Alliance ch 3: None the Wiser

“A shortcut to disqualification, Fire Boy,” Stevalok grumbled. “If Zeln gets us kicked out of this competition, I’ll have him be my chair for the next fifty years.”

Right, because if they failed, Hrausq Seven-One-Nine would be stuck low-rankers for that long, until the next reorder. Entrycii couldn’t fathom that length of time. The sixteen years he had been alive equaled forever.

“You want a chair that can light aflame at will?” His face twisted in a smirk. “Wouldn’t you rather have someone wait on you hand and foot?”

Stevalok laughed, and his pointed teeth glowed against his russet cheeks. “Last time you had that pair pamper you to repay a debt, they stained your face. I can still see it if I squint.”

A scowl pushed Entrycii’s smirk aside as he glanced at his reflection in the checkpoint’s chrome door. Zeln’s artwork of six months ago had mostly washed away. The orange flames were now faint ghosts only visible at certain angles. They appeared to hover within his tan skin dotted with silver crescents.

He shouldn’t have let Zeln talk him into having Aarex give him a facial.

“Oh great, they finished.”

Entrycii turned to his amaraq. “Why say that like it’s a bad thing?” He also wanted to ask what about the wall sconce made it look like a proper seat but decided against it. This waiting area didn’t have any chairs, just two silver doors perpendicular to two white walls and a grated floor and ceiling.

The door behind him rolled up, and Aarex bounced inside. Her smile was so broad and sharp, the glare alone could cut down a tree.

Pocketing the screen on which he had watched them, Stevalok slid off his pedestal to meet her with a double high five.

Behind a crookedly bespectacled, middle-aged Lettaplexal man—presumably the official to be passed on in this relay—Zeln retracted his flames and briefly met Entrycii’s gaze. Luminous orange circled a hole in his jacket, the jacket he claimed was not inspired in any way by Entrycii’s, despite their similarities. Both were closed by diagonal straps and hooded, fabric dark and speckled as if containing the essence of the stars.

More blood coated the back of Zeln’s knee, and he looked about to pass out. He had been through a lot in the first round. Entrycii could respect that. He nodded at his slightly younger teammate, and Zeln glanced away. Fire frolicked beneath the skin of his ears, and Entrycii flinched.

He was Knalcal. He was supposed to fear fire, despise it, detest it. It was not supposed to fill him with this sense of awe. He was not supposed to want it.

But his feet moved on their own. One step forward. Two…

Stevalok whirled toward the other door, and his elbow jabbed his partner’s gut. “Why isn’t it opening?”

Entrycii leaned against the wall, arms folded across his middle and a glare trained on his amaraq. He was Knalcal, and Knalcals weren’t supposed to show pain.

Did other Knalcals not feel it like he did?

“Maybe the official has to step through the doorway?” Aarex suggested.

“Makes sense. Hurry up, old man! This is a race.” Stevalok yanked the official into the room despite there being barely enough space for its existing occupants.

Entrycii was squished against the still-closed door, frown complete. The three Lettaplexals were larger than him, two of them reeked of burnt cheese, and the pulse of their life-signatures cloyed his ’netic senses. It felt like drowning in a vat of pudding.

“It won’t budge,” Stevalok griped. “Did you miss some important switch or something?”

“Maybe.” Aarex gave a closed-eyed, apologetic grin and scratched beneath the side of her beret. “I mean, we didn’t really take the conventional route.”

“Zeln, if your stupid shortcut costs us this race, I will personally...”

Stevalok’s shouts faded from Entrycii’s notice as his palms flattened against the door. It wasn’t that he no longer heard the voice bellowing in his ear; he just ceased to understand it as his brain switched from verbal communication to ’netic sensations, speaking the language of the computer that kept the path blocked.

It was a complex and difficult dialect, full of details and requiring one to be painfully precise. Added safeties, securities, and loopbacks only increased its vexation level. Twi always made it look so easy, but Entrycii sat muttering nonsense for several seconds before the door coiled into the ceiling.

