One Year Ago

The screams she released ricocheted off the walls and echoed in a cacophony of rage. Like a bird held too tightly, the power of her grief consumed her. It squeezed the breath out of her, made her heart flutter and flap. 

Therefore, like any reasonable individual, Liliana struggled against it.

Anything on the desk was first to go as she swiped away the papers, pens, and empty water bottles. It wasn’t enough. The coffee mug was next, shattering against the closed office door in an unsatisfying way that left her reaching for her laptop.

As she squeezed the computer in her hands, it began to sizzle. 

A low humming arose around her and her body shuddered against the electric current forming, the energy leached from the device in her hands. Thick streaks of vibrant blue played with the air as if to shield her from the bitterness consuming her. 

Liliana had always struggled to control her Aptitude, especially when she was upset. It ebbed and flowed constantly, intensifying with each tumbling emotion she plummeted through—and she was always so delicately emotional. Her mentor, Emi had managed to teach her how to tame it, but Emi wasn’t here anymore. 

The thought exploded in her mind like the device in her hands. Bubbling plastic and fried circuits slipped from her fingers to the ground as her tears spilled over and joined in mocking her. 

A moment ago, she was minding her mechanics shop with the ease and confidence of a strong Desvelarian woman, managing her team and the workflow in blissful cohesion. Now she was an orphan again, back to the frailest moments of her small existence. 

Her body remembered what it felt like to be that four year old girl on the steps of a clay hospital building: lonely, starving, weak, scared. Twenty years and one incomprehensible phone call later, it all came flooding back like it was yesterday. 

She made sure to hide her pain, hanging up the phone and rushing to her office before the realization could fully take over. Crying in front of her team was never an option. 

Which is how Liliana knew that she had absolutely locked the door and should have been in the room alone. 

A rawboned silhouette shifted in the seat behind her desk. The electricity surrounding her settled into a circle and snapped like a snarling animal. Her jaw tensed and she released the battered laptop to the ground.

“That is going to be expensive to replace.”

His voice oozed like slime: synthetic, tacky, and hard to grasp a hold of. The air sizzled with an intensity that matched her clenching fists. 

“I don’t care about replacing a laptop right now, and you know it, Phoenix.” She shook her head, the static in the air causing her coiled hair to fluff, the ends shaking with her trembling. “Our Director, she died.”

It was hard enough to admit the one thing that she wanted to ignore, but she couldn’t avoid reality. Not when it was staring back at her, his thin lips set in indifference. They had been together from the beginning, hand selected by Emi to join the Nexus Troupe, but they had never gotten along. It didn’t seem like that would be changing any time soon, either.

His frail neck fell back and his unbothered expression met the ceiling. “She died? How sad.”

Liliana’s hands slammed into the desk, hard enough to drop the somehow unscathed cup of pens at the corner, but her fury was met with unrelenting disregard. For a moment, he sat frozen—a puppet detached from his strings—before his body lurched forward. She mentally scolded herself for jumping back like a coward.

“Are you done?”

“Emi is dead,” she said again. It felt heavy, final, and yet he didn’t flinch at the words the way she did. “You’re really going to sit there and pretend that you don’t care?”

“Not really sitting here, though. Am I?” 

Rising from the chair, he took several stagnant steps forward. His body, or the projection he had cast of it, stumbled through the desk as if it were made of algae water. She swallowed the lump in her throat so she could crane her neck to face him as he came to a stand in front of her.

“Do you not know what this means for us?” he asked. He liked his questions. “It means that they have to pick a new Director for our sad little Troupe.”

The lights flickered when she tensed with the realization. “No.”

“And when given the choice between you and me” —his head hung to the side— “who do you think the Nexus will choose?”