“Leave it,” Evalyn hissed from the ditch, crouched over the suitcase she now knew was locked, but Iris found it increasingly hard to move from the scene with time. The reality of what she’d done was sinking in, but it wasn’t regret or guilt immersing her; she was all too familiar with those sensations. It was simmering frustration, anger at having only been inches away from finishing the job.

  Now there were loose ends to be tied, and she stood amongst the carnage thinking that if she stayed, she might get the rematch she so craved.

  Evalyn, ever pragmatic when it came to the job, had already turned her attention away from the bodies, distracting herself with the suitcase. The locks were fastened with magic, the type that Evalyn wasn’t equipped to crack simply by nature. Finally, coming to terms with the end of the fight, Iris walked back towards the ditch and knelt beside her mother.

  Out of the corner of her vision hung two glazed-over eyes, their usual auburn sheen dulled to a desaturated brown. Evalyn’s hands were just as still, clammy palms barely clasping the briefcase.

  “Mum,” Iris muttered, broaching the subject cautiously. Evalyn wasn’t one to blow up often, but Iris had given her worthy-enough reason and then some. Justified, sure, but it wasn’t something she could put up with. Not in her current mood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, with little hope the sentiment would get her anywhere good.

  “It’s fine,” Evalyn muttered, her lips quaking in an attempted chuckle. “If anybody’s going to shout at you, it’s Marie.”

  Something about those words seemed to unplug the blocked pipeline that was her brain, and she started up again, flipping the briefcase upright. “It isn’t something I, of all people, can criticise you for, anyway. But…”

  Evalyn flashed a forced smile, but it didn’t last very long, collapsing under pressure like a bridge with faulty bearings. “You’ve got good people around you. You’ll be fine,” but the sentiment collapsed into the bay along with the smile, equally as faulty. It was all meant for herself rather than Iris, and even then, none of it looked convincing.

  “Can you handle this?” she said, starting the conversation anew.

  “I think so,” Iris said, gratefully pocketing another loose thread, if it meant saving herself from reprimand temporarily. If Evalyn wanted to drop the subject, that was reason enough for Iris.

  What they held between them was evidence enough to crack the entire case wide open, and damaging it wasn’t an option. Not a job to let her beast handle.

  She formulated another possibility in her head, where the jaws were a pair of pliers cutting the wiring in a bomb and its pressure pinpoint precise. She moulded that possibility, still a mere sketch in her mind, and grafted it into her palm. With eyes closed, she felt the writhing, precise thing extend from her armour and between the tips of her fingers.

  She needed only to point it in the right direction, and it cut through the magic bounds like paper. But ever one step ahead, Iris stumbled onto one last parting gift left behind by the one that got away.

  It wasn’t an explosion so much as it was a spark lit beneath the leather. Corroding the briefcase itself, the incessant thing scampered like a gnat across the case’s innards, running amok across the evidence and torching whatever was once underneath into smoulders and the distinct odour of ash.

  “No,” Iris hissed, fumes of desperation seething through the gaps in her teeth. She leapt at her first reaction, smothering the briefcase in her hair turned liquid purple. Viscous and suffocating, but the spark seemed to run on persistence instead of oxygen and irritated her from underneath like an ant wriggling through her shoe.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “It’s not stopping.”

  “Strip its magic,” Evalyn said, panic rising even in her voice. “It’s all we can do at this point.”

  Iris’s cutting tool still writhed between her fingers, but in her panic, she couldn’t promise herself the same accuracy she’d achieved only moments prior, not to mention now she was following a moving target.

  ‘One step behind’. She could chisel that phrase into the inside of her skull.

  Still wanting to preserve even tatters of the briefcase’s magic, she widened her tool’s jaws to sit neatly between her index and her thumb. It was a stupid game of whack-a-mole with stakes stupidly high, but they’d run out of options. Iris was already running thin on strikes against her name.

  She snapped her hand against the briefcase’s cover, her skin for a slight moment singeing against the spark before it died, swallowed whole.

  Both couldn’t quite figure out what to say in the moments after. Iris herself didn’t dare move her head, and by the cuffs of Evalyn’s overcoat, she could tell her mother was petrified too.

  What they held between them was evidence enough to crack the entire case wide open, and damaging it hadn’t been an option. Riddled with a snaking scorch mark that wound its way from inside out following a wonky, geometric maze, the briefcase before them provoked a strange sensation. Shock and horror, clashing with the uncomfortable feeling that they expected something like this to happen all along.

  “One step ahead,” Iris seethed, this time the thought escaping her mouth.

  They moved quickly after that, trading places with the cleanup crew whom they never saw in person but knew were coming via their overwatch. They were both little more than another set of footsteps by the time the investigative personnel arrived. Iris didn’t feel envious of them, having so little to work with even before the briefcase destroyed itself.

  They were flying again, her beast’s scales fluttering under her fingertips as they cut through the tapestry of landscapes again, some new, and others familiar from different angles. It was all a vague blur in the corner of Iris’s vision, mundane stretches of land beyond her own reflection in a train carriage’s window. Her thoughts were squarely elsewhere as Deity steered them, Iris’s hands simply the conduit.

  A disquiet hung about them like a miasma, filling in where there once was tension, and where there should have been closure. The middle ground where nothing felt quite finished. Loose ends were spilling from her pockets, flailing in the wind passing them by.

  Evalyn’s hands were wrapped around her waist, but neither spoke to one another. It wasn’t an absence of words, or probably the exact opposite. Evalyn was the type to be outspoken about the things that upset her, enough to send Elliot packing with both his tail and his smart mouth tucked between his legs. But that was never about anything serious; it was about missed laundry or a package returning to the post office because nobody had answered the door. Years ago, she might’ve mistaken Evalyn’s silence for forgiveness, but six years of context meant she could see the patterns Elliot was already used to.

  Each team was heading for the closest portal. Being near the centre, they had their pick, but Evalyn decided facing the fire sooner rather than later was the best course of action, so they headed back to where they started and where Marie was awaiting their return.

  Iris had foregone a proper look at the portal the first time—the Queen’s realm was a spectacle she’d been unable to tear her eyes from. All the Queen’s portals were fashioned from flimsy alloys better suited to a century of technology already passed, but they were clean. Besides the scorch marks on the ring’s inside, maintenance looked regular judging by the brass’ polish and lack of kinks in the wiring or chips in the wooden switchboards. Their counterparts inside her realm weren’t as pristine, scuffs and with thin sheets of grime consistent with a years-long stint braving the elements.

  Iris’s beast disappeared from between their legs, and her boots landed once again on solid, packed soil. Evalyn was spending her last moments taking in a world Iris hoped was temporary; a dreadful nightmare she’d forget once Al was king. Iris wasn’t keen to return herself, knowing what waited for her, but she couldn’t help but feel drawn to a small ticker embedded into the portal’s metal in place of a switchboard. She squinted.

  “Thirty-one years, two hundred and...Mum?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember how long it’s been in here? Tony mentioned it.”

  “Not the...whole thing, wasn’t it thirty-one years—”

  “Two hundred and sixty-five days, three hours—”

  “I think it was twelve minutes.”

  “Twelve...how long have we been here?”

  Evalyn checked her wristwatch. “Thirty-six minutes. Why?”

  It was a simple thing, in any other circumstance not even worth mentioning. But Al and Tony were meticulous watchmakers with an eye for detail and a taste for durability that defied both physics and magic. Even a second’s disparity between the real world and the Queen’s one would fly well out of their tolerance threshold.

  So if that were the case, where had an entire five minutes disappeared?