me back later?”

“Sure. I’ll find a phone once I get off work.”

“See you then,” Evalyn said as she hung up. Elliot returned the phone, knowing he needed to find a private line as soon as he could manage.