Iris had found herself feeling a guilty satisfaction in watching Colte successfully tie his client to the chair. She watched from the bed, staring silently at him, asking every question he most likely had no intention of answering, all without speaking a word. It was that kind of stare, and Iris had recently become aware of how effective it was in unnerving its victim.

Although it was day, every light source they could find had been scavenged and lit ablaze. The overhead electrical light, torches stashed in case of blackout, bedside lamps, the television, and even several candles found in the bedside drawer. Anything that could emit a strong enough shine had created an impenetrable barrier around the client, of which it was impossible for him to touch any shadow except for his own.

According to Colte, it was like the chicken and egg argument, a paradox in which either result did not matter. Escaping into his own shadow would do him no good, and even attempting to do so would likely see him shot by the ash man, idly sitting in a chair on the far side of the barrier. Evalyn’s silencer was screwed to the end of his handgun, the safety was off, and Colte played with the trigger guard, brushing it with his index finger.

“Yeah, Colte baited him in, and we caught him. We’re okay, but we’ve found out some stuff that I need to talk to you and Elvera about,” Evalyn said, speaking into the telephone.

Iris had been told not to move from the bed, lest her shadow break a pathway through the barrier, but she so desperately wanted to see the Beak up close—partly out of curiosity and partly to apologise. Evalyn had made it apparent on their way home that Iris may have very well killed him and that she was not to take any measures involving her magic without her express permission.

No ifs. Not buts. No nothing. Those were the ground rules that ‘should have been set a long time ago.’

This time she had not praised Iris in a hurry, and Iris had noticed that all too much.

“He’s told us a lot, saying he answers to the city’s Security Council. Yeah, they’ve got a direct line into the ear of the City Duke. Well, the Air Marshall’s part of that council and…he’s there? Shit…. No, no, it works out for us. Marie and I are running a plan right now, but if that’s the case, then…Are you sure? Don’t do anything rash, okay? Talk to Elvera first…okay, bye. I trust you.”

With what Iris assumed to be an I love you from the other end of the line, Evalyn hung up the phone and returned to the scene. So much as a quiver from the client would earn him a death glare from Evalyn, and after the first few minutes, he hadn’t dared say another word unless he was explicitly granted permission.

One couldn’t help it after being made to endure Colte’s homemade brand of hell.

Four minutes. Even with perhaps hours upon hours of counter-interrogation training, the client had lasted a mere four minutes. They were taught to endure pain and exhaustion, yet Colte’s methods skipped the middleman. Steeled nerves were useless when hell toyed with the very existence of one’s being, tearing it apart layer by layer. Four minutes.

And even then, Colte had praised him on his remarkably high tolerance.

“Remind me again, who exactly the fuck you are?” Evalyn asked, crossing her arms as she stood behind Colte, his gun hand locked into position as the rest of his body slipped into melancholic boredom.

“Gukhel Ramalat, ma’am,” he said, several screws undoubtedly escaping his mechanical voice box, leaving behind a scratchy scrawl that served to only degrade his honour further.

“And you work for the Security Council. Is that correct?”

“Yes! Fucking yes! I’ve already told you!”

“Watch your tone; we can drive you back out there for another round if you don’t feel like fixing it.”

Gukhel forced himself silent, his machine voice refusing the will of his panicking body to stand up and scream. He was jittering with the urge to, yet the gun barrel kept his movements to nothing but nervous spasms.

“You work for the military. Not a mercenary force, not some double agent, not civilian intelligence, just the military. Is that correct?”

“Yes!” he shouted, exasperated by the repeated questioning. “Yes, ma’am.”

The question that had prodded at all three investigators’ minds had resurfaced. If it were the military who knew of Evalyn’s identity, would they have really procured that information from S.H.I.A.? An unquestionably anti-spirit organisation. They could not have been the ones with connections with S.H.I.A., let alone who set up the deal between them and the F.S.A. Why would they give sworn enemies such valuable resources?

“Hey,” Colte started, beckoning her closer. “I don’t think these two leads are related. Go find the hostages, and I’ll look into who’s got a read on you, alright?”

Evalyn remained unconvinced, judging by the unchangingly sour expression. She instead spat at Gukhel another line of questioning.

