Chapter 33
When Theren approaches the landing pad ten minutes later, Elegy is there, standing across from a small, uniformed woman with her leg in a brace.
Arias rushes forward to greet her. She does a lazy salute and then both of them start a complicated handshake that Theren can’t quite follow.
A technician light hovers near them, an opaque orb that almost seems to pulse like a heartbeat.
Elegy turns, and with the warm glow of the light catching her cheekbones, and an olive shirt bringing out the green in her eyes, the sight of her is like a gut punch.
“Secondary Parekh, this is Theren Forint,” she says, gesturing to him. “Theren, this is Lydia Parekh. She’ll be flying us to Naarm Stronghold.”
“Hi. Wow,” Parekh says. “Nobody mentioned you were this attractive.”
Theren’s face heats. Elegy cringes, her nose wrinkling, and sets her hands on Parekh’s shoulders to steer her toward the Sparrow that’s perched on the landing pad, its hatch open.
“What?” Parekh says. “I’m not flirting with him, I just don’t see the point in pretending my eyes don’t work, the way you seem to be.”
Arias is a few paces behind them, laughing.
Theren follows, his bag in hand. This time it’s not full of borrowed military clothes.
Yesterday Arias took him into Losan, armed with Theren’s old bank account information—-still active—-and a list of necessities, to get him some clothes that weren’t from the bottom of a Losan Stronghold closet, as he put it.
Theren was shocked to discover that Arias had a lot of opinions about fashion.
Theren managed to escape with a few plain collared shirts—-the one he’s wearing now is a deep navy, rolled up to his elbows.
They buckle themselves in, Parekh in the captain’s chair and Arias and Elegy across from Theren in the back.
The ship is too big for four people, but a smaller one wouldn’t have enough fuel to get them to Austra.
Parekh ties her hair back and readies the engine, her fingers dancing across the navigation panel as the elixir in her blood activates and she sinks into the ship.
He’s not Imbued, so he can’t quite imagine what Parekh is seeing right now, but his mother described piloting a Sparrow to him once.
It wasn’t like piloting a Hummingbird; she had to think about two things at once, see two things at once, be two things at once—-herself, and the ship, coasting through the air.
The training was rigorous, and not everyone who attempted it was successful—-not every mind was built for that kind of flexibility.
“Secure?” Parekh asks.
“Hold on.” Elegy, who hasn’t buckled herself in yet, crosses the aisle to stand in front of Theren. She hooks her fingers over the safety strap that crosses his chest and tugs it, testing it. It’s loose.
“You’re not an experienced flyer, I guess,” she says to him.
Her knee brushes his. He doesn’t respond—-can’t respond, because he’s watching her fingers as she tugs the end of the strap to tighten it.
She isn’t touching him, but she may as well be, skimming the fabric that holds him fast to make sure it’s secure.
Then, satisfied, she sits down and buckles herself in. “Parekh, can you at least try for a smooth takeoff—-” she says.
They jerk away from the landing pad so sharply his teeth snap together.
“Never mind,” Elegy finishes, sounding strained.
“I don’t see you volunteering to drive!” Parekh looks over her shoulder at Theren. Her hands are faintly glowing. “She was like this in basic training, too, fussing over everything.”
They fly west, toward the ocean. The flight from Losan to Austra is safer than most Cedrae journeys—-the Talusar don’t bother to patrol the empty expanse of ocean that borders Losan, and even if they did, they lack the ships to do it effectively.
Parekh flies them into the moon, which glints white on the water. Even in the dark, Earth is too beautiful to look at.
Arias is still examining the map, which is projected over the nav panel. He writes notes with a quill on the air beside it.
“Have you ever been to Austra?” Elegy asks Theren.
He shakes his head. Nonessential travel is for the wealthy, something he’s never been.
And Austra is across the planet, thousands of miles away from Losan.
But he’s heard stories of what it’s like there, about its clear water, its bigger, fiercer animals.
Like Losan, the city of Naarm has a sea wall, but theirs is older, concrete, with a mechanism in it to let a small amount of water in and out of the bay. A feat of engineering.
“The last time I went there I woke up to a spider on my face,” Parekh reports from the captain’s chair. “And it was not small.”
She turns on music. A guitar, strumming, and a woman’s voice layered over it in a language he can’t identify.