A cool breeze welcomed them to the relay’s next segment. Mirrored walls formed a narrow corridor ending in a T-intersection.

Entrycii turned to his team. “Stevalok, you want to stand here and do curls with Zeln all day, or can we go?”

Stevalok dropped his semi-conscious teammate and sprinted for the open door, snatching the official’s wrist along the way. “You’d better not be a slowpoke.”

The official stumbled a few steps before finding his stride. His amber eyes reeled to meet Stevalok’s sharp grin beneath an almost identical gaze—not only in shape or color, but similar even in the flecks of bronze.

Are they related?

Entrycii ran after them. Being of a different race, maybe he just wasn’t good at telling Lettaplexals apart, but the particular brand of sarcasm dripping from the official’s overstretched features seemed too familiar.

“What a heart-wrenching display of concern for your injured comrade that was,” the official drawled.

Stevalok guffawed. “You think so? I’m not worried about Zeln.”

“Left,” Entrycii barked, and Stevalok kicked off the end of the T in a tight turn, distorted versions of him arrayed in the mirrors.

Why did it have to be mirrors or glass at all? The myriad of reflections made the hall seem both cramped and infinitely vast. He could have handled the disorienting sight if it hadn’t messed with his ’netic senses, too. Glass took the signatures of his surroundings, ripped them apart, and threw them like glittery confetti.

He wished he had been in the first round instead. Rolling corridors, arrows, spiky ropes, bottomless drops, and columns intent on crushing him? Easy. Glass maze? Torture.

The official’s nasally twang didn’t make it any better. “Do you have no care for your Blamooka teammate then?”

“Why waste worrying when I know he’ll be fine?” Stevalok’s shrug flowed into another jump as he made a sharp right.

“You believe him invincible?”

“No, but I’ve seen him heal plenty of times. Once, we set a trap in the hallway, and Zeln tried to duck but didn’t quite make it. He had a gash on his forehead and a bruised eye, but it was all gone by morning.” The glass rattled as Stevalok’s foot hit it and launched him into a backflip. “Stupid mirrors. My reflection almost punched me with my own face.”

“Congratulations on your face becoming a weapon.” Entrycii passed them and tried not to wince at the official’s twisted arm still in Stevalok’s grasp.

Lettaplexals don’t have bones, he reminded himself, just complex muscles and hydrostatic tubes.

Sometimes seeing them contort still made him gag.

“Such an attractive weapon my face makes.” With a laugh, Stevalok sprinted into the lead again. He still gripped the official’s forearm.

At least he managed to untwist it.

The official’s narrowed gaze flicked between them, flashing a darkness that thickened the dread dripping down Entrycii’s spine. “What about your newest teammate, the Napix one?”

A light snapped on above. Amid the echoed and sundered signatures, Entrycii found the malleable threads woven into his amaraq’s attire, curled his influence into them, and yanked back. Stevalok landed on his feet half a body’s length in front of an illuminated cone as several more appeared ahead.

Brows high, Entrycii proposed, “Adjuvants aren’t supposed to call attention to themselves. Think the spotlights are a metaphor?”

His partner nodded. “Avoid the lights like they’re a team of lunatics with scalpels and needles. Got it.”

Stevalok took off again, and an “oof” escaped the official as he was dragged along. The Lettaplexals wove and dodged, and Entrycii stayed just behind them, listening to the electronics that controlled the lights. A buzz ran along his cheeks right before another flared, and a ’netic tug directed Stevalok away from it.

A spotlight swept into their path, and again Entrycii gave his teammate just enough of a push to guide him in the right direction. A lamp behind them swiveled to follow, and he shoved Stevalok.

The smack surprised him, as did Stevalok’s rock back. Someone else flew in the opposite direction, color slowly filling in the shape of a woman.

