Dez steeled himself and stuck to his story. “Well I did. I didn’t like what she was doing, but I didn’t try to kill her, Fiearius. It was a–”

“An accident?” Fiearius finished for him, feeling a spike of madness run through him. His knuckles were white and his fingernails, curled into his palm, were starting to draw blood. “Was it an accident? Did you not mean to fuck everything up?!”

“Fiearius–”

“You were just looking out for me, is that it?” He heard himself laughing in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Just trying to act in my best interest?”

Dez took a slow step back.

Fiearius followed him. “It’s not your fault, it was the will of the dov’ha that they die! Was that it?!”

“Fiearius–” it was Leta this time, hesitant and worried, but Fiearius couldn’t bring himself to hear her. His blood boiled and his vision narrowed and all he could see was an image of Aela and Denarian, standing side by side and dripping blood onto the dirty floorboards. And he couldn’t hold it back any longer.

Pride be damned.

The noise that erupted from his mouth as he flung himself at Desophyles Cordova was barely human. It could be identified as many things: fury most of all, grief, pain, despair, vengeance, but sanity was not among them. There was nothing conscious about the way Fiearius attacked, trying all at once to seize Dez’s arms, pummel his fist into his face and rip the flesh from his neck with his fingernails. He wanted blood. He craved the feeling of its warmth on the palms of his hands, the dirt that clung to it, scraping against his skin and riding down the lines of his sweat.

Dez didn’t go down without a fight. When the two men hit the floor with a heavy thump, he tried in vain to hold off Fiearius’ wild thrashing from above him. But there was no force that could stop him now. He felt a fist crack across his cheek and the hot metallic tang of blood spreading through his mouth, but it hardly registered. He was pure energy and adrenaline, a hurricane, a tornado, nothing could stand in his way.

Not that nothing tried.

“Fiearius, stop!” said a voice behind him he couldn’t place as he managed to get his hands around Dez’s throat and squeezed.

“I know you’re mad, but this isn’t the time!” the voice went on. Wasn’t the time? This was the perfect time. There was no place more fitting for an end. Dez was clawing at his wrists, leaving lines of red as he gasped for breath. His legs kicked out beneath him, trying to sway Fiearius’ balance, but it was all useless. Fiearius’ throat laughed a laugh that wasn’t his. Nothing could stop this. It was inevitable.

But then something grabbed his arm and pulled, catching him off-guard. He was so surprised, he didn’t even know anyone else was there, that he let go without resistance, releasing Dez from his hold. Furious, he threw that arm out behind him, feeling it hit flesh and bone just before Dez took his shot and pushed. Fiearius didn’t have the balance anymore to fight it. He was flipped onto his back and pinned down.

“That’s enough,” said Dez through heavy breaths as Fiearius flailed madly under his grip, desperate to get out. But he had the disadvantage now. Dez was bigger, stronger. He was stuck.

“You okay?” he asked someone else and when Fiearius tilted his head to look up at the other presence in the room, he wasn’t shocked to see the wild red hair and dark freckled face of Aela looking back at him.

“I’m fine,” said Aela before focusing on Fiearius. Her eyes were sad, but stern. “Fiear, you need to calm down. We need to leave.”

But Fiearius shook his head, a little and then a lot. “You–” he breathed slowly, grimacing as he still tried to struggle away from Dez. “–You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore. Never again.”

Aela looked briefly confused. “Fiear–”

“Why didn’t you fucking tell me?! What the hell were you doing?!” He finally got a fist out of Dez’s grip and into his ribcage. The man flinched but didn’t let up.

Aela still seemed lost. She glanced at Dez who muttered, “He thinks you’re her,” which made no sense and only served to make Fiearius angrier.

But now she looked at him not with confusion, but pity. She crouched down above his head and carefully put a hand on his temple, but he shook it off immediately. Her touch was poison, she was just as bad as all the rest. She had used him, betrayed him. She was vile. And then she said, “Let him go.”

“You’re fucking kidding,” said Dez.

“I’m not, let him up.” She got to her feet and waited as, understandably reluctant, Dez did as she said, one by one releasing his hold on Fiearius’ limbs. He was right to not want to. The moment Fiearius was free, he leapt to his feet and raised his blood-stained fist to pick up where he’d left off, but a small hand seized his wrist and held it back.

He turned to find Aela looking up at him, stern and serious. “Fiearius. You need to come back to me now.”

