Iris felt the last dregs of the Queen’s viscous time flow out of her hair and down the shower drain, hypnotised by the circling water. The few minutes she’d stood there, feeling the cool moisture sanitise every crevice in her skin, she’d stood stock still, surrendering to her whirlwind of thoughts. Doubt had snuck up on her in the time since her outburst, calling her actions into question.

  No matter where the balance of pros and cons fell once the dust settled, the fact was that a figment of her imagination had goaded her into it. Instability, anxiety, maybe even insanity were all reason enough to do more than just suspend her, but this was something else. Her past-life was trying to tell her something again, and the last time she had lost control over herself, she’d only commanded a fraction of her current power.

  Iris couldn’t afford to be volatile now, not unless open war broke out at Geverde’s borders could she risk losing control.

  She twisted the faucet closed, each rotation squeaking the valve tight and shaking the exposed pipe. Some screws attaching it to the tiled cubicle walls were coming loose, and neither she nor Evalyn had bothered to fix them. Elliot took up the mantle of handyman around the house, even if he complained about it after getting the job done—it always made her feel guilty making him waste time on a task she could do at the drop of a hat.

  He’d been through a lot recently. Conjuring up a drill bit on her fingertip and tightening the connections was the least she could do for him.

  She stepped out of the shower, dried off her skin and slipped into the first things she found in her drawer: a long-sleeve cotton top with a collage of stains across it, and a pair of black shorts, previously longer until one brutal summer’s night she’d cut off the excess length with purple blades out of frustration.

  Another towel engulfed her head when she left the bathroom. It would have startled her if it wasn’t routine between her and Evalyn already.

  “A woman’s hair is not her life,” Evalyn had once said, “but yours is quite literally the source of your power, so take care of it.”

  In that regard, she led by example, too. Adamant about not letting her job interfere with her beauty standards, she kept up a routine for everything except treating callouses. They were useful, and Iris agreed.

  She peeled off the white sheet and ran it along the length of her hair as she surveyed the room. Mum and Dad were on opposite couches, the coffee table in the centre moved to one side and the floorboards underneath pried open. There was tension in the room, one that Evalyn was predominantly on the receiving end of. It was a change of pace, debatable if it was a nice one.

  She bunched her hair up in the towel and took a few steps forward, peering into the safe hole. The stash of old rifles and stocky, primitive machine guns was as she remembered, neatly sorted into piles wrapped in deep-yellow canvas, while boxes of ammunition sat stacked on the other side. Miscellaneous items took up the remaining space—fake identities, paperwork, and wads of pristine banknotes.

  There was one folder amongst the many, its pages bulging at the fraying twine that held it all together, that was much newer than the rest. Recent enough that Iris recalled its placing there and was dreading its return to the real world.

  “I think this makes us even on the scoreboard of ‘Really Stupid Decisions with Actual Consequences’”, Elliot muttered, eyes fixated on the same manila folder. “I actually can’t believe this.”

  Evalyn was already silent, and Iris could only join her in it. Elliot was looking everywhere but the hole in the floor as though trying to forget it was there, his jittering jaw chewing through his own tongue. “I mean…how much did you two risk by doing this?”

  “This shouldn’t exist,” Iris said, her voice sounding more like a plead than she wanted it to. “I hoped that maybe I could—”

  “I know,” her father said, stopping her with both palms. “I…get the feeling, but this was a gamble you were never winning.” With a sincere, yet undoubtedly pitying smile, he bent down and carefully plucked the file from the stash. “But if there was anybody lucky enough to take that gamble, it wouldn’t be us.”

  He gingerly flipped over the cover and began parsing through the documents, even that weak smile draining from his face as he read and reality finally set in.

  “We need to get it to Marie. That was the deal,” Evalyn explained.

  “What, the deal between you two?”

  “Elly, please—”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Don’t try it.”

  Elliot sprang up from his seat, the frustration escaping his gnawing jaws. Throwing his hands behind his head, one still on the folder, he began pacing around the room. In that tense moment of silence a draught tickled Iris’s skin, cool against her bare arms and legs, but she could feel none of it. Perhaps it had been that moment of pause and reflection underneath the water planting that seed of doubt in her mind, but under Elliot’s scrutiny, that seed was rapidly blossoming.

  “Dad…,” she muttered uselessly.

  “What were you going to do with this?” he asked. “Because Evalyn, if you were about to walk up to Marie and hand this over, no bullshit Spirit powers would’ve stopped me beating some goddamn sense into you.”

  “Elliot!”

  “Dad, please—”

  “Please what? Huh?”

  Here was a side to her father Iris had only heard about in passing: a tongue as sharp as his eyes. No mercy in the face of the strong or powerful, punching up like a firecracker. To see it for the first time as its recipient was a consequence Iris found a lot harder to handle than the Anti-Aether bomb itself.