“Watch where you’re—” She fell into an illuminated cone and froze, mouth agape as gravity failed.

The lights abandoned them, and Entrycii felt what was coming like searing hands scraping his skin. Instinct flinched at the touch. Grabbing both his amaraq and the official, he threw them flat on the ground with himself at their side.

Viridian lightning shot from the walls. He closed his eyes, face hidden in his elbow. Afterimages burned in his retinas, but his ’netics claimed the threat was gone.

Blinking, he pulled himself to his feet and kept low as he scanned the scene. The lanterns remained dormant, leaving the corridor dim. It looked as it had at the maze’s beginning except there was a steaming body on the ground.

“Oh, gross. Is she dead?” Stevalok knelt next to her. “She smells like rancid bacon.”

Her life-signature pulsed strong, echoing off the glass as if a million incomplete copies of her surrounded them.

“She’s alive, but if she came from this way, it’s probably not the route to the finish line.”

Stevalok poked her shoulder. “I’ve heard Zalerits take on the color of whatever they were looking at when they got hit. This patchwork of blues says she was looking at your hair, Entrycii.” He grinned, pointed teeth overlapping his bottom lip. “She probably thinks you’re cute. You should ask her out.”

Entrycii’s cheeks felt like lightning might pour out of them next. The woman had more curves than a series of evasive maneuvers, everything about her sleek, soft, and delicate. She was part Knalcal, too. Silver birthmarks on her temples shone faintly around the dark lenses that hid her eyes.

She was also nearly twice his age.

“She’s unconscious,” he sputtered.

“Yeah, too bad you didn’t pull her out of the spotlight before that happened.”

“I was too busy saving you.” The rebuttal had no bite, towing a sigh. The glass mocked him, and even ignoring it drained him. It was like being in the middle of a mob of clashing cymbals, and doing anything that required his ’netics was akin trying to shout over that cacophony.

The lights returned, snapping on one by one, closer and closer.

Think ahead. I don’t want to expend our energy getting down this hall if it’s the wrong way, but…

It hit him: He needed to literally think outside the box.

“Stevalok, jump.”

“Um, can I know where I’m supposed to land?”

“Up.”

“Oh, that narrows it down.” But Stevalok leapt anyway.

Stance widened, Entrycii pictured strings connecting his hands to the non-Adapt threads in his partner’s attire. These imagined strings could push as well as they pulled. As Stevalok neared the apex of his jump and Entrycii’s arms shoved above his head, these unseen strings extended to propel his amaraq higher.

With a move like casting a fishing line, he threw Stevalok toward the wall. Stevalok curled into a somersault and rolled onto the partition.

Entrycii’s gaze fell on the official. “You’re next. Just jump like he did.”

The official made a mark on a note square, then slowly pocketed the device. “Your ’netics have no influence over other living beings. Am I to assume you will direct my flight by manipulating my clothes?”

Entrycii nodded. “I’ll fix them if they stretch or rip if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It just seems invasive.” His knees bent low. “Knalcals make such a fuss about their personal space, but isn’t tugging at my attire a violation of my personal space?”

“If it’s that or fall to your death, which would you choose?”

The official grinned, adjusted his glasses, and sprung, not nearly as high as Stevalok had, but Entrycii expected that. The man impersonated a common citizen, and winning a jumping contest against Stevalok would be a tall order for anyone who considered themselves normal.

Common citizens didn’t wear Adapt either, the durable fabric of Magni origin donned by Adjuvants and slippery to ’netic Talents. The official’s loose suit was much easier to work with than the few threads woven through Stevalok’s outfit.

As the man rose, Entrycii slid beneath him, hands upturned and stance solid. Trillions of invisible strings connected them, each thrashed by the mirrors’ maelstrom of signatures. It felt as if the unconscious woman leapt at him from all sides, but he ignored those false echoes and concentrated on keeping the strings straight.