“Why do they want to know whether Evalyn Hardridge is in the city?”

Gukhel stared at Evalyn, then at Colte, and then at Colte’s gun before finally speaking, voice grinding like the unoiled gears of a thousand-year-old clock.

“I don’t know…I’m assuming they want to hire her…you…if she is you. The uhm… F.S.A. are getting more organised. They want as much power as they can find.”

“Then why not hire me outright?”

“I don’t know! How should I know?! Maybe some dipshit on your side’s playing double agent! I’m just an informant, so please just fucking let me go!”

Verifying intelligence—a plausible motive for the Security Council. Perhaps unknowingly, Gukhel spat wisdom through the otherwise almost unintelligible gargle that Evalyn assumed was a plea for help. None would come, however. He knew too much.

“We thank you for your cooperation. A dispatch of Geverdian agents is presently coming to collect you. Congratulations, you are an enemy of the City-state of Fadaak and a co-conspirator of the F.S.A.”

“What?!”

“They’ll be here soon,” Evalyn continued. Your final correspondence with the Security Council will inform them of Evalyn Hardridge’s absence from the city. You will be read your rights once the appropriate officers arrive, so please cooperate. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

She left Gukhel with no personal remark for him to rue over. The execution of his livelihood was nothing personal, and the realisation of such washed over him like dunes in a desert. It just had to happen.

Evalyn stepped out of the space and into the kitchen to hang her head. She rested her body weight on the counter and sighed. The information formed links between each other before crumbling once again. All arbitrary, none of it real unless she chose to believe it so.

There was barely any solid proof that a connection existed between the revelation of her identity and the missing hostages, yet the links made too much sense to her. They were too convenient; their ends slotted too perfectly with one another that she could not see any other possibility.

A double agent. The existence of such a presence in the Geverdian hierarchy at any level was already a cause for concern, yet Fadaak had never been at odds with Geverde as far as she knew. Why would they be?

Double agent or not, the possibility of something greater than any one faction still existed. The dim speck of darkness that all the worst of her imagination succumbed to. It toyed with her, whoever this mysterious all-knower was, and how much damage they could do to her.

Connections to Fadaak’s Security Council, the Geverdian leadership, the F.S.A. and S.H.I.A. The more she thought, the bigger the dark speck grew until a suffocating feeling of systematic conspiracy reared its familiar paws across her conscience.

She knew this feeling, the feeling of something bigger than what she alone could tackle—her pleas to change Sidos before the war had brought the same hopelessness.

Stolen novel; please report.

Yet she was different now. This was not her wartime self, the girl with ambitions too big for her existence. She could do something about it, yet she did not know where to start.

Fuck.

She wished Elliot were with her right now.

As if it were magic, the small wall-mounted telephone rang—a muted chirp that jolted her heart in a small way.

She walked over and answered it, careful of who was on the other side.

“Evalyn?” Elliot’s voice called abruptly with not a clue of Evalyn’s current state of mind. An abrasive return to normalcy, but it was just what she needed.

“It’s her, yes.”

“I’m calling from another payphone, but I just connected with Elvera. She says that if the Air Marshall is with me, we could wrangle information out of him and flatten out this whole mess,” he said, keeping the details vague, perhaps as not to worry her.

“The Air Marshall knows whoever knows me,” Evalyn explained, “and I can’t help but think this is all connected.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“…I don’t know. If we’re lucky, we expose a rat in Geverde’s ranks. If we aren’t, it could be much worse than anyone imagined.”

“How so?”

“We could be talking about a network, Elly. If I’m right, then this person has their fingerprints everywhere. Hell, how did they even know to hire Colte? He’s the best Wizard they could have picked to find me!” she said, hissing quietly into the phone’s receiver.

“Evalyn, let’s bring it back,” Elliot said slowly. “We deal with this one step at a time. Someone in S.H.I.A. managed to identify you, someone else in Geverde managed to find your mission’s time frame, and someone else organised the hostage trade. This information has to terminate somewhere, and I’ll take over for now. Got it?”

Evalyn breathed, refocusing the pieces of the network in somewhat of an orderly fashion. Blurred streaks became pen-lines, and a map began to form in her head, albeit of only one possibility. Yet, she could say with confidence that it was a possibility worth investigating.

