Zelaine followed Cale into the building, Mavine falling into step beside her.
"Is he your friend?"
Zelaine's face did something complicated.
"I am afraid he might just spill everything and throw me in jail—" She stopped herself and turned to Mavine. "Come to think of it, what exactly did you tell him."
Mavine fidgeted slightly, bracing for a reaction.
"I told him you saved me after an incident where my parents were killed, and that I have been travelling with you ever since."
Zelaine looked at her for a moment, but the expected reprimand did not come from her.
"He is someone you are better off telling everything to," she said instead, her voice quieter than usual. "Without leaving anything out. He is trustworthy."
She meant it. That was the thing about Cale that made him simultaneously reassuring and deeply inconvenient.
He was the kind of person whose trustworthiness was not a comfort so much as a obligation. You could not half truth someone like that and expect it to hold.
She closed the remaining distance to where Cale was standing and looked at him directly.
"You said you would explain, then you better start now."
"I would love to, but the situation right now is quite inconvenient." Cale paused in the particular way he did when he knew what he was about to say was going to land badly. "You see, when I arrived I encountered two people. Both Ascension 3. They identified immediately that I was from outside Ellejort."
Zelaine stopped walking.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out for a moment, which was unusual enough that Cale noted it.
He had expected this reaction. It was a ridiculous situation and he was aware of that.
"They turned out to be reasonable people," he continued. "They offered to help me return home. The condition was that I run some errands for them first."
The silence lasted approximately one second.
"You bought that." Zelaine's voice had taken on a specific quality, flat and deliberate, the kind that preceded something louder. "You actually bought that. What kind of pirate falls for the sweet talk of bounty hunters." She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. "You are a disgrace to Blackbeard."
"I had no choice, they are considerably strong, and besides—" Cale steadied himself. "I need to find Shilial."
Zelaine's hands dropped.
Shilial.
She had been transported too. Of course she had. The malfunction of Sajibu would not have been selective about who it caught in its radius.
Zelaine had been so consumed by her own displacement and everything that followed it that the full picture of who else was out there had not assembled itself completely until this moment.
Cale had found something, or something had found Cale. Helpers or trappers, she could not know which yet, but the thread existed and right now a thread was more than she had yesterday.
They had to take the risk. There was not a version of this situation where caution was more useful than movement.
"Tell me everything about—"
The sound reached them before she finished the sentence.
It was unmistakably pages fluttering, coming from somewhere close.
Both of them went still at the same moment, every other thought dropping away instantly.
A single page drifted toward them through the air, slow and deliberate, just like things move when they are being directed rather than falling.
Zelaine stepped back whilst Cale coated himself with yai in one smooth motion, bracing for an explosion that did not come. The page settled into his outstretched hand and held still.
He read it aloud.
"When the death loops, the tragedy unfolds, and if the seal is broken, the unborn born, then he will bathe in pleasure."
"Some fucking darn poet," Zelaine said. "Throw it away and tell me what is actually going on."
Cale did not throw it away.
He stood there reading it again, or not reading it, just looking at it, and something moved across his face that Zelaine had not seen on him before. His jaw had gone tight.
The color had left his face, turning pale on the spot.
She had seen Cale in bad situations. She had seen him outnumbered, outmatched, operating on the wrong side of an impossible problem, yet she had never seen him look like this.
She crossed to him and pulled the page out of his hand and tore it in two without looking at it.
"Hey." She took his face in both hands and tilted it toward her, looking directly into his eyes. "Gosh, you are pale. What happened, you alright."
Behind them Mavine watched in silence. She did not know the nature of what she was looking at, the specific history between these two, the shape of a friendship long enough and deep enough to make one person read fear in the other's stillness before a word had been said.
She only knew it was something real.
Cale's lips quivered.
"I failed my wife."
Zelaine had no answer for that.
She kept holding his face and said nothing, and in the back of her mind, quiet and almost guilty, a single thought surfaced.
'I thought you two hated each other.'
"I know you might find this silly and out of character for me," Cale said, his voice steadier now but still carrying something raw underneath it. "But I have been having strange dreams where I see her suffer everytime and I cannot get her out of my head and she has been missing."
Zelaine said nothing for a moment.
The same was true for Atiya, in a sense. She had not dreamed at all for some time, which was its own kind of unsettling.