He stared at her for a moment, his mind racing. Hadn’t she died? What was she doing here? How dare she show up and order him around? He grit his teeth and ripped his wrist from her grasp. “Fuck you.”

She was unphased. “Fiear.” Both her hands reached up and grasped his face. Her palms were soft and warm and made his skin crawl. He wrapped his fingers around her wrists and was about to push her from him when she gave him pause. “You’re having an episode. You need to come back.”

The words didn’t compute inside his head. Episode? What was she talking about? He wasn’t having an episode, he had an obligation. His son had been killed, he needed to avenge him. His son, Denarian, he–

–was standing in the doorway, his hands shaking, tears starting to well in his eyes. He took a step backwards when Fiearius looked at him, afraid, like he’d been caught where he shouldn’t have been. He shouldn’t have been here. He shouldn’t have seen this.

“Both of you, honestly,” Aela was saying. She didn’t know he was standing there yet. “How many times does this have to happen? Do you not have enough violence in your lives already without bringing it home? Next time maybe I’ll just let you two rip each other to shreds.”

Fiearius didn’t listen to her. His eyes were locked on Denarian’s, trying to apologize without words. The last thing he wanted was for the boy to see him like this. At his worst. But he had. I’m so sorry, he willed across the room. I’m so so sorry.

I’m so sorry I let them kill you.

“Come back to me.”

The hands holding his face turned him back to their owner, but it wasn’t Aela. The red hair beneath her headscarf was now brown, her skin turned to snow and her green eyes shone up at him sadly. “Come back to me,” she whispered again.

“Leta–” Fiearius finally relaxed against her touch, but as he searched over that familiar face, desperate for it to ground him here in reality, he saw what he’d done to it. There was a circle around her eye, tinged red and the beginnings of purple. Was that from– Had he–

“Shit. I–“

“It’s okay,” she spoke over him, shaking her head. “I’m fine. We need to go, okay?”

He was nodding before he knew what he was agreeing to. “Right,” he said for the second time today. “Let’s–”

Suddenly, a great vwhirr erupted out of the window, leaving a space only long enough to wonder what it had been before everything shook so violently that all three of them lost their footing and fell to the floor.

When Fiearius looked up again, the room was filled with smoke and dust. The screams he’d heard before were closer now, just outside. A woman shrieked a name. A child was sobbing. Someone was shouting out orders, telling people to leave, to run, this whole place was going to come down.

“Are they trying to kill you now?” Dez asked as he got to his feet. He held out his arm to help Fiearius up and he took it, dragging Leta with him.

“They should know where we are,” Leta breathed before coughing into the smoke. “They shouldn’t be firing near us.”

“They shouldn’t be firing at all.” Finally, he started to feel his senses come back to him. They needed to act. Quickly. “Leta, grab what you can fit in your pack.” He pointed to the pile of Aela’s documents. “Dez–” He met the man’s stare. Minutes ago, he’d wanted nothing more than to kill him, but now? Now he just wanted to get out of here alive and with the city not destroyed. Dez wasn’t ideal. Dez was a liar, a traitor, scum. But he’d do. “Come with me, let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Leta promised as she hurriedly scooped whatever she could into her bag. Fiearius didn’t feel guilty leaving her in the room alone as he and Dez ran from apartment 24, down the stairs and out onto the street. She was probably safer in there anyway.

The street was in chaos. Fiearius couldn’t tell where the blast had landed, but it wasn’t far. Everything was in a haze. He could barely make out the silhouettes of buildings against the clouded light of the suns, he could see people running through the streets, carrying what possessions they couldn’t leave behind, desperately clinging to loved ones and scattering in all directions. Where could they go? Where would they be safe?

It was then that he noticed a pair of eyes on him. They belonged to an older woman, one that at first he didn’t recognize through the smoke and through the years. But slowly her face returned to him, younger than it was now, peering through the crack in his apartment door and demanding he pay his rent. When he’d known her, she’d always been frowning and grumpy, but now she was frightened. Of Carthis? Or of him?

He was still trying to figure out which when Dez nudged him with his elbow. Breaking away from his old landlady, he glanced back to ask what he was gesturing at, but he didn’t need to ask. All around him, the people that had been running and fleeing had stopped to stare. They watched, waited, expectantly, as though at any moment he might burst into flames or light or who knew what.

Well, Fiearius certainly didn’t know what. What the hell did these people want from him? If they were looking for a savior, they were looking in the wrong place. As soon as Leta joined them, they were leaving and these people could figure out what was next on their own.

