Ikelos (The Ephemeral: Book 2)

Chapter 3

"You alive in there, Fudge?" I called into the mess of a cabin.

He chuckled, raising his head from a stack of blueprints. "They're so energy efficient here! They use the waterfall to run all sorts of electricity. You should see all the physics that goes into potential energy, Alex."

"Hard pass."

After retaking Holly, Fudge had earned a name for himself among the ranks, specifically for his resourcefulness and critical thinking. Not only did he come up with the logistics behind my water tower plan, but he'd also helped organize and conduct a rescue effort to save thousands. Since then, Siren had assigned him to her research and development team, and I'd never seen him so happy.

"How's training going?" he asked, maneuvering through a maze of books and scrolls to meet me by his desk.

I tilted my head to the side, my lips puckered, and he nodded, as if that explained everything.

"I figured. This setting's no good. You do best under pressure, especially when your emotions are driving you." He smiled. "It's in the thick of it when you really pull through."

"I act like an idiot when I'm emotional."

"A powerful idiot," he corrected.

I shoved him over, and his mischievous cackling filled the room. It was probably my favorite sound in the whole world—right up there with my mother's grounding voice, even if I'd never hear it again.

"How about you?" I asked, perching myself on the edge of his desk. "Are you plotting world domination in here or what?"

"I've been trying to look into ways to weaponize light," he said. He flipped open one of the many books littering the desk, thumbing to a page full of circuitry diagrams. "I found some blueprints for stage lights and things. Equipment no one knows how to make anymore, not without the necessary tools and materials."

I peered down at the confusing sketches. "Where'd you get something like that?"

"Siren. When she reclaimed a military base at the Rim, she took a bunch of engineering books and warfare documents with her. Stuff that wasn't meant for the public eye, you know? Looks like most of it was stolen from Rhea originally." He pointed to the kingdom's national seal stamped in the corner. "Seems they're a very innovative people."

Another thing the government had lied to us about. In school, they told us that Rheans were barbarians blindly devoted to their king, living in huts and performing pagan rituals. Now, having met Will, I wasn't surprised to learn that their ingenuity surpassed our own.

Idly, I flipped through the lighting chapter and its foreign lingo. "You understand all that?"

"On an elementary level," he said, as if his capabilities were not at all impressive. "Problem is, we need to plug in. Belgate had its windmills. Siren's base has the waterfall. But when we're out there on a battlefield, we've got nothing. Solar's out. Batteries are gemstones..." He brushed his mousy brown curls out of his eyes. "Even then, I don't know if technology is enough."

"What do you mean?"

"All the artificial light and vanadium in the world won't help us against a sky full of Pots."

Right. Pots, the meta-physical demons released by the portals. The raw, unstoppable energy responsible for possessing our army. Our biggest threat.

I wet my lips. "Then we'll just have to take out the portal, right? Burn the bridge?"

We all knew that was the end goal: getting close enough to Sterling's palace to close the portal for good. We just needed to pry the demon army away from the Gorge first.