“The hell do you think you were doing?” were Marie’s first words as they exited the portal and the sensible passing of time washed over them like a tangible thing. Al’s office felt constricting after the expansive, looping world they’d just left; a jarring change, but Iris undoubtedly preferred claustrophobic stability over the shifting islands floating across the masterless abyss.

  Marie’s words sounded more like a plea than a scold. An hour ago, or rather the better part of a week, Iris might’ve shrunk in the face of her words, but right now her mind was racing. Where Iris’s own words failed, Evalyn picked up the slack.

  “Marie, I get it, but this might not be the time—”

  “An explanation at least? I want to know what made us blow our cover.”

  Iris was barely listening, her mind overwhelmed with ifs, buts, and maybes, each more terrifying than the last, with no answers to put them to rest. Marie was in her way, but behind her atop the office bureau perched Al and Tony, and her feet started moving towards them before her brain could even register her movement.

  “Iris!”

  “Please, Marie.”

  She slammed into the desk palms first, and the two Spirits stumbled a few uneasy steps back, glancing worried looks at Iris’s hands and probably wondering if she’d meant to crush them.

  “The times don’t match,” she blurted, lips fumbling through the ifs, buts, and maybes into a synthesis that would make her language teacher weep in despair. “The counters…the uh…days and hours, they’re slightly off.”

  “By how much?” Al asked, and Iris was relieved that her rambling was somewhat getting through to them. A passing grade.

  “Five minutes,” she said. “It’s five minutes behind in there.”

  “Five?” This time it was Tony, his pride showing in his disbelief that a contraption of his could malfunction so significantly. “Barely thirty years have passed in there.”

  “So what?” Marie interrupted. “There’s a million ways that thing could be a few minutes off. The entire realm has been tearing itself apart!”

  She was holding her words back behind gritted teeth, thrashing for an answer Iris had, but wasn’t sure if she would like, let alone accept. Because it was an answer that only made sense with overwhelming context; enough surrounding puzzle pieces already in place to make this one fit in almost too perfectly. Vesmos, the briefcase, the suspect’s Aether-less body, even the wilted forest surrounding the point of origin; very little of which could pass as official evidence.

  She turned to Marie—it was imperative that she take Iris’s theory seriously, because without her support, it truly would just be a theory.

  “It was an Aether bomb,” she said. “That was what was in the briefcase.”

  She tried to read the twitch in Marie’s eye, how her breathing slowed after a sharp, sudden intake of air. A tense moment followed, where Iris searched her face for telltale signs that she was resisting the idea. It was a hunch, sure, but no better and no worse than all the hunches they’d operated on so far.

  “You can’t be serious,” Marie muttered, turning to Evalyn who, with downcast eyes and a show of silence, expressed her agreement with Iris’s theory. This only made Marie’s distress worse.

  “What do we do?” The words were barely through her once-gritted teeth. “What the hell do we do now?”

  It was a revelation that to Iris and Evalyn wasn’t as apocalyptic as it must have felt to Marie. Their stashed copy of the schematics from over three years ago meant Geverde wouldn’t be starting from zero, but of course Marie knew of no such thing.

  “Marie,” Evalyn said, taking over where Iris lacked the experience to handle the situation. “The same Beak showed up again, same as in the sewers, only this time with a band of merry men and a lot of firepower.”

  “I saw them too,” Marie stammered, brain separated between topics both past and present. “In the council meeting, I…that Beak was there.”

  “Then he’s our man,” Evalyn said, grasping Marie’s shoulders. “And once the cleanup crew finds out the armed escorts were all GFP, that’ll be all the evidence we need to go after them.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “But we’ve got no authority,” Marie asked, brushing Evalyn’s hands away. “This isn’t our jurisdiction. We move now, and either none of our evidence is valid, or we rat ourselves out.”

  “We both know there’s a way.”

  Perhaps Marie was avoiding the possibility out of respect for the Spirit in question, but now that Evalyn had brought it front and centre, it was hard to ignore Al’s role in the situation—the singular linchpin left holding them back. One word from him, and every dubious action the GSO had taken before and after would be retroactively given the royal signet of approval.

  It would also cement them as the Queen’s personal guard, dogs to the imperial word and nothing more.

  Al was silent under their gaze; deep in thought, weighing their options. Iris could never fully understand the depth of statecraft he had to consider in that moment, but to her it was a set of scales with morality in one bowl and strategy in the other.

