He returned after a day of slaying monsters to find his twin lying on the floor, unconscious. Her face under the bandages looked ashen and her hands felt cold to the touch. Verne was already by her side when he arrived.

  “This is like when we first found her,” Verne commented grimly. “Perhaps a little better.”

  “She had disappeared for most of the day and returned like this,” the Librarian said, voice devoid of emotion. Ral had never met the woman during his time at the Academy and quite frankly he was grateful. He found the woman’s mannerism unnerving, as if she was a walking corpse. It was hard to believe she was related to Laell despite the similarity of their blond hair.

  Ral scowled down at his unconscious sister while he held her hand. He knew she didn’t join him in fighting off the newly formed Unseeing around the Heart because she already knew it would be fruitless - closing one of the smaller Gates would just mean two others to open. They had to close the giant Gate up in the sky and she had been saying she couldn’t locate the solute that fueled it. “She went up to try to find the solute,” he reasoned aloud. “The one keeping the Gate open. Something must have happened… or maybe Mind attacked her.”

  He briefly tried to reach her the way he did out east. He had woken her back then through her dreamscape and barely escaped unscathed. But now, she seemed truly unconscious and her tarnished solute ignored him and remained unresponsive. If he wasn’t able to get through to her, they were out of ideas.

  Despite this one obvious setback, everything else was working out, it seems. As if trying to cheer up the atmosphere, everyone in the meeting room gave a report on their successes. Laell and the Librarian have a warding spell they are trying to establish around the docks as quickly as possible. If it was successful, they would have a safe space to work. Gardlo was able to create more talismans and distributed them to people who needed it. The speed at which Yepla and Camaz established control over their immediate area was both heartening and frightening. With the combined efforts of Verne, Ral, Mikol, Rask and a handful of manus students with talismans they were able to usher more than twenty unturned people to safety at the docks.

  The current situation had a festering of Gates opening just around the Heart - it wasn’t hard to assume they will start opening closer to their location. It was also possible it opens right at the docks, however Laell had assured him that their warding spell would prevent that, especially using the previously prohibited information memorized by the Librarian.

  The room fell into silence. One thing was certain: regardless of how successful their own individual tasks were, they needed Aris to wake and tell them what she discovered. Ral needed her to close the giant Gate. Nerves gripped him and he had to leave the room.

  Yepla was outside, coordinating the building of barricades around the warded dock area. From what Ral could make of Laell’s stuttering explanation, the warding would protect those inside from turning into Unseeing, but it would not protect existing Unseeing from attacking them. As he couldn’t do anything to help Aris, he spent the rest of the day and evening helping lift the cobbled together barricades.

  “Son, should you be out here?” Rask had tried to speak to him as he worked with three other men lifting materials. Two others quickly lashed them together and then secured them to cemented posts on the side of two adjacent buildings.

  “I need to help,” Ral said.

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  “You need to be by Aris’s side.”

  “She’ll wake up.” Ral wasn’t sure which one of them he was trying to convince. “And when she does, we need to be prepared.”

  Ral heard his own words and wondered what he himself should be doing to prepare. Certainly shoring up the area for safety was important, but certainly not the only thing he could be doing. He thought about Aris lying there, ashen faced. She was absolutely doing everything she could to fix the problem. He couldn’t help but think of how she was the one to sacrifice to do the most.

  His head snapped towards the sound of screaming and shouting - Rask slapped his shoulder and they both took off running to the sound.

  A single Unseeing crashed its way down one of the larger streets they were struggling to cordon off completely. Both himself and Rask had their staffs out and shouted at people to hide behind what protection they had up, until a blur appeared to shove the Unseeing aside.

  Mikol was there, hood tight around his masked face and two shivs in his gloved hands. With unnatural speed, he rushed at the staggering Unseeing and disposed of it with quick clean cuts. The monster screamed and faltered, its ugly song silenced. The nerves at the pit of his stomach grew worse. With everything that’s happened, he hadn’t had a single moment to even consider speaking to Mikol. He was beginning to wonder if he even wanted to.

  When in front of other people, Mikol didn’t speak as his accent and voice could give him away, so he merely pointed and raised two fingers, indicating two more Unseeing were headed their way.

  Ral shook himself and headed that way.

  The two monsters trying to break through their defenses were easily disposed of, probably because they were outnumbered. While some Unseeing were deadly fast, Ral hasn’t seen one that could outrun the average Somas trained Yscian. And Mikol…

  Ral knew that Mikol was capable of great speed and great stillness - the epitome of the Somas martial style. Mikol rarely showed it off, and now that Ral thought about it, he wondered if the Yscian was partly hiding the fact that he could be so competent. What else had he been hiding back in the Ivassk desert? While these questions plagued him, how could anyone expect Ral to trust him ever again?

  Ral had avoided thinking of any of this and generally succeeded. But now he watched his old friend rip apart the Unseeing with alarming speed - Ral couldn’t help but pick up an abandoned half-shattered barrel and hurl it as hard as he could at one of the crippled Unseeing. It only stunned the beast but Ral at least got some sort of satisfaction out of it.

  Rask gave him a passing exasperated look. Nothing slipped past the Freerunner, he knew what Ral was doing. Ral had already turned back to coax out the survivors to help him continue shoring up the perimeter before Rask and Mikol finished killing off the Unseeing.

  “That wasn’t exactly responsible, Ralos,” Rask said immediately after returning to the safe side of the barricades.

  “I knew you two could deal with it.”

  “You’re going to need to face him sooner or later,” Rask continued to prod. “Just getting frustrated on your own is not going to help.”

  “It’ll have to be later,” Ral said. “Because the world is ending, if you haven’t noticed.”

  Rask was silent but still followed him back to gather more materials. “Perhaps it should be ‘sooner’ because the world is ending,” the freerunner finally said.

  Ral stared at his long time mentor. For a moment, he thought he could hate Rask for being so sun-cursed annoying, but for also being right. Of all people, Rask knew what it was like to regret not spending more time with someone he loved.

  “There is still work to be done.” Ral chose the cowardly response. “Post him as a lookout at the top of the eastern barricades, the largest one. Keeping these people and Aris safe comes first. Everything else can wait.”