Aella’s smile was small and coy. “You’d be amazed how many deviants find themselves on the wrong side of imperial law without being caught out for what they are. Most have more tact than you, after all.”
He let the truth of Aella’s words settle in his bones and cringed. Their six new friends were deviants, then, and he had no particular way to know their type. Despite Pelkaia’s assurances that his line was rare, he could be surrounded by six people just as jumpy and prone to making things go boom as he was. He didn’t even like being surrounded by himself at any given time.
And there was that blanket of sel, hiding away the whole of the house. So close, drifting above… Beads of sweat crested his brow, memories of how elated he’d been in Aransa when he’d finally let loose. At how calm he’d been in the days after, his anger burnt up with the boiling of the sky.
“You really don’t want me in here right now.” He angled himself straight at Aella, stared at her until the strength of his gaze made her look away from Pelkaia.
She rolled her eyes. “You are no challenge for me.”
Emptiness washed over him like a shroud, and for a moment he felt bereft, desolate. And then positively cheery, a refreshing weight off his shoulders. A shudder of relief stretched through him. His arm didn’t even itch anymore. “Oh, that’s nice.”
“Do be quiet.”
“Never been very good at that.”
“I am aware.”
Pelkaia’s hand darted out, gathering the selium that had escaped her face in one outstretched hand. Aella scowled, and Detan’s awareness of the cloud above all their heads came crashing back as Pelkaia’s globule floated free once more. He staggered, nausea threatening to rise. Tibs grabbed his shoulder to hold him steady.
“You can only shut down one of us at a time, then,” Pelkaia said, and though he couldn’t see it her smirk was palpable.
Aella sighed and gestured toward her arrayed guards. “And yet you are hopelessly outnumbered. Please, do not debase yourselves by attempting to fight. You are welcome here, could even come to be treasured here. I can offer you knowledge and training beyond whatever small truths you’ve been forced to scrape together.”
“Knowledge earned with a whitecoat’s scalpel,” Detan snapped.
She inclined her head to him. “Yes. My methods, however, are not that of my adopted mother and her colleagues.”
“The way you treat your mother tells me all I need to know about your methods.”
“And you disagree with my treatment?”
Detan winced. From the little smile quirking the corners of her lips he could tell she’d seen his momentary pleasure at Callia’s pain. “She deserves punishment, not cruelty.”
“I do not see the distinction.”
“Then we will never be in agreement.”
“You will change your mind in due time. Kneel, all of you. I’m afraid chains are necessary until I can come to trust you all.” Aella flashed a truly pleased smile. “Though I hope they will not be needed long.”
“Begging your pardon,” Tibs drawled, “but it occurs to me to mention that I’m a square peg in your round hole.”
Detan stifled a frantic giggle.
“Guilt by association, I’m afraid, Tibal. Now kneel.”
The six stepped forward. Detan took an involuntary step back, hands held palms-out toward them. “Hold on a tick, we were just starting to get friendly, I’m not ready for you to bring the ropes out yet.”
Pelkaia said, “Coss, now.”
Vertigo washed over him. The room shifted, the atmosphere thickened, as if the whole of reality were bunching up, dragged toward the pinprick of stability that was Coss. Tibs’s fingers dug into Detan’s shoulder, minute sparks of pain grounding him, keeping him upright. He gasped for air like a starved fish and bent over his knees as sparks of white light encroached upon his vision.
The world around him lit, nacreous brilliance falling like a curtain, cutting him off from all those around him. Sel. All the tiny bits of it drifting through the air. All the miniscule intrusions it made upon their world every day, too small to be noticed or made use of, brought to brilliant flaring life.
For the barest of moments terror shook him. He was transplaced, pushed back to that terrible moment a year ago when Callia had thrust a needle in his arm and allowed him to see the truth of what he saw now – and what he’d done with it. The heady control as he fine-tuned his power and shattered the table beneath his back. Pelkaia had said he was capable of harnessing that finesse still. Had seemed certain of the fact.
Black skies, but he wanted that power back.
The glittering tore away from his eyes, coalescing around Pelkaia, and perverse jealousy shot through him – how dare she strip his treasure from him. How dare she command that which was his birthright. Coss dripped sweat, his narrow face slack with effort.
Detan’s ears popped. All the sel pulled away from him, a receding tide that he wanted to wash him away. Someone screamed, and the sel began to splinter – to fling outward from Coss as if it were broken glass. Detan reached out for it, fingers trembling. Tibs shook him, punched his arm. He hardly felt it.
He pushed out, stripped the sel away from whoever held it with the force of his will, slammed it against those shuttered windows, and let loose.
His ears rang. His eyes filled with grit and his mouth felt stuffed with wool. He lay on his side, Tibs blanketed over him, a burning ache in his legs and a dull throb racing from his head down to his toes. Blackness encroached upon his vision and then he was standing, Tibs grabbing him by the collar, jerking him along as if he were a marionette. Dust filled the air, acrid, choking. He coughed and spluttered and they heaved themselves over the stone rubble of the wall, out into the cold breeze and the annoyingly cheerful sunlight.
Somehow he gained control of his feet and staggered alongside Tibs to the other side of the rubble. He expected to feel light, free of his burdens, as he had after Aransa.
And yet hunger still consumed him.
“Not your best plan.” Tibs brushed chalk-white dust from his coat and slapped his hat against his thigh. Somehow the ties had torn off his wrists during the blast, leaving rashy smears across his skin. A thin trickle of blood leaked from his temple. Detan looked away, stomach clenching. It was all he could do to ignore the siren call of the sheet of sel blanketing the building. Whatever Coss had condensed from the air, the raw mass of Aella’s defensive measures remained. He suspected, though the memory was hazy, that it’d been Aella’s ability that cut him short before he made use of that thick cloud.
Great bells rang out, clanging from atop the towers of the Remnant’s five buildings.
“Desperate times.” He tried to keep his voice light, but it creaked over the dusty dryness in his throat and his grin was limp.
Pelkaia staggered out behind them, Coss’s arm thrown around her shoulders to keep her upright. Detan looked away from the anger in her eyes, tried to stifle the firestorm of guilt building in his chest. He’d been careless, as usual. Throwing around his power to suit his need. Could have been a load-bearing wall, he realized. Could have brought the whole thing down on their heads.
“Sirra,” Tibs said, and the use of his nickname brought his head up sharp. Tibs was frowning at him, the blood from his temple having found a smeared path through the stubble on his chin. “Still with me?”
“More or less,” he grated, looking around at the disaster he’d wrought. Stone groaned, the ominous, grating sound loud to his ears even above the peel of the Remnant’s alarm bells. The whole windowed face of the yellowstone house was blown clear off, the rectangular shape of Aella’s desk the only stick of furniture left standing, its presence made ridiculous by its normalcy.