But as confident as he sounded in his own head, his feet didn’t move and as he realized slowly that he knew more of these faces than he’d like to (the man with the dog across the street, the owner of the store at the corner, a woman he’d went on a few dates with way back when), the reality of this, being home, started to sink in.

These people looking at him now weren’t afraid of him, the supposed nefarious Rogue Verdant. They were curious. Patiently waiting to see what he might do next, this man that they’d once shared a home with. In their eyes he wasn’t a story, he was a person, one from the very same ground as they were. These people were his neighbors, people he’d known, celebrated with, greeted every morning. And now they were in danger because of something he had done. He had brought Carthis here. He had trusted them to do as he asked.

Dez had been right to be angry. What the hell had he done?

The next blast hit a block away. The calm in the street vanished in an instant. Those that weren’t running in the opposite direction as fast as they could, weren’t, only because they had fallen to the rocking ground and couldn’t right themselves.

Choking through the smoke, thick and black and flooding the narrow street, Fiearius hurried to the side of his cranky landlady, Dez meeting him on the other, to help her back to her feet.

“Head to the tunnels on Mari’lea!” he shouted, the first thing that came into his head. She might not be safe there, but she’d damn well be safer than here.

Fiearius put his palm on the floorboard and pressed. For a moment, nothing happened. Gods, it better not have broken. But finally, the board shifted. It lowered just enough to then slide underneath the board beside it, revealing the small dark space hidden beneath it. And inside? All the heavy bound documents, printed copies and miscellaneous evidence Aela had left there.

“Guess she was right,” Fiearius remarked, mostly to himself as he crouched down and pulled out the first thing that met his fingertips, a stack of records relating to an Internal agent going undercover on Ascendia. “No one ever found it.”

Leta crouched down beside him and reached her hand into the hole to fish something out. “Department of Health Incident Report on the Transport of Wellian Virus Specimen–” she read and then looked up at him in alarm. “This is about the outbreak on Vescent. The one that killed the Senate.”

Fiearius shrugged. “She knew what she was looking for in terms of blackmail, that’s for sure…”

“This is about–Rebeka Palano.” Leta continued to sift through the documents. “Arleth Morgan? All the Councillors, they’re all in here. The takeover of Vescent. ARC?” She looked up at him in alarm. “Fiear, she knew everything…”

The revelation didn’t surprise him exactly. Of course, if anyone had uncovered the identities of the Councillors and the unsavory actions of the Society long before anyone else, it would be Aela. But even so, having the proof in his hands didn’t comfort him. If she’d known about all this–why hadn’t she told him? Sure, she’d stored all her evidence in a space under their bed that he had access to, but–she’d made it sound boring. “It’s all just paperwork and accounting,” she’d said, essentially discouraging him from ever bothering to look.

Above that, even, it changed the context of–well, everything. Aela had always been pushing them to leave Satieri, start a new life elsewhere, but she had never given an exact reason. But if she knew, if she knew all of–this? Did she–

“Alright, hi, here we go.”

He hadn’t heard that voice in over a decade. He’d last heard it pleading for the life of their son, desperate and cracked and strained. But now it sounded calm, collected, the same logical woman who had asked him to marry her once upon a time. For just a second, he thought it was a ghost.

But the thought passed as quickly as it had come. The voice had come from a tablet Leta was holding in her hands and hurriedly paused. She looked over at him in alarm and then grimaced an apology before handing it to him.

And there was her face on the screen. Her dark skin, her sharp green eyes, the freckles that dotted her cheeks that he could still mark the constellations in. It had been so long since he’d looked at that face and yet every inch of it was familiar, right up to the top of the orange sundress that hung from her shoulders. It was her favorite dress on a warm spring day, she wore it constantly. She wore it when she died.

Hesitantly, he pressed play again and her voice once more filled the room.

“If you’re watching this, it means–” She heaved a sigh. “Something went terribly wrong. Which, as you might imagine, given what you probably know now, is a little difficult to talk about.” A fleeting smile passed across her face. She was nervous, her eyebrows knit together in worry. “I guess I’m dead. Which–really sucks. I’m–or by the time you watch this, I was–really trying to avoid that. Something must have happened, I maybe made a mistake or there was another factor I didn’t think about or–”

Beside him, Fiearius felt Leta start to get to her feet to leave, but he reached out a hand to her. “No, stay,” he ordered. Leta sat back down without a word.

