CHAPTER 54: DEATHLY REMORSE

  It was warmer than Elias remembered, perhaps because the mountain air had grown colder as they’d ascended higher and higher toward the sky rift. Other details came back like a formative memory: the complete darkness, the utter silence, the still air, the feeling that they had collectively and unwittingly breezed right into death without actually dying first.

  Elias retrieved an already-lit oil lamp from the great cabin. He had been expecting this, after all. They gathered around it like a campfire on the bow of their airship, as if an answer might lie ahead of them, as if direction mattered in any conventional sense.

  “We’re going to be fine,” Elias assured them.

  “I cannot fucking believe you,” Briley replied. “You had me fly us through a goddamn sky rift.”

  “It was the only way,” he said, “but we’ll get through it, and we’ll get to Grayson with time and relics to spare.”

  “You’re risking our lives to make a deal. You know that.” Briley again.

  Certainly, no one looked at ease. Despite the warmer temperature, Gabby was hugging herself shut, draped in Iric’s winter coat. The northerner simply asked how he might help before answering his own question: “I will retrieve more lights.”

  As for Elias, upon whose shoulders their very survival now rested, he stared out at the horizon—or where one might imagine a horizon would be—as Iric took Gabby below deck to find more oil lamps and Briley leaned back against the bulwark, shaking her head. He already knew he could not find a way forward yet, but he wagered it was worth confirming this fact. While he possessed the gift of sight, navigating sky rifts—as opposed to short distances in the physical world—required the longer gaze of an ascendant collector, and he was still only an awakened one.

  He gave up and told Briley he was headed to the great cabin.

  “What’s so special about the great cabin?” she said.

  “There’s an important step I must take before I can get us out of here,” he explained.

  “I don’t know what that means, but I’m coming with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “You trusted me five minutes ago.”

  “That was five minutes ago.”

  Elias gave up on the negotiation as she followed him inside. Only success would repair the damage he had wrought. Though perhaps more critically, only success would keep them alive.

  “What are you doing in here?” Briley asked as he consumed another relic. “Besides eating our money.”

  There was still so much she did not understand that Elias scarcely knew where to start. He supposed he could speak and consume relics at the same time and that perhaps it would even be a welcome distraction. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” he began. “Millennia ago, there was a great cataclysm.”

  He spent the next half hour telling her everything that seemed relevant, chasing one thought after another. Eventually, Briley had questions of her own, and he spent another thirty minutes answering those. Finally, she inquired, “How many of those have you consumed now?”

  “Thirteen hundred,” he said.

  “You’ve consumed thirteen hundred relics—thirteen hundred of our relics?”

  “Well, a hundred of them I consumed before today. Those were mine. Consider it a cost of doing business.”

  “We haven’t done the business part yet,” she said. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight: you need to ascend in order to get us out of this sky rift—supposedly to the Broken Isles ahead of schedule—but you have not ascended yet. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to do that part beforehand?”

  “I never had the relics.” Elias sounded a little defensive. “We have fifty thousand here.”

  “Had fifty thousand,” Briley inserted.

  “That’s twenty thousand more than we need to buy the mill.” He ignored the interruption. “I think I only need a couple thousand to ascend.”

  “You think or you know?”

  “It’s a rough estimate. Apparently, there was one woman who only needed thirteen hundred to ascend. I’m already there. I’m in the range.”

  “So, it’s just a numbers game?” Briley looked over at the open chests. “Consume relics until something inside you wakes up.”

  “There’s a bit more to it than that,” he admitted, “but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. I did before, and I will again. Jalander said I was quick to awaken. It might take me another hour or two, but I’ll get there, I will, and we shall still arrive at the Broken Isles safe, sound, and as early as a morning bird.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, Briley returned to the great cabin. “The crew are growing worried,” she said. “Or rather, they’re growing more worried. They were already worried. I think we’re all pretty worried.”

  Despite his best efforts, Elias, too, looked worried. Though more than anything, he looked exhausted. “I’m working on it,” he exhaled.

