Chapter Ten

Doavin never came back for breakfast. Anai frowned at his plate, speaking without lifting her eyes from it. “His food’s getting cold.”

“Let it,” he said, mopping the last of the syrup from his plate. He shook his head when she opened her mouth once more, “He knows it’s there. If he wants it, he’ll come for it.”

Anai began to protest but ultimately thought the better of it, heaving another sigh instead as she started on her own tepid breakfast. They finished their food in relative silence, neither having much more to say to the other, and Anai stood to collect their plates once they had both lost interest in their remainders. She dropped the dishes into the sink and stood over them for a moment before throwing her shoulders back and turning to face Lars once more.

“You said you’d go lay down. I’ll find Doavin and take him to Central.” Lars nodded and had begun to push himself up when Anai spoke again. “Why do you think the boss wants to meet him anyway?”

Lars paused, one hand still braced on the tabletop. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. But what do you think?”

It might have been the lack of an attitude in her voice or the openly concerned set to her face, but Lars found himself stopping to give her question real thought. “You found him in the base. It might just be an issue of seeing if we can trust him here.”

“Or..?” prompted Anai. Lars’ brow furrowed before he shook his head and she continued. “Aeneat thinks he’s part of some new Guard.”

Lars finally lifted his hand from the table, giving a quiet snort as he began to walk away. “Aeneat thinks everyone is part of a new Guard. He has since I met him.”

Anai nodded in agreement, "Yeah well, I told him that but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. He's pretty damn stuck on it this time"

“I'm not saying it's not possible, Anai. It might be. I know I wouldn’t recognize the Guard if they bit me, and you have to admit ‘Doavin’ is damn strange. But Aeneat’s still jumping to conclusions unnecessarily, and we have more important things to do than sit here and speculate," he smiled humorously despite the fact that Anai couldn't see it. "Or you all do. All I have to do is lay down until someone comes to finish my healing job.”

“That doesn’t make me feel much better, Lars,” Anai complained to his retreating back, but he didn't respond, instead disappearing into his bedroom and closing the door behind him. Anai frowned after him for a moment. Then she lingered in the kitchen, washing the dishes and cleaning any imagined mess from the counter tops before finally leaving to search for Doavin. Finding him didn’t prove to be very difficult; he was in the same room as always. He looked up when the door opened and sliced the room apart with a thick stripe of light.

“Hey, Doavin. How about another ride in the hover?” He watched her for a moment longer and then turned away. She sighed, pushing the door open more widely, “Yeah well. I’d rather not go either, but we don’t have much of a choice. Boss wants to meet you.”

Doavin found he didn’t much care what this anonymous boss wanted, not now that it was obviously different from his desire to remain in the room alone. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Anai wasn’t going to give up when she had orders to carry out, and her continued attempts to ease him out of the room were doing nothing for his head. By the time he stepped out into the well-lit common area, the table lamps were enough to send painful shards behind his eyes and radiating toward the back of his skull. He was left following Anai, face pulled tight into a squint in response.

“Here. Put this on,” she tossed him a jacket. “It’s cold where we’re going.” He obeyed without a word, leaving it open when the zipper proved to be too much for him to figure out right away. She glanced at that but didn’t speak again until she had unlocked the hover, opening his door for him before walking around the front to get behind the wheel. “You haven’t asked where we’re headed,” she reminded him as she turned the key in the ignition. “Don’t you want to know?”

He shook his head no, and she blinked at him, surprised.

“You aren’t even a little curious?” He shook his head again, pulling a laugh from her lips. “Shit, you really are fucking weird.” Then she pulled out of the garage.

Doavin was happy to note that his wordlessness seemed to spread to Anai over the course of their drive. She turned on the radio, reaching forward to scan through the stations, but she eventually gave up and switched it off again, allowing silence to fall over the inside of the hover uncontested. She didn’t speak for at least twenty minutes, freeing Doavin to stare out of the window in an attempt to distract himself from his pounding head.

The streets offered an unfortunate diversion. Dark and dingy, they were lined with fragile-looking buildings that rested close to the curb. Occasionally Doavin could see someone move in front of their windows, casting dark silhouettes across faded shades. Leaning a little closer to the window, he tried to look above them but could only see a slab of dull gray that stretched out over the rooftops. Puzzled, he turned toward Anai, but she just shook her head, not seeming to understand the source of his confusion.

“Welcome to The Lows,” she smiled, but the expression never reached her eyes. “Slums at their finest.”

He watched her for a moment longer before turning back to the window, chewing at his lip and searching for a bright spot in the scenery that didn’t seem to exist. He lost track of time, and when Anai spoke again he started a little in surprise.

“You might want to close your eyes,” she warned, not taking her gaze from the road in front of them. “It’s going to be a little weird for a second here.”

He couldn’t bring himself to take her advice, so his eyes were open when the hover sped into an alleyway. For a moment, he could see the thin tenements rise up on either side of him as another street quickly approached. Then everything disappeared, replaced by swirling scarlet that licked at the windows of the hover. He jumped, leaning away from the window and Anai sighed in his direction.

“I tried to warn you,” she said. “It’ll only last a minute more. The instance recognized me and let us through.”

He didn’t think to ask just how the “instance” knew who Anai was. Before he could recover from the shock of seeing the world disappear, it returned just as suddenly, the switch leaving him nauseated. Anai must have given him another sidelong glance, because when she spoke her voice had a warning tone. “Don’t puke in my craft.” Doavin didn’t respond, but he was doing his best to follow her directions.

He looked out the window when he finally recovered enough to do anything beyond close his eyes and pray for a stronger stomach. The fact that he couldn’t recognize where he was meant very little; it wasn’t as though he had a map of the city inscribed on the back of his eyes. Still, he had a feeling they were no longer anywhere near where they had been before the strange redness swirled around their hover. The run-down buildings and trash-ridden streets had all disappeared, replaced by a concrete tunnel, pale blue lights barely illuminating the road ahead of them. A short distance ahead was a low structure built into one sloping wall, and Anai ultimately pulled to a stop in front of it.

Aeneat was waiting for them at the door, hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his long coat. The wind blew his hair around his head in odd patterns of curls, but he ignored them, eyes trained on Doavin as he and Anai drew closer. “Anai,” he said by way of greeting. “Are you coming inside?”

“You know I’m not,” she said, and Doavin looked over at her in surprise. “I trust the boss when it comes to tactics and sending us out to where we’re needed, but you know she gives me the damn heebie-jeebies.”

Aeneat just nodded. “Alright. Go back home. I’ll take care of him.”

Anai looked between the two, sensing there was something going on that she just wasn’t catching. Ultimately, she nodded anyway, giving Doavin’s arm a light squeeze. “Okay, I guess. I’ll see you later then, Doavin.” She managed a slight smile before hurrying back to the hover, partially to avoid the harsh slap of wintery air but also, Doavin thought, in an attempt to put a little more space between herself and the “boss” he kept hearing about. He turned back to face Aeneat when Anai began to pull away from the curb, but Aeneat had already began to walk away, leaving him to scramble to catch up before the doors closed and left him stranded in the cold outside.

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