“Okay, I’m sorry, this is not how I should be doing this.” Aela shook her bushy red hair and crunched her eyes shut like she always did when she was concentrating. “Alright, let me start over.”

There was a long pause before another deep breath and then she looked straight into the camera and smiled. “Hi, F. If you’re watching this, it means I died. And I owe you an explanation. A few, really. I’ve owed you explanations for a long time, but you never asked for any. You’re too trusting, you know that? You don’t think you are, but you are. And–it’s not fair to you.” She nodded solemnly. “You deserve to know.”

She shuffled a little in her seat and settled in. “I’ve done some things that I regret. Who hasn’t, I guess? But mine, it started many years ago. We hadn’t met yet.” She spoke so calmly, so plainly, like she was reading off a teleprompter. “I was approached by a man named Dorrion E’etan. At the time, he had just become the Verdant of the Society. You’ve seen him, you know who he is now. This was before then. Before he was everywhere. And he gave me an assignment. The assignment was to get to know you.”

A brief flash of a grimace passed over her face before she hurried on, waving her hand in front of the camera, “This sounds terrible, I know. But hear me out, okay? I was an up and comer in Information, I’d been working towards investigator, this guy, this really important guy tells me that I’m perfect for this really important job, of course I’m going to take it without a second thought. So now you know. That’s why I was at that party I had no business being at all those years ago. That’s why I sat right where I knew you’d see me. And that’s why I didn’t totally write you off when you delivered that absolutely terrible pick up line.” She cocked a brow knowingly. “Seriously, dear, I know you’re single again now, but never use that again.”

She cleared her throat. “Anyway. At first I didn’t know why I had to stalk you. I would just report back to E’etan with whatever I had and he never asked for more. And eventually? He stopped asking for reports. No fanfare, no closure, the assignment just ended and I moved on. Of course by then, you’d kind of grown on me, doofy as you were.” The smile that twisted in her lips put a terrible knot in Fiearius’ chest. “And since you weren’t an assignment anymore? I think you remember the day I turned in my last report, let’s say.”

But her smile only lasted a moment before it changed to an expression much more tinged with sadness. Her eyes cast downward and her jaw tightened. “I wish that was the end of it. But. Like I said. I have regrets. And meeting you was not one of them. What was, however, was telling E’etan all that I told him. All good things, mind you. Competent, efficient, a good leader, loyal to a fault. Everything he was looking for–” She hesitated and her stare flicked back towards the camera. “–for his replacement.”

“This should come as no surprise to you, right about now,” she admitted. “If what I think is happening today happened already, you already know. But Fiearius–” She began to shake her head, slowly, painfully and then locked her eyes on his with a disturbing intensity. “You can’t. I don’t know what you saw, I don’t know how it went down, but I need you to understand this. You can’t stay here. You have to leave.”

“E’etan–once I found out his intentions for you, I reached out to him again. We’d been together a while, you and I. I needed to know what it meant. I’d read things in my work, discovered things that–well, they’re all here. You can read them yourself. You should read them, I’m sorry I told you otherwise until now. You had dedicated your life to the Society. They were your guiding light. I couldn’t just tell you that the Council you serve had been corrupted and had done horrible, awful things. I should have told you before. But I’m telling you now.”

Lifting her hand to literally regrasp her lost train of thought, she went on, “But E’etan, he already knew. He told me about being Verdant, he told me about the Council, who they were, how they acted. I was horrified. He was horrified. And when I asked about you, he–he told me about his plan. Why he had already sought out his replacement. He was already done being Verdant, he couldn’t do anything as Verdant. He was aiming for Councillor.”

Aela was breathing heavily now, there was a slight sheen on her eyes as the corners of them filled with water. “His plan–F, it wasn’t good for you. It didn’t end well for you. But I saw an opportunity and I took it. I agreed to help him. We launched an initiative behind the Council’s back. He was Verdant, they’d never find out if he didn’t want them to. It was foolproof.”

“The man was no idiot though,” she clarified, “he knew my intentions were to protect you, but he played along. We each made our moves. I tried, gods how I tried, to extract the both of us from the game. I tried to convince you to leave Satieri, when we got married, when Denarian was born, every chance I got–” Her voice cracked a little and she put her hand over her eyes. “If I’d just told you, if I’d just been honest–” Her hand fell away and when she faced the camera again, her expression was starting to break.

“I have regrets. I made mistakes. And today, if you’re watching this, no matter how good or bad I was at the game, E’etan outplayed me. I’m gone. But, gods willing, you’re not.”

