Saia observed the waiting rooms of the elevators slowly trail past her, wishing the cabin would go up quicker. Putting to sleep the guards at the entrance of the factory had been easy, a quick expansion of her domain to reach them before they could give the alarm and they were out of the game. But she needed to be more careful from that moment on: she couldn’t afford the same loss of viss as the previous weeks, and if she expanded her domain too much with birdguards nearby, they could notice it and deactivate her.

As soon as the grid of the elevator slid aside and the guard asked for her documents, she stepped forward and gripped her wrist. A sprint and she touched her colleague too, leaving both slumped behind her. She left the room for the main elevator hall, where the guards looked at her with the same amount of suspicion they reserved for everyone else. After all, if their colleagues had let her go past them, it meant she was authorized to be there.

She carefully stepped outside, not knowing what to expect. She remembered the place as a more or less homogeneous stretch of trees, with some sparse buildings and metal nets dividing the level into sectors. She expected to act in the half-darkness of the evening, where the guards couldn’t see well, or, in the case of the birdguards, could only see the viss of someone approaching without seeing their face.

Instead, she found the trees had been obscured by a ring of lights covering almost the entirety of the fifth level. It reminded her a bit of Ifse, if all of its wind spirits were standing still and close to each other. Not only anyone would have been able to see her approach, but her movements would have attracted unwanted attention if she didn’t pretend to have a reason to be there.

She put a hand inside the pocket of her tunic to touch the small map of the rebels, in order to read it without having to expand her domain. She needed to walk quite a bit and pass through another sector before she could find the building she was looking for. From where she stood, it seemed to be situated in an area that was a bit less illuminated than the rest, even if the light was slowly advancing to cover it.

She stepped forward, never straying from the path that weaved through the trees, careful not to step onto the fertile soil at the sides and get her shoes dirty. Most of the trees were planted following parallel lines, while the ones that forced the path to bend in dozens of different directions were considerably older. She wondered why the shilvé hadn’t cut them, then remembered their most important god was connected to wood and tradition.

The trees were silent, devoid of life. After spending so many days closed inside a laboratory under the city, where workers were constantly pouring in and out with the flow of their turns, she had almost forgotten that the rest of the world followed a different rhythm.

Her impression was wiped away by a distant sound of chatter, as if of a crowd wandering further down the path, the noise interrupted by indistinct shouts. She wanted to expand her domain and observe what awaited her before she found herself immersed in an unknown situation, but she was too aware of her few remaining years and of the mountain already stealing her viss.

The trees finished abruptly, giving way to a large square bristling with activity. There were crates piled up on each other at spots that seemed random, forcing the workers to avoid them with their cargo of lights. They were all dressed with a gray tunic, except for one man wearing a short red cape on top of his clothes.

“I know you’re tired,” he yelled. “But we have to finish this area before the festival starts. Once it’s approved you can go home and rest.”

A couple of tired people cheered to that. Saia imagined they were working that late because the pattern of light was more clearly visible and close to the final effect they wanted to obtain once the festival started. She saw a couple of tanhata walking around the crowd of shilvé and humans, carrying double the cargo of light in their powerful arms. Saia waited for them to set off in separate directions before approaching an open crate. Her disguise couldn’t fool them, so she had to avoid attracting their attention. And she couldn’t expand her domain, she realized, because apparently her viss stood out in a way they found displeasing.

She looked at the crate’s contents: the lights were composed of a multitude of small spheres of glass, smaller even than the device Serit and Hilon used to communicate. Each one contained either a small sprite or a piece of a larger one. Even knowing they would be returned to the temple or arena where they came from after the festival’s end and that technically they couldn’t suffer, it pained her a little to see them restricted in such a small space.

Luckily, she wouldn’t have to hang the lights one by one, since they were connected by a long metal wire. She observed the workers setting them up around a tree while she untangled a wire from the rest and wound it around her arm. She repeated the operation a couple of times, then walked off once one of the tanhata started approaching her general area.

“Forgot your uniform?” the supervisor with the red cape called out after her.

“It was sweaty,” she answered, eliciting a laugh, and at the same time capturing more attention than she needed from the nearby workers.

She marched across the square, headed toward the buildings on the opposite side. She didn’t need to check inside to know they were only warehouses and factories for the production of jams and dried fruit. Still, she was glad to recognize their disposition as one of the shapes on the map drawn by the rebels.

She walked with purpose, ignoring the calls of the workers for more lights after they had finished setting them up around windows and branches. Some of them had climbed to the roof of the warehouse with a metal ladder to hang the decorations around the gutter. Saia realized it was her chance to see what waited ahead and climbed up to the top.

The map made much more sense when seeing the fifth level from above. The sector she needed to reach wasn’t that far away, but the lights stopped at its edges.