The official was heavy. The strength of Entrycii’s every cell poured into shoving him higher. Even so, the man fell, slowly, as if sinking through a murky lake.

Teeth grit, he released his hold and conjured a new one, hands splayed and shaking. His influence twined around every fiber of the official’s attire and pushed. His knees unbent to give the thrust the few extra fingerbreadths of height it needed, and Stevalok grabbed the back of the official’s long jacket, hauling him up the rest of the way.

Entrycii emptied his lungs and filled them anew. Time for the hard part.

He stood for a moment, arms circled in front of him as if around a large tree, palms downward. His eyes closed, letting his ’netic senses take over. Every molecule in the vicinity screamed details at him.

Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Push.

***

“Breathe,” Atok Quanko whispered as his shoulders hit the wall. “Air in. Air out. Simple.”

Yet, it was not simple. Nothing was.

Words hissed between his teeth. “Go back in your corner and stay there.”

The wall’s foggy crystal chimed as his back slid along it. His head fell between his knees as if he bowed to the planet Zalerit low on the southern horizon. Its frigid light streamed through the square hole left unroofed above a courtyard of raked sand where once a pair of princes had practiced martial skills.

He should have known better than to come this way. Though the scene lay empty, its familiar shapes called to these stolen memories, and they spilled. He shoved them back toward where they belonged, but they dripped between his fingers as if he bailed out a boat with only his bare hands.

“Excellent, Prince Sarqii,” a mentor praises, a palm clapping the younger twin’s shoulder.

Atok forced himself to his feet, though the jealousy in the memory was a sack of rocks hanging from a rope around his neck.

Sarqii extends a hand to the bloody-nosed opponent he pinned, and they laugh together.

Atok stumbled toward the door at the end of the veranda, focused on the present, on the moonlight dancing over deep shadows and the gloss left by recent rain.

The second prince’s name means grace, and it is fitting. Everything comes easy to him. Whereas Ontz is a stone known for its beauty and strength. You have the former but none of the latter.

Atok did not want to see this, did not want to live it again.

A stranger melts out of the shadows, and something tugs within the depths of your mind. Alarm dangles just out of reach, a tepid blankness in its place. Curiosity bubbles at your feet. He has pale gray skin and paler hair that falls in waves to his shoulders. His large, round features are baby-like, and the focus of his eyes seems off. Green-gold chrysolite fills them, glimpses of the lightning within. He carries himself like a storm cloud.

Atok hit the door and tore it aside, but nothing made a sound loud enough to drown out the phantoms in his mind. The scene flickered between past and present, and as he closed his eyes, only the view he wanted to forget remained.

“Might I join your spar?”

A yes sits at the tip of your tongue, though you did not put it there.

“That’s not a good idea,” Sarqii says.

Another laughs. “Why not? He looks harmless.”

Sarqii’s dark gaze narrows on the stranger. “His eyes are chrysolite. He’s Aylata. His clan pattern is on his left pant leg, so he’s a Watcher, and the insignia on his collar is Skaelao.”

The present prevailed for a moment—the cold wood of the palace wall lay beneath his hand, solid, steady, and polished until it shone like amber. It was something to hold onto, to brace himself against as he stuffed these memories back into their box.

He was not Ontz Kys, oldest prince of the Napix Empire. Ontz had died a year and a half ago, and Atok wished this memory would have gone with him. Trying to escape it was like running on water.

A void holds your expression blank. You do not move, not even to gasp or blink. Yet, deep inside, warning thunders. A Skaelao Watcher. You have never seen one and thought you never would. Stories claim that by the time you notice them, you are already dead. Throat slit, neck broken, last breath held forever.

His deprecating smile crowns a facetious bow. “I shall merely watch, then.”

“No!” Atok’s shout rang in the hall, echoing back to him like the whispers of a million specters. The plush carpet swallowed his footfalls. In their place, the princes’ spar resumed, the clack of blocked kicks, soft grunts, growled curses.