  “What are you up to now?”

  He shook his head as if trying to rattle the information loose. “Twenty-two, twenty-three hundred, I think. I stopped counting. I thought it would be enough. I don’t know if it’s the relics at this point or maybe… maybe I’m missing something.”

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  Briley scooped up Islet and cradled the cat like a newborn. “You told me earlier that it’s not just a matter of relics. Explain.” She had grown out her short hair over the past year, ultimately letting it reach her chin before deciding that was quite far enough, and while she still wore it neatly—swept to one side and tucked behind her ears—red strands were falling loose. It was not fury that Elias saw boiling behind her gaze. Briley was past the point of anger. She just wanted to get through this.

  “The relics are necessary,” Elias said, “but insufficient. You can gather all your ingredients, but you still need to bake the cake, as Bertrand would say. The problem for me is that it’s hard to know which it is. Have I already collected enough relics and now need to figure out the next part? Or do I need to keep consuming? On top of that, my brain is just—I’m back in the morning fog.”

  “Have you tried figuring out that next part, whatever it is?” Briley set the cat down on the long table between them. Islet walked over to Elias with purpose, as if carrying that question upon her slender, furry shoulders.

  “I don’t know where to start.” He petted the cat. “I was so sure of myself, so sure the answer would appear like magic right when I needed it. When I admit that aloud, I can’t help but wonder if I’m an idiot.”

  “You are,” Briley confirmed. “But so is Bertrand. So am I. We knew whom we were getting into business with. Every coin has two sides and all that. Your good comes with your bad, same as the rest of us.”

  “You’re being awfully forgiving given the circumstances,” Elias observed.

  “I never said you were forgiven,” Briley made clear, “but anger and remorse won’t do either of us any favors right now.” She sat down, made herself comfortable, and seemed to be considering something. After a minute of unanswered silence, she said, “You’ve told me how you escaped Acreton, scraping together every copper until you bought your ticket to opportunity—assuming that story isn’t bullshit.”

  Elias met her gaze. “I don’t lie about stuff like that. Just… secret stuff.”

  “Stuff like your special powers and Bertrand’s sister.”

  “Still waiting to hang me with that, are you?”

  “One of these days,” Briley said. “Maybe if we get out of here. Back to what I was saying, you clawed your way into the big city.” She paused, staring down at her open palms. “I, on the other hand, had to drag myself there. Which is ironic because I couldn’t shut up about Sailor’s Rise, about how I would make something of myself in the world’s great merchant metropolis. Grayson’s family business worked with a local trader, meaning I had free passage if I ever wanted it, but a whole year went by, and all I packed up were excuses. It was always next time.”

  “Weren’t you like sixteen?” Elias cocked an eyebrow.

  “Age is just another excuse,” she said.

  He chuckled at her—and then, of course, at himself. “So, what made you finally leave?”

  “It’s juvenile. I regret starting this story.”

  “If a tree falls in a sky rift, I’m pretty sure no one hears it. You’re already in possession of my most damning secrets, Briley. Out with it.”

  “My girlfriend of three weeks broke up with me.” Her sudden snicker was as contagious as it was surprising. Elias caught the bug, and they laughed themselves to exhaustion, waiting until she could manage the next part. “I just couldn’t be there anymore,” she told him between chuckles. “My first love had broken my fragile heart, and so I ran away to Sailor’s Rise. That is who I really am: a gay girl who ran away. The rest was just talk.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Elias said.

  “Well, it’s a true story,” she replied. “You take stupid risks sometimes, Elias. Real stupid risks. But if it wasn’t for your risk-taking, we wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have acquired this airship. We wouldn’t have a business. And we certainly wouldn’t be headed back to my hometown with fifty thousand relics to our name—minus a couple thousand, I suppose.”

