Glow in the Dark

She knows the creature is dead the minute she returns. It's animal instinct, and she cuts the ties, flipping it over onto its mask as Lei, slow to all the things that have silently bypassed him, stumbles forward.

"Are you alright?" he asks.

"We need to cut it out," she answers instead, pulling out her metal balls, molding them into knives.

She spares him a glance when he still does not understand.

"Cut out the implant, Lei."

It's bloody work, and the air is sickly sweet with it. He asks as they saw through the worst of it, as they perform crude surgery on a body that has already endured enough:

"What happened?"

What happened.

Your sister talked about cutting off her face and burying people in the ground, she wants to snark, but she can't bring herself to pretend this is amusing, can't find a way to rid herself of the small tremor in her fingers. Her cold anger is gone, replaced by a jumble of feelings she can't quite reconcile.

"I first cut off what I thought I had enough of," Isati had said, and it feels like an arrow in the chest. "My dreams, my ambitions, my wants... my desires. All the things outside this rigid plan."

Young Isati is crying in a mirror, but what she became no longer seems so strange.

"My little fuck you, tied nicely in a pretty little bow..."

It doesn't matter, Allayria tells herself, ripping some of the creature's garments, using them as rags. It doesn't matter how it seems.

The pressure of fingers; a hesitant touch—Allayria looks up and realizes Lei's hand is on her shoulder.

"What did she do to you?" he asks quietly, and of course he does, because he, of all people, should know the games Isati plays.

"Nothing," she answers, and it feels like a lie, even if it is the truth. "She just talked."

Lei shifts, still crouched low over the body, but his eyes are fixed on her face.

"About what?"

I sometimes think that I might soon break free.

"Taunts," Allayria says, and she looks away. "The usual."

They work in silence a little while longer, until he says: "She'll twist anything you give her. It's better to not let anything show."

He won't look at her, but she looks at him, at the way his throat moves underneath his frozen face, the way his jaw is locked tight underneath his skin. And she thinks of the room awaiting them, narrow bed, and decides that tonight it won't be too small.

The knock on the door seems to reverberate through her spine; she actually teeters back, bloody hands held out in front of her, as she stumbles off her scrunched feet and back onto her rear, on the dusty floor.

Lei, on the other hand, jumps to his feet, the water already slipping out of his canteen and swiping along his hands. He sends the rusty-tinted liquid her way and she's copying him, stripping the blood off her skin, as he hurries to the door. She hears the slow click of the lock and, when she looks up, she watches Lei open it a crack.

"Good, you're here," Hiran's voice murmurs through the slit, "Listen, Jin has called a private meeting, but we've got a problem: Allayria's not in her room. We need to find her quickly, do you know—"

"I'm here," Allayria says, and she scampers toward the door, sticking her head over Lei's shoulder so she can glimpse the visible strip of Hiran's handsome face. "What's going on?"

The fine brow of said face scrunches.

"What are you—?" he begins to ask, and she sees the door push slightly forward, widening the gap—if he opens it, if he sees the body—but Lei's hand quickly comes up and blocks it.

"Hiran," she commands, and the Nature-caller's gaze flits back to her. "What's going on?"

"A private meeting," he answers, though his brows are still knit. "All of us, Jin, and Ruben. Maybe Marron."

"When? Now?"

"Yes," Hiran answers, and his gaze darts past her shoulder again, back into the low-lit room. "I was supposed to bring you..."

"We'll meet you at the base of the stairs in five minutes," Allayria tells him. "Get Finn and Tara and meet us down there."

He opens his mouth to say more but she seizes the edge of the door and shuts it firmly between them.

When she turns back to Lei, it's only to say one thing:

"Quickly."

They pry the metal up from the skull with human nails, and it snaps off surprisingly easily into their hands, thin and shining, even through all of this blood. She can hear its hollow echo in the back of her mind as she touches it, and she wonders if Lei can too. If so, he's not letting it show.

"Did you find anything?" he presses suddenly, and she realizes she never answered his question in the first place.

"I found a thread," she says, thinking back to the flickering thing she identified the first time, the thing she had intended to follow the second time, but never seemed to get around to it. "If I have the plate and can access it when Isati isn't concentrated on it maybe..."

Lei nods, steadfast and true.

They move hurriedly; she stows the thing in a bundle of cloth, away from the touch of skin, then they roll the body up in the cot's comforter, in the corner of the room until later, until—

We'll wrap him in the blanket from the other room and then haul him downstairs, an old voice echoes from memory, dragging with it another body, another consequence of her Skill. Are you really going to drag a body down five flights of stairs and then dig a hole the size of a man with your bare hands, all alone in the dark?