Her hands reached out to grab the camera, but she may have well have reached out of the screen and seized his throat. “F, no matter what, you need to leave. You need to take Denarian and you need to leave. Take everything stored here and go anywhere. Remember that restaurant you always talked about opening on the shores of Paraven? Do it. Or go to Tarin. Yseltin will help you. Go anywhere, just get away from here as quickly as you can.”

Her tone deepened suddenly. “But F, if you killed him? If he succeeded and made you Verdant?” The camera, still held in her hands, shook ever so slightly. “They’ll never let you go. They’ll chase you across the Span. But E’etan was wrong.” And here, she frowned with determination. “The Verdant isn’t powerless. With all you know, everything you have, everything here? You don’t have to take it. You can fight back. You can make a life.”

There were tears now, running down her cheeks as her voice quivered. “I screwed up, F. But it’s not too late. Protect our son. Protect yourself. I love you so much and I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

The screen turned to black and she was gone, just like that. As gone as she’d ever been. Fiearius didn’t know what he was supposed to feel, but the reality was somewhere between getting punched in the gut by someone twice his size and complete and utter numbness. He still held the tablet in front of him and the planet must have been shaking. Or was that his hand?

“Fiear?” he heard Leta begin to ask.

“No,” was all he could say. “The answer is no.”

He felt her hand on his back for just a moment before she gasped and grasped at her gun. When Fiearius turned to look at what had shocked her, he was not at all surprised to find Dez standing in the doorway. Of course he was. He’d be more surprised to not find him there watching, waiting.

The room was still, none of them daring to move or speak. And then the planet did shake. A burst of light rained down from the skies above them and collided with the cityscape out the window. The blast was so loud it was silent and Fiearius’ ears were still ringing when he stood up to look out at the plume of smoke that followed it, dark and heavy and black.

“So,” Desophyles mused, leaning against the wall. “What now, Admiral?”

But as similar as it was physically, it felt entirely different. This street, this community, had once been warm, kind, welcoming, but now it was cold, dark and empty. Which made sense, there was a battle going on above them. Even in the daylight, the explosions could be seen in the skies. But it was more than that. Fiearius got the distinct impression that it had been cold here for a while.

Still, he was glad to find no blatant opposition as he traversed the shadows of the buildings towards his old home, Leta behind him. She was being extra careful to stay beneath the cover of shade, he noticed, but he couldn’t tell if it was to remain unseen or simply to keep her delicate skin out of the harsh Satieran sun. Any other time, he might have teased her about it, but now, when the only noises were the distant shudders of ship fire and their own footsteps, it felt wrong to disrupt the quiet. It felt wrong to make jokes. Everything, actually just…felt wrong.

He tried not to think about the wreckage they’d left in the Satieran atmosphere…

“Fiear,” he heard Leta whisper behind him and her hand reached out for his arm. His grip on his gun tightened as he looked back at her, but she didn’t seem to be reacting to a threat. She was standing very still, facing him, but her eyes were locked on the upper window of a building across the street. “Look.”

Carefully, he did as he was told, though not quite as subtly as she had. He met the pair of eyes that were watching them from above, they widened in alarm and the curtain was drawn shut instantly.

“There were others, too,” she muttered, glancing over her shoulder. There were no more obvious spectators in view, but Fiearius didn’t think she was wrong when she said, “I swear it, I can feel them watching us.”

So they weren’t as alone as he’d thought. He felt a touch of pity for these people, terrified and holed up in their homes, waiting for whatever was going to happen to them next. What would he have done, if he’d still lived here during all of this? Been like these people and stayed inside with his family, hoping it would all turn out okay? Or would he be up in the sky, fighting off the invasion?

It didn’t matter now. “As long as they’re watching and not attacking, I’m fine with it,” Fiearius mumbled and continued onward. They were almost there, he could see the steps to the door from here, still missing a chunk after Fiearius had gotten into an impromptu fight with a shotgun in 1853. He stepped over a dark patch of concrete, tinged ever so slightly red, where he’d once tripped and reopened a wound from a recent job gone wrong. He didn’t have to look at the wall of the neighboring apartment to know that there would still be one big and one tiny handprint stained into its surface.

Fiearius had always been acutely aware of the marks this place had left on him over the years, how Satieri still lived in his veins and shaped his bones, but it had never occurred to him how many scars he himself had left. And as he approached the front of the building he had once called home, it quickly became clear just how much of an effect he’d had.

