After a full day in captivity, Iris watched the informant vanish beyond the doorway, subdued sufficiently by two covertly armed officers. As she watched him go, spirit broken and will to fight extinguished, Iris felt the twinge of guilt turn into a pang. The thought of him lingered in her mind longer than she felt necessary.

She watched Colte as he put out each light one by one, flicking switches and choking candlelight with damp thumbs.

“Was it okay to do that?”

“Do what?” Colte said through a mouthful of thumb.

“To lie like that, get him arrested?”

“Would you have rather let him go and spill your identity?”

No, was the simple answer, but the fact that her rampage was the reason he could no longer be set free was the truth. If she had just restrained herself, things could have been different.

As if reading her mind, Colte watched her before taking his singed thumb out of his mouth.

“His fate was sealed the moment he scampered on me. It was thanks to you we found him at all.”

Iris remained unconvinced as he began to place the room back into its natural order. She sat there, watching him, or rather the wall behind him. The final item, a desk lamp, he put atop the bedframe before finding her in his vision once again. He sighed, apparently at the sight of her. It was only then had Iris realised she had forgotten to blink.

She felt her body sink as the heavier man sat next to her.

“What did Elliot tell you when you were on the phone?”

“I can’t remember all of it,” she said.

“Just the important parts.”

“… that whatever I do is up to me, good or bad.”

Colte chuckled at the sentence, scratching his cheek as he did so. “Good…yeah, that’s good. Iris, can you let an old man tell you something?”

“You’re not old.”

“What’s your definition of old, then?”

“The Queen is super old, isn’t she?”

Colte sighed again, this time retaining a slight grin on his face. “Different kind of old, Iris. Don’t compare people to the Queen.”

“Why not?”

“…will you let me say something first? Then I’ll explain to you.”

“Sure.”

“Well,” he said, making himself comfortable. The smell of smoke escaped his clothes whenever he shifted, but never enough to overpower her nostrils. “What Elliot said is always important to remember, Iris. Whatever you want to do is up to you.”

“Good or bad?”

“Good or bad. But, there are a few things you have to remember.”

“What are those?”

“That you can’t do everything.”

“But you said-”

“Anything and everything are two different things. This line of work needs motive. Strong conviction.”

“What’s yours, then?”

“What’s mine?”

He rummaged in his jacket, pulling faces as he reached impossibly deep until he found himself his pipe, the one that if not found in his jacket, was almost permanently glued to his lips.

“You know how I got my magic, don’t you?” he asked, talking out of one side of his mouth while the other held the pipe in place.

“I think so. Roughly, at least,” Iris answered.

“Then you’d know that we earn our magic, and we do it so we can do what we were always meant to.”

“What was that?”

He produced a small tin, no larger than two of his fingers, and opened the lid, gently tapping the contents into the open end of the pipe.

“To protect Aerilia. It’s a city in Geverde; you must have flown over it on your way here. If you follow the canals in Excala away from the sea, you’ll always reach it,” he said, demonstrating the flow with a wriggle of his palm. “A great city built across the largest lake in the country. The downside to that, however, was that fire was the greatest asset to any ancient army. It was rendered impractical in Aerilia’s defense.”

His chest expanded. A visual harkening back to the moments before Iris’s trip to hell. She expected something just as vile, but nothing of the sort came to be. The monstrous breath was released as nothing but a whisper, funnelling itself into the pipe and lighting the dry leaves inside.

“Aerilian fire. The flame that burns on water. Used always protect Aerilia, and now Geverde, from its enemies. That’s what I dedicate myself to, and that’s why that informant’s condition is of no concern to me.”

She watched a gentle smoke begin to pour from his pipe. A smoke that moved not only at the whim of the air, but to the amusement of Colte—a hive sharing a singular will.

“And I’ve decided to what lengths I would go to do that. At that moment, Iris, you had to choose between you and him. It’s a choice you’ll make over and over again.”

A choice with a resounding undertone of cruelty. The decision, even being uttered as if it was absolute, made her gnaw at her lip. It was unfair, overwhelmingly so.