“You and Elvera keep working on that plan,” Evalyn said. “I’ll do what I can from here.”

“I intend to. Put Iris on the phone for me, would you?”

Evalyn turned around, finding Iris still idle on the queen-sized bed.

“Iris,” she said, tilting her head, beckoning her towards the receiver. Iris shuffled off the frame, avoiding coming into contact with the illuminated ring. She reached Evalyn, who passed the phone to her.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Iris,” Elliot chirped.

“Hi.”

“How’re things?”

Iris thought momentarily, stuck on deciding whether either the truth or a fabricated yet gentle answer would better suit the situation. Yet she felt an innate insecurity in the latter, as if she would be sabotaging if she chose it. Elliot was the one who made her food, put her to sleep and held her hand. Denying such a person of anything did not sit right with her.

“I found out about the city,” she said.

A long pause transmitted through the coiling wire, and Iris wondered if Elliot’s words were perhaps still stuck climbing them.

“I see. How did that make you feel?”

“Scared.”

“Why?”

“That things like this can happen.”

“Bad things happen, Iris. Better things always follow.”

“Can I make those better things happen faster?”

“Iris,” Elliot said, voice growing stern. Any jovial tinge left had entirely disappeared by now. He sighed, acknowledging his sudden change in tone.

“Iris. I want you to remember something. Are you listening?”

“Yeah?”

“Iris. You will grow up to be an amazing person, perhaps even greater than your mother. You will grow up to do many great things, and perhaps some bad things, but that’s okay. But promise me one thing, Iris.”

“What is it?”

“Whatever you do, you will do it because you want it to. Not because someone told you or because you feel it needs to be done. The power everyone holds, including yours, is best used when using it for yourself.”

“But this is important-”

“I know, Iris. I know. Perhaps, one day, you will be able to overthrow an entire country, and perhaps you never will. But Iris, you owe nothing to no one, not even Evalyn and I.”

He said this with quiet desperation. Words that had his entire being nested in them, yet they still seemed as though it pained him to utter them. Perhaps he was leaving something unsaid; perhaps there was a reason.

“Whatever you do, Iris, is up to you. Good or bad.”

“What happens if I do something bad?”

“…Then there will always be someone there to stop you. You’ll understand one day.”

“Okay,” Iris said, admittedly unable to fully understand the entire meaning of Elliot’s words. “I love you,” she said. Another pause—this one shorter than the last. One of surprise, not insecurity.

“I trust you,” he replied.

Elliot placed the receiver back onto the payphone—his coins jingled in the belly of the machine as he left the small box. He was on a smaller side street in the city’s commercial district. The buildings here were not nearly as tall as those in the business sector, yet still numbered several storeys high. ‘To buy razor blades’ had been his excuse, something no Spirit had a use for on the base.

The bustle here was manageable considering the time and day, but he was sure that by the later hours, they would return to the endless stream of bodies he was used to. He crossed the street and found his way onto the main road, a wide affair for such a tightly-knit district. The neon signs were not yet illuminated, and the lack of contrast between black night and glowing buildings showed the town in a less impressive but gentler way.

He reluctantly found his car, the same model he had ridden in upon his first arrival at the base. He had hoped the same model did not also mean the same driver, yet it seemed the gods were not in his favour on this particular matter. His reckless flying had used up all his luck.

“All done?” Jerimiah chimed from the driver’s seat.

“Yeah,” Elliot said, presenting a box of razor blades before tossing them onto the dash.

“Then let’s go,” Jerimiah said with an uncharacteristic brevity.

The trip was too quiet. Jerimiah had only uttered a sentence or two concerning the state of a particularly ill-maintained road and had not said anything since their exit from the city. The abstract painting outside Elliot’s window was not any more entertaining than his driver was, and Elliot cursed himself for sincerely debating if the droning Jerimiah was in any capacity better than the silent one.

“Hey,” Elliot said as Jerimiah shifted gears in response to a lonely and unnecessary speed sign.

“Yes, Sir?” Jerimiah said, barely taking his eyes off the road. He was such a smooth and responsible driver that it irked him. Perhaps the gods had indeed gifted him with a different driver after all.