He had leaned a shoulder against a corner pillar and observed shallowly through Ontz. The Ravida had been correct. The princes’ minds worked nothing like those of Napix heritage, purebred or otherwise. Like a fresh bay compared with a salty sea, the well of these foreigners’ thoughts stretched deeper and coarser, sanding his Mental palms until raw and weeping. If he did not take caution, he would sink too far, mission left undone.

A thud louder than the others. Prince Ontz lay on the mat, companions in a frenzy around him. Atok retreated into himself, teeth clamped on his own sleeve to keep him from vomiting.

He took the same pose now, perched behind a decorative scroll at the top of an alcove as a palace guard strolled past. Head held high above his fur-lined collar, the man gave no indication he had heard anything out of the ordinary. As his booted footsteps faded in the distance, Atok took a few more moments to compose himself.

With its epicenter left behind, the memory played out and jumped to another. The youngest Prince Chyr in the hallway outside the grand hall, smile sweet as ever. Then, his vacant eyes dripped blood onto the lap of the former empress.

Bumping shoulders with Prince Sarqii. One look. Easy dismissal. Sarqii’s fear and grief was a gunk Atok could not scrape off the inside of his skull.

By the time he dropped back to the floor, undesired scenes had mostly been shoved back in their containers, padlocks straining to keep warped lids closed. His weak knees bent further than usual as he ghosted through the corridor, tremors hidden and breaths a steady fire in his throat.

He could not change the past. He should not have dared enter this part of the Emperor’s Palace again, but he needed to speak with Revel in person despite the lateness of the hour.

Revel K’alaqk, Emperor of the Napix Empire for six months now, was not in his room. Shadow blanketed the curved space, gently reprimanded by moonlight filtered through ice-like walls. Face buried by a pillow, Empress Topeca lay tangled in a thin sheet.

Atok slid through the hidden door in the chandelier’s crown molding and alighted on a dresser, toes barely fitting between perfume bottles and trinkets. A guard slouched on the balcony, back to the sheer curtain over the arched doorway. The light fabric waved in the cool evening breeze, but the man did not move.

Atok’s frown deepened. It should not have been this easy to get in here. Another leap brought his feet to the raised, wood slat floor around the bed with a deliberate rap.

The empress shifted but did not awaken, and no one came to investigate the noise. She seemed a fragile, tiny thing, her braided hair as thick as she was. Freckles lightly dotted her cheeks, parted lips effecting a quiet hiss with each breath.

A needle of longing impaled his core, turned molten by jealousy. Revel had Topeca always. Atok was alone. He had just come from playing spy in his home territory, Skaelao, and had seen people he cared about, been as near them as he was to Topeca now, unable to reach out and touch them.

He should not have been able to get that close to them unseen and unquestioned. He should not have been able to get this close to the sleeping empress. Someone needed to be taught that. Shown, not told.

He drew one of his throwing kanabers. By rote, the toggle to activate its flat laser blade rested against his thumb. The handle waited, held vertical and aimed downward, but the blade remained at rest within.

He dropped the weapon, and it landed soundlessly on the empress’ black silk braid, chrome casing lit like a museum’s display. Alongside the toggle, the engraving of Skaelao’s motto glistened.

Take caution as your guide.

Standing, he padded to the main entrance, cracked open the double door, and slipped through. The young guard stationed here posed with the coy confidence of one who had never experienced a real threat to himself or his quarry. This nobleman’s boy was just as likely to flee, faint, puke, or wet himself as be of any help in a crisis.

Atok’s chin hovered over the guard’s shoulder. “Are you supposed to be protecting something?”

The guard whirled, shooter in hand, but Atok’s fingers wrapped its barrel and trapped the weapon at his hip, pointed at the baseboard.

“Alarm.”

A headset picked up the guard’s squeaked warning and delivered it to the rest of his company. His eyes, pale and clear gray like a Napix summer sky, met Atok’s. The emotions that struck through that connection were not nearly so serene.