“Dov’ha ti’arte…” he breathed, finding himself stunned to a stop as he looked up to take it all in. The building hadn’t changed in a decade. It was the same shambly old building, dated, but comfortable, homey, with its friendly green door and cheerful round windows. It may have been given a fresh coat of paint, but it was hard to tell given the layers of graffiti that covered the lower floor.

There were libreras, and then altered versions of libreras, the same that Dez and his followers wore. Anti-Carthian slurs, scribbled Ridellian prayers, Society posters of his face, their slogans changed from ‘beware’ to ‘be aware’. But the piece that took up the most space, the thing your eye was drawn to first was the huge painting of Fiearius, his eyes and mouth covered by the bold phrase in red paint ‘THE ROGUE VERDANT LIVES’.

Startling was an understated description.

Fiearius was still standing, staring in a stupor, when he felt Leta’s hand on his arm. “You okay?” she asked.

No. No, he was not okay. This was not, in any sense of the word, okay. Fleetingly, he thought of Dez. This was probably his doing. Spreading lies and bullshit to garner more people to his crazy purpose. But then just as fleetingly, he remembered someone else. A ship captain he’d met long ago on Archeti, long before Dez’s movement, aboard a Society ship he was stealing. The first he stole, actually. And the words that had never left him. ‘You’re an inspiration. A legend. You give us hope.’

Gods, how the hell had this gotten so messy?

“Yeah, come on.” He marched up the stairs, decidedly ignoring the bizarre, disturbing shrine that had been resurrected here on his behalf, but as he barged through the front door, he found it didn’t end there. The murals continued in the hallways. On the doors to the apartments within. The ones that hadn’t been torn down to reveal equally defaced and trashed rooms inside anyway.

People had lived here, that much was certain. There was tossed furniture, strewn linens, things left behind that weren’t worth packing when the residents had been run out. There was an abandoned plush dog toy at the bottom of the stairs. What remained of a dresser at the top of them.

“It’s apartment 24,” he told Leta, though he didn’t need to. Even from the landing, the door they needed was apparent. It was where all the paintings and drawings and scribbled sentences culminated. The original color of the doorframe wasn’t even visible anymore, so covered in additions. The door itself was nowhere in sight and as Fiearius carefully stepped over a beat up couch cushion onto the threshold of his old home, he didn’t feel the same sense of familiarity he had on the street. The four walls of the cramped living room may have stood in the same place, the doors to the balcony, shattered, were where they were meant to be, but this wasn’t his home.

“Is this stuff–yours?” Leta crept around him into the living room, stepping over abandoned paint cans, broken furniture and glass.

“No. Don’t know what happened to my stuff.” He shrugged. He hadn’t even thought about ‘his stuff’ in a decade. Must not have been that important. “Didn’t have much to begin with.”

“So this is recent then.” She gestured to the mess around them. By the way some things still sat, untouched and innocent, it seemed whoever had been run out of here had been run out of here quickly. When she reached the one remaining bookshelf that hadn’t been torn apart, she lifted the broken picture frame from it gently. It flickered on, just briefly enough to show its image.

“This poor family…” Fiearius heard her mutter as he walked the opposite direction towards the bedroom. It was difficult enough to not wonder if he was in some way at fault for this. He had no intention of getting to know his victims if he was.

The bedroom was less ransacked than the main room of the apartment. There was still a bed in it, for one thing and though the writings on the wall were similar to the rest of the building, he spotted a few cruder ones in here. He almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Almost.

“You okay?” he heard Leta ask from the doorway and this time, he frowned back at her.

“Would you stop asking me that?”

At once he saw her bristle with irritation. “Oh I’m sorry, is my genuine concern for your wellbeing bothering you?”

He rolled his eyes. “A little bit.”

“Well get over it.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “This is really weird. I’m sure it’s even weirder for you. I just want to make sure you’re alright because I care, deal. Now I’ll ask again, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he lied, almost smirking. Annoying or no, Leta’s eternal willingness to battle him on even the smallest things added just a touch of normalcy to this otherwise alien situation. “Now help me move this, would ya?”

Setting their hands down on the mattress,they pushed the heavy bed out of the way into the corner of the room. Underneath, the hardwood floorboards looked entirely innocent, just like any other piece of flooring. He could still remember the afternoon Aela installed the box beneath them, smiling ever so proudly to herself. “No one will ever find it,” she had declared pulling her palm from the floor and wiping her hands together in satisfaction.