“What’s there?” she asked the worker that was carefully relieving her of a bundle of lights.

“You’re new here, right? That’s the military complex. They don’t want us to go there.”

Saia nodded and climbed down with the last bundle of lights still wrapped around her arm. She proceeded toward the very edge of the expanding curtain of light, then kept going. She felt too visible, the only light in the semi-darkness of the evening, and had to constantly repeat that having an alibi was more important than disguising herself to common guards. Birdguards could see her from afar regardless, and would only consider her harmless if they believed she was only a worker.

She walked past another group of buildings that was drawn onto the map, the last one before her objective. She rounded the corner slowly, to get a better look at the building she would have to enter.

“Who’s there?”

Her viss buzzed frenetically as she looked for the guard who had called out for her. It was a shilvé standing right next to the entrance with a colleague on the other side. Both of them were pointing their tridents at what they probably saw as a bundle of lights floating in the air.

“Setting up the decorations,” Saia answered.

“You alone?”

Saia shrugged, then realized they couldn’t see her gesture.

“I’m faster than the others,” she said with a jovial voice, even if it didn’t reflect her mood at all. The guards slowly put their tridents back in position, with the end of the pole on the ground and the spikes up in the air.

She approached a tree right in front of the entrance. There was a net of metal between that spot and the building, running in both directions from the external wall to the border with the second level.

She took her time wrapping the wire around one of the lower branches of the tree, observing both her actions and the building at once. There wasn’t additional outside surveillance apart from those two regular guards. That didn’t exclude the presence of one or more birdguards on the inside that could see her approach through the walls. She itched to expand her domain and check, but that would mean dooming herself. She needed to hope the lower amount of viss in her body would be enough for them not to think she was the one approaching the building.

She finished setting up the lights and walked away until she was hidden between the trees. She moved around, pretending to do something else for the benefit of any birdguard in the area, then backtracked, keeping away from the lights she had set up.

She walked up to the metallic net and jumped. She regretted not practicing how to silence sounds when she landed on the other side with an audible ‘thump’.

“Who’s there?” the guards yelled almost at once.

Saia looked at the windows of the second floor, thinking that any birdguard inside had surely heard their words. She needed to neutralize everyone in the building before they connected the attack to her presence.

She sprinted toward the guards. One of them fired the trident at her indistinct shape. She slowed down, ready to deflect the projectiles toward the wall of the house, but a small explosion made the guard yelp and drop the trident. The other one wavered, looking at their partner holding their own hand.

Saia reached them before they could decide whether to risk shooting. She reached out with her arms to touch their cheeks and put them to sleep without needing to expand her domain.

She held onto their clothes, preventing them to slump on the ground. Anyone could have heard their yells even from the nearby buildings and decided to check what was happening. She couldn’t let them find two unconscious guards on the ground. She held them by the back of their uniform with one hand, kicked down the door, and prevented it to touch the floor by holding it with the other.

Still, the commotion had attracted a lot of attention. Two guards entered the room through another door. They hesitated in seeing her, probably not expecting a tanhata. She held their colleagues in front of herself to dissuade them from shooting, then sprinted ahead and touched them both. They dropped to the floor in an instant, but Saia wasn’t quick enough to grab their weapons before they clattered onto the wooden boards.

She left all of the unconscious guards in a heap and ran toward the room they had entered from. There wasn’t anyone, just a staircase leading to the top floor, a desk with some documents and two chairs made of wood so rough she could see splinters protruding from their back. She ran past them, then slowed down on the stairs, aware of the creaking her steps produced.

She emerged into a big room with walls covered in cloth. Hundreds of identical tunics, boots and belts covered the wooden boards. She almost didn’t notice the thin doors hidden between them, two for each long side of the room, one for the short ones. She waisted a few seconds of indecisiveness, then opened the closest one.

There was a small room on the other side, with a bench and a rack for clothes. As much as she looked around, she couldn’t find anything of notice, nor a purpose for that place’s existence.

She left and entered the next door. The room was identical, and exactly as empty. She opened the next one, ignoring the dread mounting in her viss, but it was empty too.

She started opening doors quicker and quicker, barely realizing that she leaving an imprint of desperate viss on the handles. When she opened the last one, she was so used to not seeing anything inside that she froze in seeing two guards sitting on the bench. One of them raised their glass as if to greet a friend, then stopped halfway through the movement when they realized she wasn’t a guard. She sprinted forward before they could put down the bottle of wine they were holding or reach for the weapons abandoned on the floor. She let them collapse against the wall.

They were both shilvé without animal traits. She checked their clothes before letting that thought settle in, hoping at least one of them was holding the shard in their pocket for inscrutable reasons. She found nothing.

She returned to the main room, feeling like the biggest fool in the world. She had allied with people who had no qualms about killing one of their own to keep their secrets, she had to imagine they would only use her for their gain.

