"I killed your daughter today, Pia." A low voice floated in through a heavy veil of sleep and a splitting headache.
She forced her eyelids open, but was met only by darkness. Stiff vocal cords crackled words through a dry throat. "What—?"
"Just a little thing, that one." His words were oddly clipped and slow, his breathing heavy as furnace bellows. "Barely taller than my blade." The voice chuckled without humor—a low rumble that Pia could feel through the door between them.
The darkness resolved itself slowly into blurs, then thick smears of light. Her stiff hands reached out and found the cool, curving surfaces of filigreed walls. Attempts to rise to her feet proved premature.
"Of course I didn't forget you through all this...excitement. Here, I brought you this."
CLANK. A piece of metal clattered to the floor somewhere in front of her.
"Go on. A memento for what you missed," the voice said.
She reached out a tentative hand to the object. A flat fragment, completely melted on one side and deeply etched on the other. Lightweight. Cold, and warming only slightly under the warmth of her touch, but with deep, precise carvings on the intact side. A titanium alloy prized for use in their renegade airship engines for its formability and heat resistance—though this piece was nothing more than slag on one side.
"Do you recognize it?" the voice inquired too eagerly.
As her eyes adjusted, she could make out some of the symbols, and traced the rest with her hands. A stamped swirl of motion beneath a pointed spire. Pia knew this symbol—it felt like yesterday that she and Kiran had come up with it as they left Ghirapur. A leaking spire, a symbol for the renegades, for the Ghirapur they wished they could come back to. But what was this piece? Her fingers danced over the engravings, scanning its surface. And stopped.
Below the insignia, the letters "K.N.," scrawled in the messy but deliberate hand of a craftsman who had separated from his tools. She knew exactly what it was now—a piece of Kiran Nalaar's final project.
Chandra's vent pack.
Muscles between her ribs tightened, and a sudden rush of blood filled her chest with heat. Her hands went limp and dropped the insignia.
"Oh look!" The voice beamed on the other side of the cell door. "Of course you do.
"There's not much I'd care to recall about these things," the voice continued. "Though I do recall her gaze. Shifting around the crowd, unable to stare back at me. Cowardly. Defiant."
Her senses had now almost completely returned. The blurred lights came from the aether pipes in the ceiling of a stark prison cell with a grated door. She had been taken prisoner as the Consulate had ambushed her family in the village outside of Ghirapur. This was not the reality she'd hoped to awaken into. Go back. Be a dream. And that voice—the voice was so familiar...
"But then I realized," the voice went on with genuine enthusiasm, "she was looking for something. Or, someone perhaps?"
Oh yes. She knew that voice. The voice of the man who had hunted her family: Captain Baral.
"She was looking for you, Pia."
The air in her chest heaved out of her in a peal of outrage, though for whom she couldn't tell. Her hands flew to the grating, grasping at Baral's silhouette though he stood easily outside of her reach. Shoulders and fists flew against the cell door. Baral stared back at her, his masked face impassive.
"Am I the one who deserves your contempt?" he asked. "Wasn't it you who should have arrived to save her? To offer her some final comforting words?"