  There was fury in his eyes, perhaps more so because it concerned those closest to him.

  “God’s sake, do you two seriously think you’re immortal? The Queen is dead! We already knew the old hag was on her way out three years ago and you just thought, ‘oh she’ll cover for us forever’.”

  There was a vicious artistry in his words. The glare in his sharp eyes stung hers. She couldn’t bear to look.

  “She would have crucified both of you! Both. Of. You. You here me?! There wouldn’t have been jack shit Marie could’ve done about it, and not to mention the poor woman would never trust either of you again.”

  The flames lost steam for a moment, and the piercing glare turned away. She didn’t dare look up but could hear Evalyn’s stifled breathing beside her. Her mother was holding it in, praying she could keep it together.

  “Maybe I, of all people, can’t be saying this right now, but you came this close to tearing this family apart.”

  The vitriol in this voice made sure she knew it was the truth, and saying it hurt him just as much as it hurt her.

  “You two are people. Not gods. That’s a promise you made to me. To Marie. To each other, for fuck’s sake.”

  His voice trailed off, breath shaking as though he were completely out of breath.

  “We’re all just assets. The fuck am I supposed to do when the people in charge decide you two are liabilities.”

  All she could do was stare at her whitening knuckles, obscured by the layer of tears welling up in her eyes. She heard his footsteps, heavy against the floorboards, leading away towards the door.

  “Where are you going?” Evalyn said, her best attempt at sounding as though she had some agency left utterly failing.

  “To fix things,” came Elliot’s bitter reply as he tapped his shoes against the doormat. The lock bolt slid open and the door hinges gave a nervous squeak as he left.

  Silence. Perhaps the most painful Iris had ever felt.

  The couch squeaked beside her, and a soft, limp sniffle came from Evalyn’s nose. Then, a shaky breath. Then she spoke in a nasal voice between gentle, yet frantic inhales.

  “I think we have some washing to do,” Evalyn said. “Can you help me?”

  Hanging laundry with purple tendrils felt most natural to her. She’d sit on the back porch, parsing through a newspaper while flipping towels and pegging clothes on the length of wire stretched between two metal posts nailed into the soil.

  It was a thoroughly absent-minded task for her, especially after years of repetition, but something about taking the easy way out, even for something as benign as laundry, felt wrong. The weather was pleasant anyway, so she decided to join Evalyn in hanging them up by hand. Ever since she closed the detective agency, home life in all aspects had seemed to slow for her mother. She was even slowly learning to cook.

  It was just the sound of wind playing with loose fabric to keep them company now, whistling between jacket sleeves and trousers.

  “I’m sorry, Iris,” Evalyn began. Iris was in the middle of beating one of her uniform blouses against her legs. She tried to find her mother through the flapping garments, but her face was always just barely obscured. “I think you’ve seen the worst of both of us now.”

  The worst of them. The silver lining, at least, was that it didn’t get much worse. That, or Evalyn still suffered an inexplicable confidence in their relationship; still believed that she was invincible.

  “When was the last time?” Iris asked, dragging a clothes hanger down the length of the wire and wrapping her blouse’s shoulders around it.

  “Years ago,” Evalyn said with a sigh. “Ten, now…maybe eleven.”

  “What did you do?”

  She heard Evalyn throwing a pair of trousers over the wire, evening out the folds and wrinkles. “Does your school do the birds and the bees talk?”

  “Yes. I don’t get the name, though.”

  “Me neither,” she said, chuckling dryly. “Don’t think about…any of this too deeply. Anyway. You know how before you, I really wanted children?”

  “Even though you weren’t allowed to. I know.”

  “Yeah. It didn’t stop me from wanting to try, so…one day I uh…lied to him.”

  “About what?”

  “About…you know.”

  Iris racked her brain to last semester. The conclusion was hiding behind an awful lot of unconnected dots, but she got there all the same. She pursed her lips, wishing the ugly truth had been something a bit more palatable, but what did she expect from something that had peaked Elliot’s bi-decadal wrath.

  “I see,” Iris muttered. “What happened then?”

  “He went to work for the week. When he came back and saw that he’d scared me out of ever doing it again, I think that made him forgive me.”

  Evalyn took a few barefoot steps through the grass, and out past the billowing clothes. The sunlight glistened across a tired face as she loosened her hair tie and gave the swirling wind a new plaything. “He’s a softie, but I think if he ever decided enough was enough, he wouldn’t hesitate to say it.”

  She collapsed backward, spread-eagle onto the swaying grass. Only then did Iris notice that her laundry basket was already empty.

  “I’ll always handle the consequences of my own actions, but that doesn’t mean he has to go through that with me.”

  And that went for Iris, too. ‘Dad’ and ‘daughter’ weren’t the be-all, end-all. Maybe she had taken him for granted.

  “We’re going to be on an apology tour for the next month, all right?”