Arik

Razha sits on a narrow metal bench in a small, dark cell. She feels nauseous while the airship moves. She never wanted to set foot on one of these monstrosities in her life, and this is no way to start flying. She’s only grateful her cell doesn’t include a window, although the pale electric light tubes here in the brig are making her eyes hurt.

It’s a small ship. What they call “the brig” is just a few cells, enough for the few folks they snatched and grabbed along with her. Most of them are stuffed into cells together, but they thought she was too dangerous to have any accomplices, and threw her in her little cell alone. It would only be her home for a few hours, anyway.

Her hands are still bound, after she immediately punched a soldier in the face the first time they unbound her. At least they’re in front of her now. Now Razha is too tired to even think about some mad scheme to escape from an airship flying among the clouds.

She hears the door to the brig open--as if the two soldiers posted outside her cage weren’t enough, another one is last person she wants to see. But it’s an officer--Lieutenant Ilyssa Karrys, truly the last person she wants to see.

“Razha,” Ilyssa says.

Razha doesn’t even look at her. “Fuck off.”

“Here.” She offers her a canteen through the bars.

Razha side-eyes her.

Ilyssa pulls it back and takes a drink of it herself. “See, it’s clean. Take it.”

“What the Hel do you care?”

“It’s probably the last time I’ll ever see you, so...” She throws the canteen through the bars into the cell.

“I don’t want pity, least of all from you,” Razha says.

“Whatever. I wish I never learned you survived. I already mourned for you once.”

Razha looks away from her.

“Anyway, I have duties. Goodbye, Razha.” Ilyssa turns and leaves her, walking with a limp in the leg where Annia shot her. Razha smiles at the thought. Finally she is gone. There’s almost nobody else in the world she would have rather not seen today.

After some time passes--time doesn’t exist in a cage--she hears the door open again. A voice calls out, “You are dismissed!” There is something eerily familiar about it.

“Yes, sir!” says his lackeys, and they leave from their post outside her cell, presumably to go lick someone else’s boots.

A man steps out in front of her cell. He wears the yellow and brown officer’s coat, over top a white shirt and black pants, with a winged insignia pinned to his black and yellow cloth hat, the uniform of an airship captain. But unlike his underlings, his skin isn’t white, but brown, much the same as Razha’s. His hair is the same color and texture as hers too, although it’s far too short. Around his neck hangs a necklace of moonstone, identical to hers.

She gasps at the sight of him, almost falling over under a turn of the ship. She approaches him, gripping the bars of the cell. “Arik!”

The captain speaks, “Hello, brother.”

END