CHAPTER 9: LIES LIKE RAIN
The rain in Aethelgard wasn't water; it was liquid twilight, a fine, cold mist that clung to the gargoyles and slicked the cobblestones with a treacherous, phosphorescent sheen. It did nothing to wash away the city's scent—a layered cocktail of wet stone, ozone bleeding from the mag-lev tracks, and the distant, cloying sweetness of bio-engineered orchids from the Grand Conservatory. Underneath it all, in the narrow alley where they now stood, was the base note of rotting food from overflowing dumpsters and the damp, earthy breath of moldering brick. The air itself felt heavy, a chilled, metallic weight in the lungs.
Aurelia Brontë bent at the waist, hands on her knees, her borrowed black hood soaked through and dripping a steady, syncopated rhythm onto the pavement. Each breath was a ragged sawing in her chest, her lungs staging a full-scale rebellion against the unaccustomed exertion.
"Well?" Sloane's voice was a dry, unwinded rasp from the alley's mouth. She leaned against the damp wall, arms crossed, a silhouette of smug composure carved from the shadows. "Did you catch the little phantom, or are we just conducting a survey of Aethelgard's most pungent back-alleys for future reference? My boots are starting to regret their life choices."
Aurelia straightened with a wince that crackled audibly in her spine. "She possesses a preternatural ability to vanish into urban topography. It's like chasing a rumour given legs and a startling turn of speed."
"Don't bury the lead in your thesaurus, Brontë," Sloane pushed, her tone laced with mocking curiosity. "What did she say? About this mysterious 'Akira'? Spill the tragic backstory. I live for this stuff."
Aurelia's expression tightened, her face a pale, damp mask of irritation. "She was evasive. Spouted some philosophical nonsense about the paradox of knowledge and the vastness of ignorance. A thoroughly unhelpful and pretentious exit line. I give it a two out of ten for dramatic originality."
"Oh, really?" a new, breathless voice piped up.
Iris stumbled into the alley, looking like a drowned, distressed kitten. She braced herself against the wet brick wall, her small frame shuddering with each gasp. "What's… going on? Why are we… running? In the rain? My lungs feel… sticky. And I think I swallowed a bug. It was… crunchy." She gagged slightly for emphasis.
"Our resident floral terrorist," Sloane said, jerking her chin in the direction the girl had fled. "Chances are she knows more than she's letting on. Which means we start investigating all silver-haired enigmas with a penchant for dramatic proverbs. Could be more of an insider who knows you, Brontë."
"The probability is statistically significant," Aurelia agreed, her mind a whirring database cross-referencing variables. "Someone with proximity, with intimate knowledge. The connections are compounding at an alarming, and frankly, irritating rate."
"Who is this Akira, anyway?" Sloane asked, a sly grin carving its way onto her lips. "Your brooding, long-lost girlfriend? Don't tell me you have a tragic romance tucked away in that filing cabinet you call a heart."
Aurelia turned her head with the slow, deliberate menace of a turret aligning on a target. "He," she enunciated with icy, surgical precision, "is my brother. A component of our original triumvirate alongside my sister. Nothing more."
"My sissies were in a love triangle," Sloane teased, her voice a low, needling singsong.
Aurelia's gaze could have frozen helium. "I was never in love, Blackwood. And currently, he is a captive. Your reductive and hormonally-driven categorization of all human relationships is, as ever, profoundly unhelpful and slightly nauseating."
Sloane held up her hands in mock surrender. "Brother. Love triangle. Got it. Touchy, touchy."
Before Aurelia could launch her scathing retort, a new sound cut through the patter of rain: the sharp crackle-hum of hard light being shaped, followed by a whimper of pure, undiluted fear.
They moved as one, slinking deeper into the alley's glutinous gloom. They rounded a pile of discarded packing crates, the scent of rotting wood and damp cardboard thick in the air, to find a scene of brutal simplicity.
A tall, broad-shouldered student with a shock of fiery red hair had a younger girl pinned against the wall. A glowing, orange hard-light broadsword was held inches from her throat, its malevolent light painting terrified tears on her face and glinting off the damp brick.
"You're on my turf, little mouse," the redhead sneered, his breath misting in the cold air. "That means you pay the toll. Your lunch credits. Now."
Iris immediately shrank back, her hands flying to her mouth. "Oh, no… we should… we should get a teacher…" Her voice was a thin, panicked thread.
Aurelia, furious, made a move to step forward, but Sloane's arm shot out, a bar of iron blocking her path.
Sloane, however, stepped forward, her boots making no sound on the wet stone. "Hey, Rust-Bucket. The 'toll collector' schtick is a tired concept. Find a new grift. Maybe try interpretive dance. I hear it's very cathartic."
The bully turned, his sneer widening. "Back down, new fish. This doesn't concern you."