They hold the council in the kitchens, down, beneath the earth, in the dark when others have lulled into sleep or stupor. They hold it more like thieves planning a heist than generals planning a war. This is how she likes it.

In the sunlit hours prior to the horror that had occurred in a small room set several stories above this, they had held a different assembly—one with elegant figurines, scribes scribbling on parchment, officers hovering over coordinates. There were sweeping proclamations, bold moves noted and measured. They had devised a battle plan, all anthems and glory, with vanguards and rear guards and artillery descending upon a lone dot on the map.

Here they devise survival.

There are no figurines; their only markers are chalk, pebbles, and flint. Words are only exchanged in murmurs between not fifty, not twenty people, but seven.

No one writes what is said down.

"The ruling fortress is set on this mountain," Lei tells them, etching it out on the wooden table. "In the center of the Phoenix's Bend. Vatra lies in the valley between. The sieging army would have to go through the city, or up the mountain to reach the Plinth."

He circles the bend of mountains, flicking arrows into its center, where the Jarles capitol city rests.

"But," he adds, and Allayria can see the way his knuckles whiten in the candlelight, "for a small group there is another way."

His finger taps the chalk on the scored X.

"There are three levels to The Plinth," he says, and he starts to sketch them in the corner. "First, Lower Level. This is accessed from the Climb of Tears—a narrow stone pathway up the mountain. It's all switchbacks—designed to clog an army trying to march its way up. This is the largest level, with the old throne room, the reflecting pools, the palace grounds—" He draws rough shapes of them, a dome on the far left, a curved arch of columns on the right, and a jumble of buildings in between. "Steel, inclined walls a-man-and-a-half high guard this level."

He pauses, and then taps on a spot some distance above the Lower Level.

"This is the Throne Room," he says and he draws a sharp V. "The new one my— The new one made by the Imperator. Accessed from the Ascension," he skims a sharp, nearly vertical route back to the Lower Level with the chalk. "It's barely a path—single file, treacherous. This level has the best view of the valley below. This is where the Imperator will most likely be."

He pauses.

"If not, she may be here," he says and, even higher up the mountain, just to the right, he draws a strange shape, an X with a crooked bottom right score.

"The Sun Dais," he explains and he draws another winding trail from it to the Throne Room. "Accessed from the Lonely March."

"An easy hike, right?" Hiran murmurs.

"Both upper trails are rough, uneven. You won't climb quickly or en masse," Lei answers, not hearing the wryness, caught up in the way his own fingers flinch against the wood. "In daylight, it's difficult to see; in night it is inaccessible."

Allayria watches the way his throat constricts as he swallows.

"This is what they will assume," he tells them. "But they built the Throne Room on the old path to the Sun Dais, and that dais is an old sanctuary that was used by sun worshippers long before Vatra came to be. A lot of their secrets have been buried, but there is a way to get up it at night. Isa— I learned it when I was young."

Isi, a young child whispers in Allayria's ear. Isi, there's something outside.

"The stepping stones have traces of Skill in them," Lei explains, curt in his error, tracing the old trail up through the etched V. "You can see them if you shut your eyes."

She can picture it; two skinny children, dark-haired and knock-kneed, armored in old training helmets against a dark something that menaces just on the outskirts of memory. They would stumble, quick but terrified, up to where they thought a bigger foe might be too afraid to follow, where big boots would be clumsy and slip. But their helmets would slip instead, and they would know one moment of terror before they saw it, the ghostly shapes against the dark.

"I can get a small team up in the dark to the Throne Room in a matter of minutes," Lei says. "Security will be low; they rely on the natural defenses of the mountain. We can end all of this in a matter of hours."

"Yes, but," Tara interrupts leaning forward and tapping the base of buildings below the V, "this all assumes we get to the Lower Level in the first place. That Climb of Tears—the switchbacks, that puts you in direct view of the fort. Night or day, we'll be shot down before we reach the gates."

"We would," Lei agrees, "if we went that way. There are no other paths to The Plinth, but there are other access points."

Next to her, Ruben suddenly sighs and Allayria glances at the old Skill master out of the corner of her eye.

"We can get to Lower Level," Lei announces, ghostly pale in the yellow light, "through the sewers."

A/N: You know that moment where you finally arrive at a murky plot point you've kept hand-waving at in a vague "it'll work itself out" kind of way for literally the entire book and you kind of stall and hem and haw around it and then the answer suddenly comes to you and its like this shining sliver of either great ingenuity or absolute madness and you can't tell which one it is but you're just basking in it? Yep, had one of those this week. Not sure anyone else is going to follow it but hey, you've all made it this far, haven't you?

Chapter notes: Meg reminds Allayria that friends who bury bodies together, stay together (orrr maybe not) in Paragon's "Bodies" chapter.