Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

Fehn ran forward, haggard and dripping with blood, shotgun aimed at the woman’s face. She reacted, aiming the blast meant for Tayel at him instead. The force knocked him through the air, and wrenched the gun from his grasp.

Pressure released slightly from Tayel’s gut. She inhaled sharply, and kicked the distracted councilwoman’s frail leg, knocking her off balance. Tayel rolled sideways, creating distance. She looked up, and there, in the grass, beside Fehn coming to a stand, was her mag baton. She put one arm forward, took a breath, put another arm forward, took a breath. Her knees shimmied in the grass to propel her.

“Get back here!” the woman squawked.

Tayel hadn’t made it to her weapon, but Fehn had found his. He charged the Rokkir a second time.

“Fehn, wait!” Tayel cried. If they could just coordinate and take this threat together…

The woman snapped her talon forward. Fehn snapped his hand forward, too, grabbing her talon. He tightened his grip over the councilwoman’s fist, and a tremendous cloud of dark aether built between them, spilling into tendrils which whipped along the grass. Tayel froze, unable to look away.

The Rokkir’s face turned fearful, her eyes going wide.

Fehn screamed. He pushed forward, and the gigantic gathering of aether exploded in front of him. The impact shuddered across the ground, and Tayel rose her arm. She covered her face from the rain of dirt and rock.

The patter of debris ceased as the small quake stopped, and Tayel finally snatched her mag baton from the grass. But the Rokkir was gone. She sucked in a raspy breath. The Rokkir was gone, and Fehn lay still.

She stumbled toward him, her legs quivering, threatening to let her fall. “Fehn!”

She rolled him over. The right sleeve of his favored trench coat burned away, the lines of orange flames beginning to reveal the smooth, black prosthetic arm beneath. Dark aether evaporated from polymer fingers, and trails of purple light traced a glowing geometric pattern across the prosthesis, slowly fading.

Tayel drew a sharp breath. Even with body mods — even with a cyonic limb — she’d never seen dark aether used by anyone except a Rokkir. Fehn opened his eyes. He glanced his arm, and his expression sunk.

“Red,” he muttered, “it’s okay.”

She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

“It’s just me,” he said.

Footsteps rumbled the grass behind her, and Shy stopped at her side. “Tayel, are you—?

We have to…” Her eyes landed on Fehn. Her hand gripped Tayel’s upper arm, and pulled her backward. “You did use dark aether.”

He groaned, “It’s—”

The trees rustled around them. Shouts echoed toward the clearing.

“We need to go,” Shy said. “Get up. We’ll deal with this later.”

Fehn grunted as he stood, and Tayel jogged between him and Shy toward the ship. Her body was heavy, and her legs numb.

They boarded, closing the door behind them. The vessel hummed under Tayel’s feet. Baton clenched in her grip, she fell against the wall opposite the door and slid down it. Jace moved to her, eyes frantic with worry, but she couldn’t placate his concerns. Fehn’s cyonic arm held him upright against the wall, but his flesh one still let blood flow like a river from the shoulder.

They’d all been so close to dying.

The ship revved and hummed as it lifted. Tayel steadied herself against the ground.

“We’ll be breaking orbit in under a minute,” Shy’s voice said through the crackling speaker. “It’ll be a bumpy ride up until I activate the FTL drive. You… might want to hold onto something.”

Tayel could handle bumpy. She could not handle standing again to reach the holds dangling from the ceiling. She balanced herself against the turbulence. The sky outside the viewing pane turned a darker and darker shade of black until, in an instant, it was as if a light snapped on. Tayel’s stomach twisted as they slid into slipstream, white light crackling out the window as they tore through space toward Modnik.

Everything ached, but Tayel had just the strength to pry open the med kit. Jace sat beside her, cradling his broken wing while she plucked an insta-ice pack and a sling out of the supplies. Across from them, Fehn leaned against the hold door, a rivulet of blood streaming down from where his injured shoulder rested.

“Fehn?” Tayel asked. “Do you—?”

“No.” His answer muffled against the steel his face was buried in.

“You really should…” She stopped, wary of how his shoulders tensed. “Xite.”

She smacked the ice pack between her hands. It cooled instantly against her still-sweating palms.

“Hold it here, Jace,” she said.

Jace chittered as she set the pack against his matted red feathers. He placed his talon over it, his eyes rolling shut. Tayel pulled at the sling’s packaging, tearing along the serrated plastic until the polyester-cotton fabric came free. She glanced over the instructions, and started wrapping Jace’s wing.

Bright white light mixed with trails of pink and orange shined through the viewports as she worked. She’d never been good at astrophysics, so guessing how long it would take to get to Modnik was pointless. Hopefully it would be long enough to patch everyone up.

She finished wrapping the sling and thumbed through the rest of the med kit. Gauze. Disinfectant. Burn cream. Her breath wavered. Finally, something to stop the pain.

She pulled the already loose ties of the curtain fabric around her arm free, grimacing at the sting of air against her burn. Bulbous yellow blisters covered her red, cracked skin all along the underside of her forearm.

“How did this happen?” Jace asked, his voice quiet.

He must have thought it was disgusting. She shifted right to hide it from him and thumbed the lid off the disinfectant with her free hand.

“Tayel?” he asked.

“Aetherion,” she said.

His beak clamped shut.

Tears blurred her vision as she disinfected the burn. The liquid contact sent searing pain up her arm, through her shoulders, and into her teeth. A cry caught in her throat, holding her breath there as her eyes watered. She squeezed pale blue burn cream over the area and groaned.

“I’m so sorry,” Jace said.

“It’ll heal.” She set the gauze to her arm and wound circles around it, building up layers of protection.

“Not just for the burn. For everything. You risked your life rescuing me. If you and Shy hadn’t come, I’d be dead. Or worse. I was wrong before. I should have listened to you about the portals — about the Rokkir.”

“It’s okay, Jace. I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened. How did you get captured, anyway? What were you doing?”

He leaned back against the wall. “Originally I was going to the guard sector to… to turn you in.”

She frowned. “Really?”

“But I couldn’t. I kept going back every day, telling myself it would be the one I let them know about Shy. I thought of a dozen ways to tell the story without implicating you. Or Fehn.”

Tayel closed her lips over a frustrated sigh. The idea of Jace ratting Shy out annoyed her. She wanted to explain that Shy had been trying to help from the beginning, but it just felt like betraying him again. He was opening up to her. Now wasn’t the time.

“Which, considering I just found out in Castle Aishan that she’s the raider princess, maybe I should have,” he said.

Tayel remembered the muffled voice on the other side of the kitchen door in the castle, shouting that the raider princess was inside. The urge to defend Shy bubbled up like a physical sensation. He was bringing up issues that had already been put away, issues he could have seen solved, too, if he’d just come with her when all this started. She took a steadying breath.