  “You’re giving me too much credit,” he said to her. “You’re the one who grounds our plans in reality, irons out the details, counts the relics. Not to mention you’ve always been on my side. Now, Bertrand, bless his well-intended heart, that man puts up a fuss at every turn. But you? You’re among the most fearless people I know.”

  “I’m good once I get going.” Briley blushed. “It’s that first step that gives me pause. Whereas you just… leap.”

  “Sometimes a little too far, it seems.”

  Briley leaned forward on her elbows and scratched the table’s wooden surface with her fingernails. Islet returned to her like a genie summoned.

  “I miss the ocean,” she said after stroking the cat from head to tail. “I miss staring out at it, all its promise, all its possibility. I miss imagining every life I might yet live beyond its misty horizon. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, our present predicament notwithstanding, and yet I miss the yearning. It’s silly, isn’t it?”

  “I miss the stars,” Elias said. “My mother once told me that every choice is a death sentence.”

  “Grim.”

  “It’s a death sentence for all those other lives we could have lived,” he continued. “Maybe that’s what you’re mourning. Maybe that’s what we both miss.” Elias peered out the window beside him, but there were no stars in sky rifts. “She said she had no regrets in the end. I’m having a few right now.”

  Briley lifted her hand from behind Islet’s ear and reached for something in her pocket. She retrieved a single relic, pinched it between her fingers, and said, “For good luck, then.”

  She tossed the relic toward Elias.

  It sparkled in the firelight like a comet through space. He caught the coin in a neat fist, then slowly unfurled his fingers, revealing an empty palm.

  He smiled at her, and his heart leapt—a little too much.

  His body tensed with a sudden anxiety, as if the poor nineteen-year-old might have already given himself a heart attack. He tried to inhale, but his throat felt tight, his lungs full.

  “Are you okay?” Briley stood up.

  Elias shook his head.

  She walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “I think you’re having a panic attack,” she said. “I get them all the time.”

  “You do?” Elias sounded surprised, still gasping for air.

  “Worry about yourself right now.”

  “I don’t think it’s a panic attack.” His ears started ringing. His stomach was a sea storm. His head grew lighter than a hydrogen balloon. He rested it on the table, which he gripped the edge of, trying to anchor himself.

  Briley said something else, but her voice was nothing more than a background murmur now. A furry body rubbed the side of his head. Sounds and feelings swirled into one another as reality thinned and feathered like not enough paint across a canvas. At some point, there was a thud.

  The thud reverberated like a volcano bursting through the landscape of his mind.

  The ground fell out from under him. Darkness dissipated from his vision in clouds of charcoal smoke. He was falling. Elias had fallen like this once before, but his mind was a spiderweb of shattered glass, deep cracks cutting through once-clear thoughts, and no longer could he remember what he remembered.

  Distorted shapes and vivid shades zoomed through his vision—fire and magma, rubble and relics, the latter glittering in his periphery—all of it out of focus, flying past him like an idea that could not quite coalesce. He knew he needed to understand it, grasp onto it, comprehend it completely, that this was the only way forward.

  What was it telling him?

  You already know, an internal voice seemed to say.

  The chaos closed in around him like a tunnel, funneling him toward some deeper truth. He could almost hear its words, muffled like an exchange of strangers behind a plaster wall, words he recognized but struggled to decipher. “Power,” he thought he heard them say. “Beginning.”

  And then, as clear as a whisper in his ear, they resonated through him, became a part of him, words that were as unmistakable as his own mother. “To understand your power,” they said, “you must start at the beginning.”

  A perfect silence followed like the period at the end of a poem. Black faded to white. Elias existed in this happy nowhere for an immeasurable stretch of time until eventually, slowly, sound returned in the form of lapping water.

  Briley’s ocean: that thought trickled into his mind as he felt his sanity reassembling itself. He could hear its tides, feel its water softly slapping his beached face. Increasingly, each splash sounded like his name. Elias. Elias. Elias.

  “Elias.” The voice was Briley’s, her blurry shape looming over him. “Elias, wake up.” She slapped his cheek, then slapped it again.