“Sweetheart, I don’t know if this note will ever find you. I feel I don’t have much time – there’s only one thing I must do and the need to fulfill that mission is stronger in me than life itself. I’m sorry I couldn’t be th

DON’T EVER SURRENDER THE HOMELAND TO SCUM SUCH AS THOSE WHO KILLED ME

MAKE THEM ALL DROWN IN THEIR OWN FILTH

HONOR TO GAURLANTE AND AIVOR”

-Unsent letter penned by Plato Arap three days after his death.

On the road to Kivv: 243 YT, Autumn. Eleven days after the execution of Marga Zelenko

The hum of an engine in the distance drew quickly closer as Kamila tried to push Hilda and Aleks to up the pace, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly. “It’s got to be the soldiers, right?” she said, nervously flexing her fingers and listening to the metal plates in her gauntlets slide against one another. “They’re getting closer.”

Hilda looked to Aleks, who shrugged. “I don’t know. Without knowing who it is, I can’t get a good look at them at this distance.” Instead of turning away or increasing her pace, Hilda grabbed Aleks’s hand and muttered something Kamila couldn’t hear. Aleks’s eyes widened and he nodded. They both closed their eyes, arm in arm, and came to a halt.

Kamila nearly ran into the two of them from behind, sputtering in surprise at the halt. “Come on,” she said aloud, “We have to keep going!” She grabbed both her siblings by the shoulders and tried to push them, but she felt as though she were pushing against the pillars of a great ancient building. The force, and her surprise, nearly made her lose her footing.

Kamila turned to look over her shoulders. “Come on! Let’s go!”

“I see him,” Hilda said, voice quick and shallow and urgent. “It’s an Aether-touched.”

“It’s one of the soldiers,” Aleks said at the same time. “The priest, I think.”

“He’s on a vehicle.” Hilda was almost breathless.

“A motorcycle. He’ll catch up with us in minutes. We can’t outrun him. We have to hide!” Aleks pulled his arm out of Hilda’s hand and dashed off the road, just in time for Kamila to turn around in a panic and see the motorcycle approaching her and her siblings. Limping from the pain of her old injuries, Hilda started off the road, attempting to follow the nimbler and stronger Aleks. Kamila turned and grabbed Hilda by the shoulder as the vehicle approached.

“I killed that bastard once, I’ll kill him again.” Kamila flashed a grin. “Come on, how hard can it be?”

“He’s an Aether-touched now,” Hilda said. “It’ll be dangerous just to get near him. And if you killed him…” she seemed to realize something, and with a choking gasp, Hilda grabbed Kamila by the arms. The younger sister’s arms rested outside Kamila’s grip, and instinctively Kamila tried to slip into a parallel hold, but Hilda turned away from it. Kamila’s stomach fell.

“If you killed him,” Hilda said, “That means he’s probably after you. He’ll know where you are, no matter where you go. And he’ll never stop until…” She turned away, pulled out of Kamila’s grip, and limping, ran after Aleks.

“Until what?” Kamila called back. “Until he finds me? He knows where I am?”

Hilda turned back toward Kamila, standing on the crest of a roadside hill. Her eyes were wide and her mouth twisted in pain and regret. “Fight or run,” she said. “It’s up to you.”

Kamila glanced in the direction of Kivv. The city’s rust gates were visible in the far distance, past the trees and the hills and the lakes, less than a day’s walk from where she stood, rooted by fear and uncertainty.

She looked to the approaching Plato, who leaned down over the head of his vehicle, weapon mounted to the side of the chassis. Her gaze was drawn up as she noticed a disturbance in the air around Plato. Louder still than the humming of the engine was the rush of wind, the storm darkening the air and bending the branches of trees. Grit and dirt whirled in the air around Kamila. She brushed something out of her eye, and it caught between her fingers. Sand. The sand whirled around Plato as he approached, the glassy raging eye of the storm.

From the sky, ash fell, until it was swept up as well in the storm around Plato.

Kamila raised her arms, clenched her fists, and listened to the plates of her power-gauntlets click into place just as the corpse of a songbird, serene and silent, fell to the ground in front of her.

Plato revved his engine as he leaned into the vehicle, moving straight toward Kamila, a fixed smile on his face, his eyes like misty blue glass. Kamila braced herself against the wind and looked to her left, where Hilda and Aleks had disappeared behind the hill. Under her breath, she prayed they would either find safety or come to help her. She didn’t know which was better. She didn’t know which she wanted. She took a fighting stance, readying for the cycle to overtake her.

Just before Plato would have struck her, Kamila began to move, rolling to the side and avoiding being run over. Plato immediately adjusted his trajectory. As the bike blew past Kamila, the wind picked up in strength for a moment, nearly blowing her off her feet and leaving her ears burning with the pressure. She dug a gauntleted fist into the ground to avoid being blown off her feet. Plato wheeled around, freeing his weapon from its brace and raising the rifle one-handed. Kamila raised her head just in time to see it – the tiny pinprick that was its inky blackness, obscured but for a moment by whirling sand, brought her back to days earlier, when she’d helplessly stared down that rifle barrel once before. It set made her jaw and her arms ache with the memory, and she tried to move, tried to yank her gauntlet out of the ground, but it was stuck fast and the ash falling all around was beginning to land on her and the -

Plato fired his rifle before Kamila could move out of the way.

She expected that a bullet would feel like fire, or like an impact multiplied by a thousand. If it struck an organ she would feel the rupture, and then would simply fall, and in a few minutes it would all be mercifully over. She had seen people fall, suffering almost invisibly. There would be no spectacle, no shower of blood and spilled insides – only a pathetic death.

It didn’t hurt, though. Strange.