“Jace.”
“Hm?”
“I’m really proud of you.”
Chapter 26
Tayel trudged up the hall, fussing with the hem of her coat sleeve. Jace still beamed beside her, but as relieved as she was to have their argument behind them, she couldn’t match his enthusiasm. He was still going, after all, and their debate hadn’t been as subtle as she’d planned. She grimaced at the thought of facing everyone. She grimaced harder as she narrowed everyone to just Shy. Because nothing could quite say ‘I want to be with you’ like trying to swap someone’s injured brother into a warzone. Tayel sighed.
“No one’s going to care, Tayel,” Jace said. “Besides, Fehn and Shy have seen worse from us before.”
She nodded to placate his optimism, but her heart skipped a beat at the sound of muffled voices drifting from Locke’s room. She took a breath. It wasn’t like she could hide in the halls until the war pack was ready. She pulled aside the curtain of furs and stepped inside.
Fehn stopped short on a word. Shy and Locke turned in their seats. Tayel replayed Jace’s words mockingly in her head: no one’s going to care. She dug her hands into her coat pockets.
Fehn leaned back against the stone wall across from her. “So… how’s it going?”
“Great,” Jace said. He strut to an empty stool beside Locke. “Is now a good time to go over the fiber cutter, or…?”
“Oh.” Locke’s eyebrows shot up. “Certainly. Fehn and I were just finishing the prototype.”
“We’re done?” Fehn asked.
“All that’s left is the charge.” Locke tapped the jerry-rigged contraption on the desk beside him. “Now you can help my sister with the equipment.”
“I see. Red, mind helping her out in my stead? I need to find a hole to piss in.”
Tayel stepped aside to let him pass. “Uh, sure.”
“Thanks.” He pushed through the furs.
Locke and Jace devolved into a murmur of technobabble in the corner, leaving her with Shy, who sat on the bed patching a gas mask. She worked rhythmically — quietly — completely undistracted by any of the previous conversation. Tayel snared a loose string in her pocket between her fingers and tugged.
“Shy?” she asked.
“Hey. Ready to work?”
“In a second.” She sat on the empty space of furs beside her. “Listen, I’m… You have to understand why I tried to convince him not to go.”
Shy looked up. “Why? I’m not mad at you.”
“You aren’t?”
“No. If Jace didn’t go, we’d have figured it out.”
“Oh. I thought you’d be pissed.”
“If I can get over you endangering our lives to protect Jace in Castle Aishan, I think I can forgive this.”
Tayel smiled at the sincerity in Shy’s voice. The release eased the strain in her chest, replacing it with airy relief. “Wish I could say I won’t make a habit out of it, but…”
“Yeah. I know,” Shy mused. “Here. Locke already replaced the filtration cartridge on these, but we need to patch the tubing and repair the fasteners.”
“Okay, got it.” Tayel took the broken gas mask, rapping her fingers along the face shield. “You sure you’re not mad?”
Shy tipped her head. “Do you want me to be mad?”
“Alhyt, no.”
Tayel laughed, Shy half-grinned, and they both got to work.
The sour smell from Locke’s glue gun transported Tayel back to the crowded shelves in Otto’s shop. Jace’s room, too, although that was helped along as much by Locke’s scattered tools as the smell. Strew around some trading cards, slap one or two flexi-screens on the walls, and Jace and Locke would have almost identical domains.
Tayel refocused, opening up the patch kit next and trying to stave off the growing feeling of homesickness. But with Jace sitting there, listening intently to Locke’s instructions on how to steal information from the deadliest force in Igador, it was hard to think of anything but home. Of she and Jace safe in his room, him sifting through comics on his tablet, her staring at the ceiling, daydreaming. What relief she’d experienced at Shy’s forgiveness dissipated, replaced by fear at the thought of those days never coming back.
Even when she’d finished repairing the masks and Shy moved on to demonstrate a modified shoulder harness sheath for the mag baton, the tension in her shoulders kept growing.
“So there’s electromagnetic strips across the back of the sheath and the handle of the baton,” Shy said. “You press this button here and it should activate both strips so you can lock it in.”
Fehn looked up from the floor, where his disassembled shotgun rested in several parts. “Let’s hope the Rokkir don’t have a giant magnet.”
Tayel tuned out Locke’s argument against the possibility as she tried on the harness. It wasn’t just Jace she worried for. It was Fehn, too — even with the snarky comments. Him and, of course, Shy.
Tayel chanced a sideways glance at her. Her long black hair had been newly braided that morning, undoing the cloud of frizz that had haloed her head around camp. But cleaned up as she was, it couldn’t hide the fumbling fingers over the shield bracer she tested, or the way she blinked slow enough she may have fallen asleep once or twice. Shy was tired. They all were, but now they had to fight harder than ever. Tayel had to fight harder than ever, because she couldn’t bear to come out on the other side without any of them.
Hours of silent work passed building, repairing, and scrapping together precious few items to defend themselves with from whatever came next. When a pair of Varg delivered food to the room at Locke’s request, Tayel barely had the focus to taste it. She moved from a bite to a final check on her harness, another bite to an equipment check for Jace; it was a slow, tense process that left her with a half-empty plate and squirming insides.
“Alright,” Locke said.
Tayel started. It had been a long while since anyone said anything.
“The prototype is ready,” he finished.
Jace scratched his broken wing. “That’s great! Do we get to test it?”
Locke shook his head. “Not until it counts, I’m afraid. I only had the resources for one antimatter pack, and one charge.”
“So we just have to trust it works,” Shy said.
“I’m not throwing you into battle blind, sister. With Fehn’s assistance, I was able to calibrate the shield to ensure no collateral damage or dispersal of force when impacted by dark aether. Everything considered, I’m confident it will perform. ‘Perform’ taken to mean the charge only lasts thirty seconds, and even that is contingent on any enemies’ strikes being similar in force to Fehn’s.” His mouth twisted into a scowl. “It’s not a lot, I know.”
“You did the best you could,” Jace said.
“It will give us something if we go up against a Rokkir,” Shy added.
“Well it will give one of us something,” Fehn said.
Dread tightened all the muscles down Tayel’s spine. Only one — one person would be protected from the dark aether, if the device even functioned as it needed to at all. The fight in the woods came to mind, and her bones pounded at the memory. She’d had the sense that, even then, the councilwoman was going easy. The full force of her power came out in her clash with Fehn, and if all Rokkir had that power, Tayel doubted if even one thirty second charge could do much to defend them.
“You’ll have to decide who takes it,” Locke said.
Fehn crossed his arms. “I’ll be okay without it. I met a Rokkir head on in the woods and survived. Right now I stand better odds than you three if we come up against another one.”