Tabitha Chirrick - Overshadowed

“In this case, yeah.”

He rose his eye ridges at her.

“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him. You don’t have to.”

“Maybe you should give him some space, Tayel.”

“What happened to ‘I always do the right thing’?”

“You always do what you think is right,” he corrected. “I’m not sure you’re actually right in this case. He asked for privacy.”

“It’s not like I’m going to ask him more questions. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

“If you say so.”

“Anyway, are you ready for bed?”

“I think I was ready hours ago.”

She helped him up, keeping a hand at his back out of instinct. They’d left the nighttime forest and the Rokkir fortress behind, but there was a lingering, pervasive fear that wouldn’t leave her. A fear that at any moment, she’d have to push him forward again to flee.

Since Fehn had taken the room to the left, where the red lock display indicated the occupant inside, Tayel led Jace to the right. Small had been an understatement. There was barely enough room for the cot, and the floor space wasn’t helped by the considerable amount of boxes pinned to the wall by a cargo net.

“Wait. If I sleep here, where will you sleep?” Jace asked. “This cot isn’t big enough for two.”

“I’m not sure it’s big enough for one .” Tayel grabbed the thinner of the two blankets from the bed. “I’ll figure it out. You just worry about getting some sleep.”

“Are you sure? I can probably sleep on the floor if you let me take the pillow.”

She smiled. “It’s alright, Jace. Really.”

He waffled a bit, shifting his weight from left to right before sitting on the cot’s edge. “I feel kind of bad.”

She laughed. “Don’t. Get your rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Okay. Good night, I guess.”

“Night.”

She maneuvered across the few inches of walking space and left the room, pressing her hand to the touch sensor in the hall. The door shut behind her. Only a two arm’s reach away, Fehn’s door still stood closed, the lock still red. She took a steadying breath and knocked.

No answer.

She knocked again. “Fehn?”

The lock display snapped from red to green, and the door slid open.

Fehn stood in the doorway. “What?”

“Hey.” Tayel hugged the blanket a little closer. “You okay? I feel like maybe we pressed you a little too hard. You didn’t deserve that.”

He grunted. “Banshee’s right. I should have told everyone sooner.”

“I… don’t know if I agree.”

He crossed his arms.

“I think it was your choice to say something when you wanted to — if at all,” she continued. “Tonight, things just sort of happened too fast to hold it off.”

“What’s done is done,” he said.

“Not that it matters, right?”

“What?”

“I assume now that you’re finally off Elsha, you want to get back to the core systems.”

His eyes turned downcast.

“Or not?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Even if I went back to the empire, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”

“Not home?”

He focused on his cyonic. “No.”

“I don’t understand. I thought…” She bit her tongue.

He asked for privacy, Jace had said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to pry into your life anymore. You should just know that we’re lucky you’re here. Thanks for, uh, saving all our lives.”

He half-smirked. “Thanks. We done?”

“Sure.”

He pulled back into the room. “Night, Red.”

“Night.”

His door shut and locked. She headed back to the hold. It didn’t make sense that he didn’t want to return home. After everything he’d endured, he should’ve been more than ready to bail. But as confused as she was, thinking about it was pointless. He didn’t want to talk, so she had to accept she’d probably never know what was going on in that thick head of his. The saving grace was that he was staying. For all his scowling, he’d always been there when it counted.

She stopped in the middle of the hold. If she could justify checking in on Fehn, then she could definitely do the same for Shy. Her part in the argument had been just as heated, and Tayel still needed to thank her for her part in rescuing Jace.

It was a bittersweet ideation. Tayel had rarely talked to Shy about anything other than the next task. Checking on her felt different than checking on Fehn, somehow. It was some weird combination of exciting and scary she was too afraid to admit she knew how to place.

She tiptoed through the corridor to the front of the ship, turning left until she was in full view of the cockpit. Holograms dimly lit the cabin in orange, their various readings reflecting off the blacked-out front-facing viewports.

Tayel leaned against the entrance arch. “Shy?”

Shy mumbled something — faintly — and Tayel stepped forward, turning sideways to get between the two pilot’s seats.

“I wanted to—” She shut her mouth.

Shy sat curled up in the chair, everything up to her chin covered in a thick blanket. Her closed eyes looked peaceful, her eyebrows relaxed arches over her long lashes. Tayel’s pulse beat in her ears. Shy mumbled again, her lips moving slightly to word something incoherent, and Tayel let herself frown. No one could see her, anyway.

She took a step back and left the cockpit.

Back in the hold, she sat against the wall where she’d patched herself and Jace up only an hour before. She had no one else to check in on, nothing else to keep her company except the sounds of flight and thoughts of Rokkir. She wrapped the blanket around herself, leaned back, and watched the pink and orange lights of slipstream space dance through the viewports.

Ruxbane wriggled his fingers as feeling returned to his extremities. If it hadn’t been for the dark aether he’d conjured as a shield against the cryonade, numbness would be the least of his worries. Even with the aether, the bitter cold sensation of ice squeezing around him lingered long after he’d been thawed and dragged to the council chambers in Castle Aishan’s highest tower.

“You’re tensing up again,” his healer warned. “Relax.”

Ruxbane blew air out through his nose, willing his muscles to cooperate with the woman’s order. He shifted for comfort as she dipped her hand in a fist-sized jar of medicine.

“Should be less unpleasant this time,” she said, and spread her salve-covered fingers across his bare chest.

He shuddered as warmth spread through him. Goosebumps rose up along his arms, but the pins and needles across his wound didn’t sting as much as the first application. The healer had been right. Her fingers slid off him, and she turned to the prep table to wash her hands.

Sticky, shiny residue remained on his chest, providing a glossy sheen for the black and purple bruise stretching from his collar bone to the bottom of his ribcage. Wisps of dark aether trailed out of the wound like evaporating steam, taking some of the pain with it. Ruxbane grunted as he shifted again. Even through three layers of clothes and a shield of aether, the damn silver sphere had hit like an Aloman croc mule.

Footsteps approached from the left, scraping and shuffling along the cobblestone. Iselglith stopped a few feet away from the tableside, a tablet rattling in his grasp.

“Sir. A-Adonna is on her way up,” he said.

Ruxbane tensed, his fingers digging into the wood beneath him. He ignored the healer’s hiss of disapproval. He hadn’t wanted Adonna to go after the princess and the girl, but he didn’t have much say while frozen solid in the castle kitchen.