Aurelia's gaze was purely analytical. Her Interface provided a silent, silver-text confirmation in her periphery.
[SCANNING...]
[TARGET: MALE, LATE TEENS. MUSCLE MASS 28% ABOVE AVERAGE.]
[COMBAT PROWESS: AWAKENED. RANK A-]
[WEAPONRY: HARD-LIGHT EMITTER. MODEL: GLADIATOR-CLASS BROADSWORD.]
[ASSESSMENT: DIRECT CONFRONTATION INADVISABLE FOR UN-AWAKENED TARGETS. KINETIC BARRIER STRONGEST AT CENTER-MASS. EMITTERS LOCATED IN BRACERS.]
"Sloane," Aurelia murmured, her voice a low, clinical monotone. "He's Awakened. A-Ranked. His strategy is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. His barrier's focal point is his torso. The emitters are in the bracers."
Sloane didn't look back, but a slow, dangerous smile spread across her face. "An A-Rank? Cute." She cracked her knuckles, the sound sharp in the tense air. "So am I."
The bully's confidence flickered. "You're bluffing."
"The only thing I bluff at is poker," Sloane purred. "And I usually win." With a flick of her wrists, twin hard-light daggers, sleek and blue as arctic ice, snapped to life in her hands, humming with contained energy.
He roared and lunged. Sloane flowed. She dropped into a low slide under his sweeping blow, her dagger lashing out to screech against the wet cobblestones, throwing up a blinding fan of sparks and steam that smelled of ozone and scorched stone. The fight became a whirlwind of calculated motion—a flurry of feints and jabs, the crackle-hiss of energy meeting energy painting the grim bricks in violent, fleeting strokes of color.
Aurelia watched, dissecting the fight with a detached air. "He's powerful but slow. Predictable. Sloane is reading the kinetic output of his emitters. A classic case of brute force versus applied physics."
The bully, frustrated, bellowed and brought his sword down in a devastating overhead chop. Sloane saw the tell-tale flare of his emitters. She crossed her daggers above her head in a perfect 'X'.
The clash was deafening. A pulse of blue-orange light exploded outwards, momentarily bleaching the alley of color.
Then Sloane grinned. "Overclocked."
Her daggers flared, burning from electric blue to a blinding, solar white. There was a sound like a cathedral window shattering as the bully's broadsword dissolved into a million fading orange shards. His kinetic barrier flickered and died with a pathetic fizzle.
Sloane placed the tip of one still-glowing white dagger against his sternum. "The toll," she said, her voice soft as falling ash. "Is your pride. Now get lost."
He fled without a backward glance, his footsteps echoing into the distance. Sloane turned to the cowering girl, her demeanor shifting to something surprisingly gentle. "Hey. You okay? What's your name?"
"M-Mei," the girl stammered. She was a redhead, and even through the tears and rain, her clothes spoke of wealth, starkly out of place in the grimy alley.
As they regrouped, Iris finally emerged. But the voice that came from her mouth was not the frightened, breathy tone of the orphan. It was lower, flatter, stripped of all emotion, like stone grinding against stone. "Efficient takedown. No wasted movement. Target neutralized without permanent damage. A clean, acceptable display of force."
Sloane and Aurelia both stared.
Iris blinked, and the soldier was gone. "Did… did I say something?" she asked, trembling with confusion. "My mouth tastes like… copper."
Aurelia looked from the terrified Mei, to the unnervingly complex Iris, to the smugly victorious Sloane. "This school," she stated, her deadpan tone slicing through the ambient noise, "is a petri dish for the profoundly unwell. And we appear to be the newest, most virulent cultures."
Mei looked up at Aurelia, her big eyes wide. "There's an Evaluation session for freshers, first years too," she said softly, pointing a trembling finger down a connecting alley. "I was... I was trying to find it when he..."
Aurelia's gaze softened imperceptibly. She placed a hand on Mei's damp head. "Well, we'll see to that."
"Mid-semester?!" Iris hollered with a sudden, surprising burst of rage, her small fists clenching. "I might want to kill Principal Theron if I'd met him!"
"Iris, I sense your deep empathy despite your... multi-facetedness," Aurelia said, her tone dry enough to desiccate the surrounding moisture. "Take care of Mei."
"Y-yes, I- I will," Iris stuttered, the fire vanishing as quickly as it came, replaced by reluctant compliance.
"Taking orders from my little volcano." Sloane smirked, wiping her daggers clean on her thigh before they winked out of existence.
"One of these days, I might duel you. Seems like your little luck of coming into the world first has gotten into your skull, pumpkin," Iris shot back, her voice taking on a sharper, more confrontational edge.
"Hey, no fighting." Another voice from Iris spoke, this time calm, confident, and medicinally smooth.