“I don’t want to…,” she said finally. “I don’t want to make that choice.”

Colte took a sombre drag of his pipe as his eyes caught the glint of the moonlight. His harsh features cast rigid shadows across his face, only furthering the sense that his face was cast of iron.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Evalyn said the same thing once. It’s not the right mindset for a mercenary.”

“But she’s a P.I.,” Iris said.

“Sure she is,” he said. “But she’ll never be allowed not to be a mercenary.”

“Why?”

“…because sometimes what we do isn’t up to us. Good or bad.”

Another layer was added to Evalyn’s doctrine, at least the incomplete Iris could piece together. For now, it still remained a mysterious set of unordered, unbound pages. A mystery she could only ever read the fringes of. But even there, scribbled and scrawled in the margins of every page was something Iris could decipher clearly.

“She wanted a family. She wanted a home. That’s why she couldn’t be a mercenary,” Iris said, the words controlling her lips instead of the other way around. Words that arose from an intimate appreciation of the woman at the centre of her life.

“Yes, Iris. She’s found her conviction. I wonder if you can find yours.”

Grain men. A passing remark from a worker had put him onto the term only recently. A name to put to the tectonic vibrations he would feel pass through him every few hours. Taking that inkling of knowledge, he had gone to a crew member—again, the slim fellow with a knack for squeezing in tight spaces—and asked him exactly what a Grain Man was.

No one had a clear idea, apparently. The heads of the base had advised them not to worry since Grain Men only ever concerned themselves with magical outbursts. A human population was of no concern to them.

“Guardians of the desert, apparently. It’s why the base is on its turf; it protects us from any magical attacks,” the worker had said while hanging off a metal arm, screwing a bolt into place. “The rumblin’ is just it moving. Never seen it above ground, though.”

As if on cue, the ground under his feet had shifted, filling the cracks in the concrete with sand.

“You get used to it,” he had said. Kurael hoped he would not be staying that long.

“It’s ironic a Spirit protects the base….” Kurael said, partly to himself and partly as a jab made in spite.

“Grain Men ain’t the ones we’re after, boss. We draw the line somewhere; else, we’d be taking on half the world.”

“So you don’t have a problem with me, then?”

“Course not. The same way you don’t have a problem with all humans the way you do with us.”

The man dropped from the arm and found his toolbox stashed in the silhouette of the H.O.A.

“Sometimes I think we’re doing the same thing in practice, but for a different cause,” he said, swapping his spanner for a screwdriver and hammer. “Everything’s acceptable as long as you’re the one doing it,” he said, his demeanour not growing desponded in the slightest even after such a self-deprecating statement.

“Don’t lose your confidence now,” Kurael said, “you’re in too deep.”

“I’d rather die,” he said, returning to his work. “Won’t rest until something changes.”

“You want the world to change?”

“Course I do. But wanting and making are two different things. Our goal will always be the city.”

Kurael eyed the contraption up and down, scanning for anything amiss. He caught himself, wondering why he was quality-controlling terrorist armament. He tore his mask away in cowardly defiance. If he was truly brave, he would have unlocked a coupling or kept one or two integral screws loose.

But he was not. This was not his fight. For all he cared, the city could burn in hell. By the sounds of things, it probably deserved it.

Perhaps he had spent too much time with them.

It had been over a month, but Kurael was not entirely certain. One of the more optimistic would have been counting the days, though he doubted anyone still was anymore. He had remembered the first week vividly. Many had already been forced at gunpoint for a month or two already, yet they were still allowed home, albeit under watchful eyes. A decent bed and filling meals, provided you kept an eye on every one of your movements. A single twitch, a misplaced word or a plea for help of any degree was not a risk Kurael was willing to make, to the point he had switched off his voice box if there was no use for it.

The desert had been a shock to everyone. The Sidosians were accustomed to buckets of rain and cloudy skies, and the Geverdians were used to a climate micromanaged by Her Majesty on a day-by-day basis.

No one was used to nothing. Kurael could have been convinced that no one at all was used to nothing, yet now, he sincerely believed that life found a way no matter where it was. The Grain Men perhaps survived instinctually, but humans needed food, water and shelter.