She was not sure whether that meant he was fine or whether it meant something she did not want to think about too directly.
If she had been having the same dreams about Atiya that Cale was having about his wife, she suspected she would not be holding herself together much better than he was right now.
She pushed the thought aside.
"Get a hold of yourself," she said. "You are the future branch leader of Artem in the 49th belt."
Something in Cale's posture shifted. He straightened, drew a breath, and put his face back into something that resembled its usual configuration.
It was not perfect but it was functional.
"How ironic," he said. "You are the one acting mature." A faint trace of his normal self returning. "Atiya would bash my head in if he saw me like this."
"He would," Zelaine agreed.
They continued on.
****
Atiya shoved Leishna onto the glacial edge and dragged himself up after her, the desperate final push of two people who had used everything they had. Both of them collapsed onto solid ground, both of them off the water.
His teeth were chattering hard enough to feel it in his jaw. Every extremity had stopped reporting properly, the freezing cold having moved past sensation and beggining to take the toll.
Leishna had also passed out beside him.
However the danger had not finished with them yet.
From the passage above the waterline, ignoring the collapsed floor entirely, two figures leaped. The first had his sword already angled downward, the trajectory selected before his feet left the ground, blade aimed at Atiya's legs.
Swoooosh.
Atiya was numb from the shoulders down and dodged it somehow, throwing himself upward on reflex alone, the blade passing beneath him close enough to feel the displaced air.
He landed and tried to open distance between them but the speedster had already closed it, a second swing coming before Atiya had finished his first step, catching him across the chest in the air.
"Uggggh."
The cut opened and reported itself immediately. He kicked out as the sword reached him, connecting with enough force to create a gap, and used it.
Then the second one came out of the left passage.
With full velocity, blade forward, the line already chosen before he entered the cave mouth. A straight diagonal closing thirty feet of passage in under two seconds, aimed at Atiya's center mass with precise calculations and he was undoubtedly someone who had done this enough times to stop thinking about it.
Atiya hit the ground and with his chattering mouth commanded.
"Op-e-n."
The portal opened, magenta in the dark, accepting the blade at the fourth step of the speedster's approach. The sword went in without slowing.
And the second portal gave it back at chest height, leftward angle, trajectory curving down and to the right.
It arrived at the exit moving at precisely the speed it had been given, passing through the space where the speedster's trailing shoulder would be in another half step.
His instincts were excellent. He dropped his weight and rolled left and the blade opened his upper back instead of his neck, a long shallow wound that reported itself as heat before it reported itself as pain.
He came out of the roll against the cave wall and was upright again before the pain had finished arriving, sword back in hand, carrying expression with nothing but immense hatred.
He looked at Atiya across the dark of the cave.
"Give up, bastard."
Atiya had miscalculated something and understood it immediately.
The female attacker he had kicked was gone.
'I bet my gacha waifus that she is trying had not retreated by herself and is planning something sneaky.'
The answer came a moment later.
She had crossed the ceiling in the dark during his exchange with her brother, moving not toward him but around him, repositioning while his portals were occupied with the other one.
She had not wasted a single second of the exchange on anything other than getting to where she needed to be.
She dropped from a limestone shelf directly behind him, both hands on the hilt, full body weight behind a downward thrust aimed at the base of his neck. A technique built specifically for staff fighters, coming from the angle where a long weapon was hardest to bring back in time.
'They are fucking good. Very well versed.'
Atiya did not bring the staff back.
He dropped his left shoulder, bent his right knee, let his body fold into the collapse it had been threatening for sometime, and the blade passed through the air where his neck had been and struck the cave floor and threw a brief white spark off the stone.
The drop cost him. His right knee found the rock and his hip joint filed its complaint and something in his chest shifted in a way that was new and not encouraging. He registered all of it. He did not stop registering it.
He simply did not allow it to reach his hands, which kept the staff level, or his mind, which kept both portals open.
He looked up at her from the floor.
She had already recovered.
'Is she an analyser.'
That was the problem with her. She treated missed strikes the way other fighters treated landed ones, as data, as information to be folded in, nothing wasted, no frustration attached to any of it.
She was already repositioning, circling left, putting herself on the line that would give her brother the angle he needed to come back in from the right.