The sisters looked at each other and then at Iris. Mei only stood there, much shorter than the rest, her eyes wide with bewildered fascination.
"What's funny?" Iris frowned, her own voice returning, laced with genuine confusion. Then her posture shifted again, shoulders squaring, chin lifting into something alert and ready. "By the way," the new voice—Atlas—stated, crisp and clear. "I just gained a little bit of access to your realm. My name is Atlas. Nice to meet you guys."
Sloane watched the internal civil war play out on Iris's face with undisguised fascination. "Stars, it's like a living radio. Can any of you in there cook? Because that would be useful."
"A committee," Aurelia corrected flatly. "We're dealing with a committee." She looked down the alley Mei had indicated. "An Evaluation. Mid-semester. They're not just evaluating skill. They're mapping potential. Cataloging assets. Someone is taking inventory."
"Well, they can add me to the list under 'Will Not Cooperate,'" Sloane announced, flicking a stray piece of lint from her sleeve.
"Your non-cooperation will be duly noted as evidence of our collective instability. The logical move is to participate, gather our own data, and appear compliant while revealing nothing of consequence."
"So, lie," Sloane translated with a feral grin.
"I prefer the term 'strategic misdirection'."
"I don't like this," Iris's voice whispered, the orphan's fear returning. "It sounds like being dissected."
"Dissection implies a post-mortem state," Atlas's voice cut in, sharp and clear. "It is an assessment of viable combat parameters. We should participate. Knowledge of the enemy's methods is a tactical advantage."
"Or we could just not get dissected!" Iris wailed internally, her hands fluttering nervously.
"No one is getting dissected," the paramedic's voice interjected smoothly, a balm on the rising panic. "We will proceed with caution. We will stay together. We will be fine."
Aurelia's cold gaze swept over them all—the mocking brawler, the fractured girl with her war council, the frightened child they were shepherding. The pieces were all in motion: the silver-haired phantom, the captive brother, this sudden, suspicious Evaluation.
"The puppet master is clearly watching," Aurelia said, her voice barely a whisper. A faint, cold smile, devoid of any warmth, touched her lips. It was the most terrifying expression any of them had seen all night. "Very well. Let's go give them a performance. Let's give them exactly what they want to see."
They left the alley, the oppressive gloom giving way to the wider, though no less damp, campus pathways. They hadn't gone far when a figure emerged from the mist, walking with an unhurried, scholarly grace. She had a cascade of silver hair, strikingly similar to the hooded phantom, but it was tamed, tucked neatly behind ears that supported a pair of thick, intellectual glasses. She carried a stack of books bound by a leather strap.
"A suspect," Aurelia stated, her voice flat and immediate, her body tensing like a hound on a scent.
Sloane followed her gaze and let out a short laugh. "Hey, cool your jets, detective. That's my roomie. Athena Vespertine. She's a nerd, not shy though. Loves reading like it's a competitive sport. She's here on a scholarship for her big brain, not her floral arrangements."
"The more reason she's on my suspicion list," Aurelia countered, her eyes never leaving the approaching girl. "Intelligence is the primary prerequisite for subterfuge."
The two groups converged. Iris and Mei had fallen into a hushed conversation about novels, a small island of normalcy. Aurelia and Sloane stood as a united, if contentious, front.
The silver-haired girl, Athena, walked up to them, a polite, closed-lipped smile on her face. "Sloane. I was wondering where you'd vanished to. The weather is rather inclement for... whatever this is." Her voice was soft, measured, and carried a faint, scholarly precision.
"Hey, Thena. Just a bit of extracurricular activity," Sloane said, clapping her roommate on the shoulder with a familiarity that made Aurelia's eyebrow twitch. "Girls, this is Athena Vespertine. She's got a polite demeanour that could probably calm a rabid dog. And she doesn't steal my stuff, which makes her a saint in my book." Sloane went on, praising her with an enthusiasm she reserved for very few.
Aurelia watched the interaction, her mind a whirlwind of silent, cynical calculation. I wish I didn't have to meet you at all. Your convenient timing and placid demeanor are statistically irritating. I only enjoy Gwendolyn's company. I've so much missed you, Gwen. Her thoughts were a bleak, tearless storm as she furrowed her brows, her expression giving away nothing but a profound, deep-seated annoyance.
Athena's gaze swept over the group, lingering for a moment too long on Iris's still-trembling form, before settling on Aurelia. Her smile didn't waver. "A pleasure to meet you all. Sloane has told me... very little about you. Which, I suppose, makes you intriguing."
Aurelia met her gaze, the air between them growing cold. "Intrigue is often just a prelude to complication," she replied, her voice a low monotone. "And we have more than enough of that already."
The rain continued to fall, a constant, whispering curtain of lies, washing nothing clean, only making the secrets beneath the surface glisten more brightly....
.... To Be Continued....