  If they were wrong, it could show just how fragile a voice Geverde’s people held about their own country, how shallow their power was. Whatever goodwill they regained by restoring the monarchy might quickly vanish, and only more turmoil would follow.

  Inversely, if they were wrong…then there might not be a Geverde to rule any longer, at least as they knew it.

  “Give me…some time,” he muttered sheepishly, probably knowing well how little time there was left. Yet nobody objected. Nobody could object.

  “Understood,” Marie said, holding a shallow bow towards him out of respect, and what felt as though an extra few seconds as an apology. For what? There were probably too many things. “Let’s go,” she said once she rose out of it. “We’ve got too much to sort out and, for God’s sake, too little time.”

  The dissonance in time only became obvious when they met Elliot in the vehicle bay, where he hugged his daughter as though he hadn’t seen her in a week, and she reciprocated appropriately, which was to say rather despondently, to her own warped sense of time. He was more hesitant with Evalyn—Iris wasn’t sure of what had happened after the briefing, but they exchanged an embrace of their own, however hesitant on Evalyn’s part, she seemed to melt into it like she always did after a few seconds of resistance.

  Something of his attitude seemed to rub off on Marie, and she softened on them both before they left, but Iris knew that wouldn’t be the last they heard of it. Elliot’s rewarded paid leave for seven straight days of surveillance would be time enough for dust to settle on Iris’s breach of contract.

  Marie and Evalyn parsed a few whispered words between each other as Iris climbed into the back of Elliot’s rental four-wheel drive—an ugly drab-green thing with little above the door panel but the windshield.

  The Steel Whale’s inner workings had long since returned to full steam ahead, burying the conversation between a thousand others already jostling for space with cranking metal and saw bits, but Marie was periodically flicking nervous glances back at Iris. Evalyn was likely still vouching for her case.

  “Did you get into trouble?” Elliot asked rather nonchalantly, but his face drooped when Iris, too focused on the conversation, didn’t reply. “Oh seriously? What did you do this time?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing unwarranted.”

  “Breaking contract is precisely what unwarranted—,” but he couldn’t finish the sentence before his motivation to ran out. “This is what Evalyn gets for handling all the paperwork.”

  “What do I get?” Evalyn asked, opening the side door and sliding into shotgun.

  “A disobedient child who doesn’t know her own terms of service,” Elliot replied in an overly authoritative tone, but the disappointment hidden underneath wasn’t lost on Iris, who leant against the door panel and waited for Elliot to put the car into gear.

  “There might be just enough trade-offs to her muck-up to earn her a pass. Don’t know…depends on what Al does next.”

  Elliot huffed and puffed as the car started moving down the off-ramp and onto a well-trodden path of tyre tracks cutting through fields of grass. The conversation from then on was tepid, rolling along with the car’s wheels back and forth between Evalyn and Elliot, while Iris listened in. That’s how it had always been, and the return to some semblance of normalcy soothed her. It slowed her heart rate and gently drew curtains over her vision until the topic of the conversation up front forced the sun back into her eyes.

  It was largely a status report on the country: the opening power struggle, the stopgap measures now the temporary foundation of society, and the all-important constitution now being drafted.

  Evalyn listened quietly at first, nodding along with a grave look on her face as though she were receiving another briefing from him, only ever interjecting to clarify details. But between the gentle sway of the car around winding bends, the wind leaping over the windscreen and into their hair, and the rays of sun peering out from rain clouds only just recently passed, Evalyn’s demeanour seemed to loosen despite herself.

  Her shoulders sank, and she slid further into the seat as her responses became more opinionated, and at times pointed with colourful language. She was in a foul mood, yes, but it was the kind that Elliot knew how to deal with, and Iris knew not to fear.

  Despite rarely ever taking the wheel herself, drives had always worked to improve her mood. By the time Iris came to live with them, it was a time-honoured tradition, Elliot’s trump card in sticky situations and a habit that eventually rubbed off on Iris as well. Like the passing rain clouds above, things were on the way up for a brief blip. That was, however, only until Excala and therefore home loomed over the rolling hills.

  At home was a responsibility tucked underneath the floorboards, squirreled away in the hope it would fade with time like a bad dream. That, Iris now realised, had been a na?ve thought, no matter how noble its intentions.