“She was born on Cedre Station,” Elegy says, as if that explains everything.
“Oh?” Theren says. “And you Losani are, what? Expert spider--handlers?”
Elegy’s eyebrows pop up in surprise. She clearly forgot he’s also from Cedre Station—-not surprising, given that they reencountered each other in Valla. But she just says, “I’m only saying the station--born tend to be . . .” She pauses. “A bunch of wimps.”
“Interesting.” He folds his arms and sits back. “Then we’ll have to put you in a spacesuit and see how you do adrift.”
Parekh laughs. Everyone on Cedre Station has to experience a spacesuit drift when they’re eleven years old, so they know how to handle themselves in an emergency. Theren loved it. It was like swimming without having to come up for air.
“It’s part of basic army training,” Elegy says. “I did fine.”
Theren squints at her, like he’s assessing her.
“Fine, I almost wet myself, is that what you want to hear?” But she’s laughing. “You’re very annoying, you know that?”
He thinks he should tease her more often—-he’s never seen her eyes light up like that before. He tips his head back against the wall of the ship as Parekh and Elegy reminisce about their army training days.
Parekh tells Theren that Elegy used to stay in the back of the group no matter how slow or hopeless they were, to make sure everyone finished as a team.
“It didn’t get us the best scores,” Parekh says.
“But we were all so closely ranked we got to sit together at graduation.” He can imagine Elegy at the back of the group, the severe pout of her mouth, a line between her eyebrows.
Arias, meanwhile, is on his feet, staring at the projection of the map. He circles a few places on the hologram with his fingertip.
“Here, here, and here,” he says. They all go quiet. “We should look for the Talusar ship in these places. They’re closest to the Talusar border, and they’re flat, relatively clear. Good spots for ships.”
“We won’t be able to see a parked ship from the air, thanks to all the tree cover,” Theren says. “We’ll have to search on foot.”
“Parekh, how’s your hip?” Elegy asks.
“Good enough,” Parekh says, a little too quickly. She feels lively to him, like a beetle buzzing from one branch to another. A difficult person to read, especially compared to Elegy.
Parekh finds a place to land—-a clearing at the bottom of a kind of bowl in the land, where she nestles the ship against the slope of a hill.
It’s not a hidden place, which leaves it vulnerable to the Talusar, but she activates the ship’s security system as soon as she touches down.
If anyone but her tries to connect to the ship’s systems, the equipment will fry so badly it will be unusable.
It’s important that the Talusar don’t get their hands on any more Cedrae ships than they already have, since ships are Cedre’s only combat advantage.
Theren unbuckles himself, rubbing at his shoulder where the strap dug into his skin. Elegy is already outside, unloading the supplies she brought from Losan Stronghold with Arias. When Theren descends the steps, Arias tosses him a pack.
Theren holds it for a moment, drinking in the air, which is moist and temperate, unlike the dry heat of Losan.
He listens to the trees shuddering in the wind, the insects chirping and buzzing.
It’s been months since he was in a forest, and he missed the sound of it, the smell of it.
Even though it’s still dark, he closes his eyes so he can focus on it.
When he opens them, Elegy is standing in front of him with a sword. Not a longsword, but a sturdy falchion, a little curved at the end. He takes it by the handle and tests its weight.
“Thought that would work for you,” she says, a little stiffly. “Can’t march through the woods with a one--handed longsword.”
She has a spear already strapped to her back. Her weapon of choice. And apparently she knows his.
“It’s good,” he says. “Thanks.”
When the ship has powered down and they’re all outfitted with weapons and supplies, there’s no debate about who’s in charge.
Elegy tells Arias to take point, since he’s the best navigator, and ushers Parekh and Theren ahead of her—-accustomed to leading from the back, he assumes, based on the stories Parekh told him.
Most Cedre soldiers aren’t trained to be quiet.
There’s no need. So even though it’s clear Parekh, Arias, and Elegy are trying to tread lightly, Theren can still hear the crush of greenery beneath their feet, and little bursts of breath as they forget to breathe through their noses.
He also hears the cries of distant birds and the rustling of small mammals through the brush.
They pass a shimmer of moonlight refracted over the threads of a spiderweb, and the earth yields to his boots in a way it rarely did in the dry mountains that border Valla.