She put her back against the wall, pressing the uniforms under her weight. In about twenty minutes, the engineers would have come back, found the navigation room empty, and given the alarm to whoever was actually tasked with protecting her shard.

She sat on the floor, thinking she at least didn’t want the statue to break when they deactivated her. She thought about the days spent in the room with Hilon and her crew, using her power to manoeuver the city. Maybe it was better to be deactivated that way than slowly disappearing over weeks, months or even years of boredom. She didn’t regret taking that chance, she was only sorry about breaking the promise of returning to her family. About betraying Aili’s trust by leaving her shard in enemy hands.

A crash startled her. Something tumbled on the floor, stopping right in front of her.

She reached out to take the object even before realizing what it was: a heavy stone, with a string looping around it, pressing a message to the surface.

She stood with the stone in her hand, the shards of glass from the window creaking under her feet. She opened the message, almost tearing it with the strength she was unconsciously applying.

We always keep our promises, there was written at the top. Just a bit more effort.

Under the message, there was a drawing much like the one she had found attached to the cookie jar. This time, the marked building was right next to the one she was sitting in.

She ran up to the window, but didn’t see anyone outside. They were surely hiding nearby, observing her, but she couldn’t expand her domain without the risk of alerting the birdguards.

She put away the message and started running down the stairs, aware that the twenty minutes had become fifteen. She only stopped briefly to glance at the documents on the desk downstairs: forms for guards who wanted to request a new uniform after losing or ruining their old one. She had entered a military building, just not a relevant one.

She reflected on the situation as she ran toward her new target, forced by the lack of time and the descending darkness to set aside all cautions. The rebels were clearly using her for their goals, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what they were. They certainly had to know she couldn’t afford to use her powers to their full extent to risk remaining so close to her.

She reached the entrance of the new building at full speed, knocking out the guards partly with her viss, partly with the impetus with which she pushed them against the wall. There were various rooms filled with desks inside, all of them empty except for one, where three guards were bent each on an open book, a lantern next to it. They were so tired that putting them to sleep felt like mercy. As their heads hit the desks, she reflected that once again, she had only met shilvé without bird traits.

That was the confirmation she needed to know that her shard was probably somewhere else, but she quickly checked each room anyways. The second floor was an auditorium, with a lectern on one side and rows of chairs displayed all in front of it. It was probably some sort of school for guards.

She put her back to the wall, observing all three windows. Her mistake the first time was checking the message before looking outside at who had thrown it, but she wouldn’t have committed it again.

She heard a crash downstairs. She swore out loud and ran down the steps. She found the stone on the floor of one of the classrooms.

You’re almost there, keep going!

The map pointed at another nearby building. She gripped the paper so tightly it wrinkled and tore on the edges. She was tired of these games. Nothing prevented them from toying with her undefinitely, until the engineers discovered her absence and had her deactivated. She could gain a lot more from that situation by catching a rebel and forcing them to reveal the actual position of her shard.

She left the school, ran away for a bit, then quickly hid behind an empty structure that looked like a small warehouse. She peered around the corner, taking comfort in the fact she could easily see anyone approaching, but they couldn’t see her.

After a couple of precious minutes, a group of floating lights started approaching the entrance of the building. Each bundle was held by a person, each dressed with the gray tunic of the workers that had been hanging the decorations. Only two of them were shilvé, the remaining three humans. Their hair was long and tied up on top of their head following the cloud people’s fashion, but they also could be wigs. Much more interesting were their inked forearms.

“I’ll go inside,” Saia heard one of them saying. “Check that she has knocked out everyone.”

The one at the head of the group nodded and stepped aside, letting them go in.

Saia left her hiding spot and sprinted toward the rebels before any of them could have the chance to enter the building. They only noticed her when she was too close, and she managed to put two of them to sleep before the rest could recover.

“Alert the boss!” one of them shout-whispered, looking over their shoulder.

Saia followed their gaze and saw a sixth rebel crouching behind a tree trunk a few armlengths away. The woman took out a small light from her pocket. Saia sprinted in her direction, but before she could reach her, the world disappeared.

She awakened, her head on the ground, an arm outstretched in front of her. Only five minutes had passed, five more until the engineers found out about her disappearance. The rebels were nowhere in sight.

She sat up, aware of the time running by, but doubting it mattered anymore. The rebels had her shard.

She found a message tied with a string to her hand.

Do it again and we’ll leave you in their hands.

The handwriting was too shacky for the threat to hold any weight. She wondered about their actions once more: if they could control her, why go to the length of organizing a treasure hunt for her shard? They could just tell her what to do, and she wouldn’t have any choice but to obey. Unless…

Unless their control on her was only temporary, or very, very recent. Or both.

She could see no other course of action than following their directions and seeing where they led her.