*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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Young Isati lurks behind Allayria's eyelids as she cleans up from the aftermath of the battle. Her broken expression is there when Allayria dips her head under in the bath; her quaking, claustrophobia lingers when Allayria wraps the dry robe around herself. It is a memory she did not share with Lei, even though she is curious, very curious.
Was he still around then? she muses, staring at a more familiar reflection in this hotel mirror now. Or was it after?
She doesn't quite understand why this is what she found inside the masked follower, and not a current connection to the Imperator or even Isati herself. She doesn't understand why Isati's memory would even be in there.
Is it a trick? A trap?
No, not it doesn't feel that way. There are better ways to lure Allayria—hints at a weakness in their network of minds, false trails back to her or her mother. Not an old memory of suffering and pain.
Her knuckles are white against the sink when she glances down.
It has to work, she thinks, not for the first time. The next one... it has to work.
Working backwards through Abadi and Isati's disturbing network of minds is the best way Allayria can think to get to them fast, get to them without sacrificing a tidal wave of blood on the battlefield.
If I can find them, she tells herself again, if I could get at them—or even just know their location...
She hears Lei enter the room and straightens up. His eyes lock onto hers, as they naturally do, pulled by some innate, electric sense, but they are alone here, and the blank, flat veneer has been shed from his face.
"I'm going to try again," she tells him. She promises.
She watches in the mirror as his hand fists and flexes.
"Come to bed," he says in a low voice instead.
It takes a while for his breath to even out; she keeps track of it in the shuttered twilight, the way his silhouette rises and falls in slumber. The hotel is overrun; there are no extra rooms and with Lei's supposed one currently occupied by their special guest, it leaves only this small, narrow one for them to share. Neither of them likes it.
We've slept this close countless times before, she tells herself not for the first time. On floors, in the dirt. I don't know why it's so different in a bed.
Tomorrow, tomorrow things will shift. Tomorrow things will change. They'll meet with Jin, assess their gains and losses, then move down south, to Ruben, Hiran, the others. They'll regroup, salvage what little fighting force is left in the Thalassa inhabitants, establish supply routes and porting, and move... move...
Into the great darkness, the vast unknowing, with the all-seeing specter awaiting them.
"Mother wants to meet you," Isati's ghost had whispered out of a dying soldier's mouth. "Mother wants to find you. I should let her."