Atok glared. “Never meet a Mind Aylata’s gaze.”

The guard shook his head, focus searching for another target. Despite that, the storm persisted, screeching at Atok’s annoyance. He saw his own face, light skin and hair phantasmal in the wall’s moon-fueled glow. He watched the chrysolite overlay in his wide eyes shatter and swirl.

Heralded by the hiss of a sigh, a darter shot past Atok’s ear. He spun into the shadows of an alcove, keeping the guard with him, and raised the shooter. A second darter sunk into the wall, and with a brief, brilliant flash, a chunk of the wood disappeared.

Knuckles level with his shoulder, Atok fired. A spark flickered as his darter hit its target.

“Mandin!” The captive guard’s cry nearly drowned out the thud of a heavy object striking the floor. Scrambling footfalls tattled on Mandin dashing for cover, fallen weapon abandoned.

“I shot what fired at me,” Atok murmured. “I would not shoot any of you. That would be pathetic.”

Relief loosened the young guard’s shoulders, and he looked back at Atok.

“What did I tell you about Mind Aylata?” Again, his own visage flickered over his view, and this time he coiled those emotional strings around his Mental fingers. They were smoke at first, slowly solidifying into rivers, cords, chains. His inner self held them while his fleshly hand pulled another throwing kanaber from the strap on his leg.

Unlike before, his thumb did not hesitate to slide the toggle. The hilt left his hand an instant later, a white laser blade flashing into existence. With a metallic whine, it impaled the barrel of another shooter.

The young guard’s heartbeat shivered through the chains, thrumming in Atok’s ears.

“Why?” A new voice.

This one shows more skill, at least.

With a tsk, he released his hold on the young guard, who crumpled to his knees, drowning in gasped sobs as Atok turned to the newcomer.

This one had already discarded the ruined weapon and stood in a solid stance just over an arm’s length away. Confidence held a smaller shooter in a two-handed grip, aimed at Atok’s head. Brave but hardly a good idea. He did not have to be this close to fire, and Atok’s staff-like Ier could easily reach him at this distance.

Atok eyed the mottled jumpsuit. A trooper, not a noble guard. “You are of the Unwanted.”

“Why shouldn’t we look into a Mind Aylata’s eyes?” He spoke with a trooper’s accent, too—the slight twang of Yakru but more slurred. It was not a speech pattern Atok equated with intelligence, and the fact that he stared into an Aylata’s eyes while asking why he should not only lowered his initial impression.

A tiny grin touched Atok’s lips. “Drop it.”

The shooter fell from the trooper’s hands and clattered on the floor.

“When you meet a Mind Aylata’s gaze, he owns you. I was not even all that specific with that command.”

Vagueness made suggestions easier, provided one did not care too much about an exact outcome, but he would not tell them that. This fear was medicine. He prodded it, and it festered.

The trooper retreated, knelt, and snatched the throwing kanaber, sightline now more wisely trained on Atok’s hands.

A quick learner?

“What’s your agenda, Skaelao Watcher?”

Atok shrugged. “Call it a drill, a warning that if I meant any harm to your lady, the deed would be done, and you would be none the wiser.”

The trooper ventured a glance at the closed doors. “We stopped you out here in the hallway.”

“Did you?” Atok tilted his chin. “Why not check on your empress?”

The trooper’s eyes flicked back and forth, indecision a vine spiraling around his limbs. Atok pushed on it, effecting one stumbled step and an ill-advised look back, but Atok was finished with him. He indulged in a long blink as a shield against the man’s beckoning emotions and focused on a distant roar.

When his eyes reopened, they aimed toward the window at the end of the hall.

“I must keep my appointment with the emperor,” he told the wobbling trooper. “Do focus on being more impressive next time.”

Continued in Chapter 4: Without One, the Other will Buckle

Thank you for reading!