THE EPOCH CHRONICLES | ✔

nineteen | one

AMELIA TOOK in a deep breath. She released it.

And then she slammed her fist into the tiled wall — momentary satisfaction that faded into deep regret as she swore and clutched at her hand. Shower water cascaded down her thick curls and paining back, and she used the moment as an excuse to finally cry.

She'd nearly died. The only thought that had entered her mind as the elevator's doors opened and those 'rescuers' had opened fire on them had been Daryl. How she had failed him and lied to him and then she was going to die without getting a last chance to tell him that she loved him.

And then Amelia hadn't died — but instead she'd been told that the mission had been moved from two weeks' time to within two days. Her emotions were scattered, and she was too exhausted to try and understand the decline her life had taken. She was hurtling to self-destruction. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

"Mel?" Tina was in the shower cubicle next to her own. Amelia switched the water off and swallowed thickly before responding, hoping her friend wouldn't be able to tell that she'd been crying.

"Yeah?"

"You okay?"

She didn't hesitate in her response. "No."

There was a pause, where Amelia felt like the most selfish person on earth — she hadn't asked how Tina felt, or Luca, the one who got shot. She fought to rectify this, summoning an emotional strength she didn't know that she possessed in order to lighten the mood. "But one day, I think, we'll get over it. Like Lale. Or, y'know, Bradley."

Tina snorted, and Amelia's heart lifted with the sound. Her own lips curved into a slight smile. "Yeah — and then we're gonna become as grumpy as Lale! I think I prefer being emotionally scarred for life, thank you."

This shifted the mood slightly, but now, at least, there was comfortable silence. Amelia leant against the cool tile, feeling slightly chilled. "But I honestly don't think he's grumpy."

"What else is he?" Albertina laughed, switching her shower back on. Amelia, cold to the bone, did so as well, thinking over the various synonyms for 'grumpy'. But it felt like more than that, too — if Luca and Tina thought the former marine was cranky, then was she just a bad reader of personality?

Or, a quieter voice inside of her suggested, maybe you see something no one else does. But there was a reason why that voice was quiet, and Amelia quickly discarded it before she could think about it too much.

"Fine," she conceded, and her smile grew wider, even though there was no one else to see it. "He is one grumpy dagger."

━━━━

Amelia fidgeted on the spot as the warehouse doors were opened. All of the ERAA members were heading off to another building in order to view the time machines (though Luca corrected her when she said this; they were meant to be called TimePods, but she thought time machines sounded better and less like an invention of the 2020s), but the sight of bullet-frazzled doors and electric fencing that had only just started being repaired only further knotted her stomach.

It had been a miracle so few were killed, she realized as she walked out of the warehouse, Tina at her side, and Lale on her other, especially as she viewed the carnage. Bradley and Luca were lucky to be recuperating from mere skin wounds, and Amelia hoped they would be able to heal before the mission got underway.

As they filed into the other warehouse — which had miraculously escaped damage, beside from a few bullet holes in the metal wall — Amelia felt her breath catch in her throat. This depot was vastly advanced compared to the one that held the elevator; mysterious contraptions only people like Luca would understand hung from the ceiling, while people wearing grey work clothes slowly moved from metallic desk to metallic desk in front of a large curtain of plastic, spanning half of the building's interior.