They had built shelter. The hangers were closer relatives to garden sheds than their military counterparts. Crude in every way, bolted together in some places and welded in others. The concrete was uneven, only existing to fill the spaces left behind by the outcrop of rock, which was a miracle of geology in and of itself—a speck of solid ground in an ocean of impermanence.

Water was delivered on a three-day basis, and food on a weekly schedule. A convoy would arrive, scattered from dusk till dawn, each fulfilling more and more of the base’s needs in a way that would not attract too much attention. Routes differed due to the simple fact that defined routes did not exist, and the drivers of said convoys would use instruments of navigation more reminiscent of a merchant ship of a bygone era. They would use the sun and the stars, obscure landmarks and tyre tracks if they were fortunate.

Kurael rolled over, uncertain of the time. He could hear the sun’s rays just beyond the walls of his tent and thought to shift his covers away from the edge in case they combusted in his sleep.

It was still day, and Kurael had no business being awake during sleeping hours if he wanted any hope of lasting the work night from dusk till dawn.

He rolled over, testing his eyesight, or rather visual senses, on his surroundings, attempting unsuccessfully to purge the bleariness from the picture.

Sixteen bodies in a variety of shapes and sizes, yet all fitting in the rough parameters that one could consider that of an engineer. He had known several since arriving in Sidos, that now being a distant memory along with any semblance of hope left in their faces. They lay in their beds, trying their hardest to fight the heat for a wink of sleep.

Problems of the mind start in the body. It was something even Kurael could sympathise with, but his bodily pain never originated from hunger and thirst. That was uniquely human.

Control of the mind could ease the body—another uniquely human trait. Henry, a taller man with slender muscles and a tendency to lean on whatever was even slightly shorter, had almost lost his awkwardly charming demeanour Kurael had grown to appreciate. His voice would croak when speaking, and he had absorbed himself in his work, perfecting every minute task, likely fearing the reality of his situation would dawn on him if he so much as took his mind off it for a second.

And it did not go without saying that the members of the F.S.A. kept sane through sheer willpower and faith alone. What could have created such a mental fortitude was beyond Kurael, or rather he did not want to know.

The silence was complete. The air was empty, devoid of anything other than stale oxygen and the crunch of airborne sand. With such heat ordinarily came an oppressive humidity that hung in the air and weighed it down, much like a foul odour. Yet this air had nothing; the nothing tickled his skin, searching for a drop of sweat it could greedily snatch for itself.

Sooner or later, the vapid air would find something of his to steal.

He struggled to lift himself upright, his body fighting with the stiff canvas of the hammock. The ‘bed’ creaked loudly, but no one else seemed to notice or care. Whatever the noise was, it was not worth losing sleep over.

There were no windows, and the entrance was folded over, yet the room was still ambiently bright. The tent’s white fabric, although reflective, did not block light. The omnidirectional luminosity was not one he could simply turn away from. His best bet was to use their paper-thin covers as an eye mask. God knew the last thing anyone needed was a blanket.

Only now was he able to separate the music from the ambient brushing of the wind. A slow piece, brought forth along with—and marred by—a faint scratching. A small record player of human design sat haphazardly on the uneven ground, playing despite its situation. It pained him to see such a proud device straining itself in such a humiliating position.

Each swell of the music, each playful melody, had lost its infinite charm. He could imagine it resting proudly atop a mantlepiece or a coffee table in the home of a lonely bachelor as it soothed his aching soul in self-affirming sorrow.

Perhaps that would never happen. Perhaps it could be something he could steal back with him—if the chance ever arose to do so.

He fell again into his hammock, his imagination running amok, stretching the small thread of hope like an unravelling sweater.

Rescue. Would that not be nice? Perhaps a week two ago, he had made headlines. In a week or two from now, maybe a police record.

The subtle rumble of the earth brought his mind back to reality before he even had a chance to dream about home. Perhaps it was doing him a favour. Perhaps he did not need to bear the image of his mother anymore. Perhaps he was not meant to.

Crying. A uniquely human trait. One he found himself longing for, for the first time.