Chapter 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a continuation of the story and universe introduced in Chapter 0 and 1 (Chapter 0 linked here, Chapter 1 here). Although it can technically be read without that context, I strongly recommend checking those out first. Additionally, I have updated Chapter 1 slightly (as discussed here), so I would recommend rereading that. - GB

She wakes up slowly, awareness creeping in so gently that despite the pulsing pain in her head it takes her a minute to realize that she is, in fact, no longer dreaming. The second she does, however, she snaps upright, eyes springing open and dancing around, cataloging her surroundings. There are two men in front of her, blocking the only door in or out of the small room she finds herself in. They seem relaxed, posture drooping, not glancing back, unaware that she’s watching them. 

There’s something to be said for the ability to be unnoticed in a room without doing anything in particular. Rissa had never been particularly skilled in that respect, but Jay and Adalyne had made a game of it, sneaking into rooms and just sitting there until someone noticed them. Eventually, both of them got so good that they would do it at the same time, and play card games with each other from across the room. But Rissa had never had any interest or aptitude for it, and so she leans forward slightly. Neither of the two men seem to notice, but now, looking closer she can begin to recognize one of them. They’re the ones who attacked the house. Focus. Rissa. Two swords sit propped up against the table between them, concealed by cracked leather scabbards. She takes a deep breath, then lets out a scream. 

The two men immediately turn around to face her, one of them reaches for the closer sword. She can see that he has a gun propped up against the side of his chair, previously blocked from her view. They both seem somewhat surprised, as they should be, given that I just revealed I was awake in the most obvious way possible, instead of even attempting to escape. Her breath starts coming in shorter gasps, but she forces it to level out slightly, pushing the growing panic beneath the surface. Focus. Rissa. She hunches over slightly, knees curling into her chest, widening her eyes as she looks at the men. 

The men look at eachother, before the unarmed one steps forward. He looks like the younger of the two, she would guess that he’s in his mid thirties or so. As he steps forward he slowly raises one hand, and she flinches back slightly, but all he does is run it through his wildly tangled, frizzy mass of dark red hair. Even as he pushes it back, it flops back forward into his face, exposing plain black roots, flecked with gray. 

“Now there, no need to scream,” he says, kneeling down in front of her, tipping her chin up to make eye contact. His eyes are dark brown, sharp around the edges, but softened by the faint wrinkles that she can see have started to form at the corners. “Now, do you know where you are?” 

He says it like he’s trying to be kind, not willing to be anything but softly supportive to a child. Focus. Rissa. She barely bites back the urge to scream every last profanity she knows at him, and instead shakes her head slightly. The man pulls his hand back from her face, and chuckles slightly. 

“How old are you, little one?” The endearment sounds practiced, the ease with which the letters trip off the edge of his tongue exposing a slight drawl in the vowels. 

“Thirteen.”

“Ah, a lucky number!” The other man clicks his tongue, and lets his sword lean back against the table. Although he keeps a grip on it with one hand, he reaches back and grabs his tankard with the other. The man in front of her glances quickly back, before turning back to face her. “Wait, no unlucky, my apologies. But, thirteen! You must be Miss Clarissa, the youngest of the family. My name is Felix, and my partner here is Ren. I suppose I should get right to the chase. What do you know about seeing and shifting?”

Scars creeping up a covered arm, an unrecognizable face through the glass, ships rocking in the sea, family lost or left behind, as a smaller hand rests on worn wooden planks, he sets an overly adorned box between them, too light for the impact it will have. He knows so much more than you or my uncle would ever learn.

She shrugs, “Not that much… my uncle didn’t like to talk about it.” It wasn’t a lie. For all the stories Jay delighted in telling her, he always shied away from the topic of the Aether, something she had always attributed to a potent mix of painful memories and the knowledge that he would never be able to teach her more than she could find out on her own.

“Do you want to tell me the story?” she asks, allowing her voice to slip into an almost unnoticeably higher pitch, crisp vowels relaxing.