“Last time you drove me, you said humans weren’t allowed outside of the city.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I get why they’re restricted from military bases, but why are they not allowed at all?”

Jerimiah took his time with his answer, tapping the steering wheel with his bony fingers.

“I’ve never had anything to do with the business, but a fella once tried explaining it to me. Imagine you had a pet…I don’t know what humans keep as pets.”

“A house cat.”

“Sure. Say you had a house cat that was born in your home, raised there, lived out its life so on and so forth. On its deathbed, how would that cat have ever known there was anything else besides that house?”

“They wouldn’t, would they?”

“No. Most Help & Labour who leave the city never come back. The only reason they stay is because they think they’d be a slave anywhere else. They’re whisked away by a lovestruck tourist, or they join the F.S.A. Once they get a taste of freedom, who would want to come back? Even the folk from Workar never do.”

“Workar?” Elliot asked, reeling the name from distant memory.

“They’re the company with the most skin in the game, Sir. Their Help & Labour is well looked after from birth till death. Usually servants and butlers and that sort of thing. Some are probably smarter than both of us combined.”

“But the fact that they’re slaves never changes…”

“…no. I guess not.”

Elliot grew silent as the conversation dug deeper and deeper. Places he did not feel confident going.

“I have a buddy in the city, works at a telecom centre downtown,” Jerimiah began. “He’s a refugee from a ways away. Travelled by boat to escape slavery in his own country. At first, he was cheering at the fact humans were getting the taste of their own medicine, but that didn’t last long, though.”

“He couldn’t escape it,” Elliot said.

“It’s the same everywhere, Sir. It’ll haunt him wherever he goes. Frankly, I know a lot of people with similar experiences. Just because you’re being paid don’t mean you ain’t a slave. Didn’t take long to realise them humans going through the same fucked up shit they went through.”

Elliot watched Jerimiah’s hands move. They were perfectly still as if they were numb to the vibrations he supposedly used to find his surroundings. When he spoke, it was deliberate. Not as a Spirit against humans, not even as a Spirit. Just as a single living being.

“Sir, can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“I saw you fly yesterday. Watched you control that fighter like you was simply walking. I heard from one of the rookies how much you done over the course of your career.”

“What about it?” Elliot asked.

“Have you ever really, and I mean really felt like you ever changed anything? Anything that mattered?”

Elliot thought, rubbing his unshaven chin with his fingers as he watched the sand dunes. Impersonal, unrelenting, never-ending. That was the impression of the world adulthood had boiled it down to.

He was only one pilot. A pilot needed a unit, a unit needed an army, an army needed a nation, and a nation needed allies. Even then, no state in history had ever succeeded in changing how things turned out in the end.

Different names, different regimes, different ideologies. No matter what, the nature of the living triumphed over all, and everyone secretly wished for a world where they were at the top.

Evalyn had told him once when she had asked the Wishing Whale if having such selfish ambitions were permissible, even moral, and he had given a simple answer.

“That is how the world will work, until the day utopia begins.”

“What’s that, Sir?”

Elliot returned his mind to the present.

“Nothing, I think. But…”

“But what, Sir?”

Elliot leaned back, inhaling the cool air with gratitude.

“I think I have changed something in all these years. I met a girl, saved her life a couple times, found a house and took on a child.”

Jerimiah laughed.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, Sir,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Well, it’s the best you can hope for.”

“I guess so….” Jerimiah trailed off into silence. “Things’ll change here, Sir. It’s just that no one thinks that they’ll be the ones to start it. No one wants to start it.”

“Complacency?”

“No. Everyone thinks the same as you, Sir. Just them alone won’t change a thing, Sir. Just liberating the city won’t change a thing. The F.S.A. does what everyone else is too scared to do.”

“Then why do you fight them?”

“Because when they take over, it’ll be us who’re made to be slaves. This city is built on slaves, Sir. No matter which way you spin it.”

Elliot sighed, feeling the bitter pill get caught in his throat. His mind flashed back to Iris, her childish face and jewel-like eyes. He had told her something that no child should have to come to terms with so young.

Whatever you do, Iris, is up to you. Good or bad.

What wishful thinking.