Felix sighed, smiled slightly, and ran a hand through his hair. “Well, shifters are fairly self explanatory. It’s mostly a term used around these parts, because there’s enough of them around that people don’t want to bother saying ‘shapeshifter’. We don’t know where they’re from, or how what they do works, but as far as we can tell, it’s a way of twisting perception in this world. As for seeing,” he pauses, seeming to finally look to his friend for guidance, but all the other man does is smirk and take a long, slow, sip from his tankard. Felix makes a complicated looking gesture, which she presumes is vulgar, at his friend, before turning back to her. “I think you can tell me about seeing, little one. It’s what your family is known for, after all.”

She barely restrains a sigh. Everything that Felix had just told her was clearly carefully curated scraps of what anyone who lived within a hundred miles of the coast would know. What do I know about these people? They want to talk about the Aether, they don’t seem to like shifters, and have some amount of knowledge about my family. What can I tell them? Focus. Rissa. Who is he pretending to be?

“Sometimes… sometimes we can tell what people really look like,” she finally mutters, right as Felix shifts his weight again.

“‘We’ is your family, isn’t it. You can see what’s really there. You can tell who people really are.” 

“It’s not just us,” she shakes her head. Surely he must already know this. It might be too much to give away, but she can’t resist spitting something back, desperate to tell him to stop talking about her. Get to the point. 

Felix raises his hand, and she can already see that he’s going to brush his hair back, taking a moment to compose himself before responding, but his friend—Ren, she remembers—cuts in before he can do so. “No, it isn’t. But it runs in your family. Your siblings, your father, his mother, on and on, as long as we can follow the records. It’s how your family made a name for themselves, as something more than just another band of merchants. But five years ago, you stopped bragging about what you were capable of, you stopped offering your help in hunting down those lying bastards, you stopped offering to teach children of your allies how to see for themselves,” he starts off nearly whispering, but as he keeps talking his voice grows in volume, until the force of his words jerks him to a standing position. As he begins to move, Felix quickly stands, placing a hand on Ren’s chest, and pushes him back towards the table. He leans in closer, muttering something that she can’t quite make out, but Ren’s posture relaxes somewhat, and he leans back against the table. 

To her slight surprise, Felix doesn’t approach her again, instead staying beside Ren, a hand lightly resting on the taller man’s arm. When he finally speaks again, his voice is paced, quiet, barely carrying across the room. “You know what changed, don’t you.”

A statement, not a question. “Where’s my uncle? He knows this already, better than I do.”

“Because he’s still looking for The Interceptor. Now, why is he doing that? Your mother’s brother, no connection to your line of seers, although rumors are he wishes he could. It’s not revenge, he’s not put a bounty out, he just wants to know where they are. We were going to ask him, but by the time most of us got in, the only ones we could find were you, and the corpse of one of the sellswords we brought along.”

He pauses, and she looks carefully at him. He’s not lying, she realizes with a start. They want Jay, but they couldn’t find him, because they think he ran. Jay liked to know people, liked to plan ahead, he wouldn’t mind hiding until he could figure out what was happening. But he wasn’t there by the time they arrived, and so they found her alone. Focus. Rissa. “Where… where do you think he went?” 

She brings her knees to her chest, and stares at them intently. She can’t see how the two men react from her position, but she can hear them shuffling, and resists the urge to look up. Focus. Rissa. Felix’s hand rests on her shoulder, but she doesn’t move.

“We think he got a lead on The Interceptor, and went to find it. But no matter what he did, we need to talk to him. You can find him, can’t you, little one? We don’t want to hurt you, we want to help your family teach people again.”

—

As she exits the building—which from the outside appears almost suspiciously lightly adorned, especially compared to the celebratory swaths of brightly dyed fabric that drape off the surrounding buildings—she can see the path ahead. Just ahead of her, the road begins to crumble, as it leads into seemingly endless empty dunes. She begins to walk along the path, pausing only to grab a cloak that hangs over a nearby door frame. She swings it over her shoulders, shoving her hands into her now covered pockets, pulling the hood over her face. She lets out a deep breath, leaning into the faint sound of shops down the street packing up business for the day. A scream begins to build up in her throat, but she quickly pushes it down. Focus. Rissa. Now is not the time. The desert is west. And so she turns her back to it, and starts to walk.