Architects of Ether Read online

  Emeryss jumped back and Blinked.

  She’d done it multiple times with Adalai, but only two other times by herself.

  The familiar mask of the ethereal plane went to a blinding black. An empty void. She popped out the other side gasping for air.

  There was a slight sting in her back.

  She glanced back and found Grier smug as ever with the tip of his swordstaff poking her.

  “And you’re dead.”

  She let the dark haze at the edges of her vision pull her from her trance. Sweat ran off her in buckets. The Zephyr flight uniform, covering her from neck to ankle, was clearly not suited for heat like this. The gauzy shorts and sleeveless tops of her Neerian home in the summer would be a welcome change, but it wouldn’t do much against Air Slices and mini-bolts of lightning.

  She held out her hand. “That’s it. Give me your javelin.”

  He barked a laugh and jumped back.

  “I’m going to take you down.”

  “Come get me. Prove I shouldn’t go easy on you.” His blond hair bounced as he moved away.

  He lifted his swordstaff at her, and she ran at him. The moment his hands moved, she Blinked beside him.

  She was avoiding his swings and thrusts, but the Blinking and lack of air between jumps were nauseating. His next jab forward, she panicked and lifted a small purple shield to deflect it.

  “Good!” he called to her. “But keep your arms up and ready.”

  She shoved her shield at him, pushing him back, and Blinked.

  He spun, the blade of his weapon coming around with him.

  She held up another shield to block. The metal clunked against it. Blinking again, she aimed for behind him with her knees and hands out. Pulled through the darkness of the Blink, she appeared on the back side of him.

  He hadn’t been fast enough.

  She launched herself on top of him, shoving him to the stone. It wasn’t pretty. More like a tackle than any sort of fighting move, but she’d take it. The ethereal plane washed away, and she straddled Grier’s lower back, fingers pressed into his spine between his shoulder blades.

  He’d grunted when he landed and laughed at her. “You got me.”

  A sharp pain expanded out from her ear, forcing a thunderous headache across her scalp and forehead. She yelped.

  “And you’re dead,” Urla said.

  She sighed. “You took advantage—”

  “Of you being distracted? Yes. The Ingini will use and abuse that. It’s a strategy. It’s smart. It’s you or them.” Urla turned for the doors. “Time’s up.”

  Sonora followed her.

  Grier stood easily, forcing Emeryss to slide off his back to her feet as if she hadn’t really been pressing him down into the stone at all. “It was good though. If you can manage to Blink directly behind me, I can’t see where the trail of ether is leading.”

  “If I had a harpoon, you’d be dead.”

  He snickered, resting his arm around her shoulders.

  “Don’t pretend I didn’t catch you off your guard.”

  He raised his hands in surrender and nuzzled in where her ear met her neck. “You did, but you wouldn’t kill me.”

  She wanted to curl into him, but she pushed him away—or tried to. “I’m all gross and sweaty—”

  “Like we haven’t been before?”

  “I need a shower. I love how these suits feel, but they make me sweat a sea’s worth.” She put her hands against his damp shirt.

  “I can help you with that.”

  She giggled. “Oh, can you?”

  He shrugged and pulled her closer. “Or stay like this. I happen to like it,” he mumbled into her cheek.

  It was easy to fall into him, to love him, to let him love her. It was also easy to give him whatever he wanted the moment his hands or mouth came near her.

  His fingers found her nape and wound through the small, damp curls that had slipped out of her ponytail. It brought a heady, dizziness that lured her deeper into his tide.

  She reached up and pulled him down to her, pressing her lips against his. Soft and salty, their sweat mingled. His tongue slid over hers, and he tasted like the sea, like something she could wade into and forget herself between sky and wave.

  She wanted to bring him to Neeria, to show him her home. She wanted him to see her in her home, to get to know her family, to eat her people’s food. To see him hauling fishing nets, to see how the sand settles on his face and hair, to see his skin tan under breezy sunsets and early dawns. The need to immerse him in every aspect of her life tugged at her heart.

  Sonora’s throat cleared. “We’re still here, guys.”

  Emeryss pulled away.

  “The least they could do is let us watch, eh?” Urla nudged Sonora with a smirk.

  They stopped with a slight laugh, and Emeryss lowered her hands from his scratchy face.

  Sonora held up an index finger as her eyes glazed over. “Adalai wants us on the bridge. She wants to go over the plan for getting into Ingini, and she knows how to get the Ingini girl, Clove, to give us a shipment location.”

  Grier sighed against Emeryss’s forehead and kissed her there. “To be continued.”

  She took his hand and pulled him toward the Zephyr’s lift.

  Chapter 2

  Zephyr Airship — Revel

  Grier swallowed the urge to ask Sonora to pass on an image of him giving Adalai a rude gesture for interrupting them. Between training Emeryss and practicing himself, Adalai had the absolute worst timing and had ruined several perfect moments.

  Or nearly perfect. Adalai hadn’t interrupted their nights, thankfully.

  In truth, had she not interrupted them, they probably wouldn’t have gotten much done. They’d never leave the ship, never get dressed. Like ether, they were bound to each other, their bodies always in tune of where the other was. His hands had memorized every curve, every angle. His lips had tasted every inch. She was quickly becoming an extension of him, and he her.

  Emeryss looked at him with golden eyes under thick eyelashes after they’d stepped onto the lift and pressed the green button on the panel. He smiled in return. It didn’t take much, just Emeryss being Emeryss, a look he’d seen every day in Stadhold and cherished. Her conviction, her determination, it could get him to do damn near anything she wanted. And he did.

  “Are you blushing?” she asked.

  He tried to relax his face and hide the stupid grin he must have had. “No.”

  “You are.” She poked his shoulder. “What were you thinking about?”

  The platform jolted to a stop, and they stepped out and down the hall for the bridge.

  “Just you.”

  “Me?”

  “And tonight, when we can’t be interrupted.”

  She nodded and took a shaky deep breath. It might have caused a shiver up her spine, but Em had said all these moments together were making up for lost time. All those times he’d peeked inside her suite but had never entered. All those times she’d flirted, and he couldn’t respond for fear of ruining his job, his position, his rules. He’d been a fool, but it was worth every second of making up for that lost time.

  The cold, dark-blue metal corridor opened into a bridge with a panoramic glass window and dashboards with several dials for the pilots, Jahree and Mykel.

  Urla sat behind them with her withered cane across her lap and beside Adalai. Vaughn adjusted his Zephyr suit and crossed his arms as he leaned against the railing of the level leading to the navigation area. Sonora, beside him, still had her dark hair tied up in a loose, messy bun. She looked frustrated to not have made it to the showers yet after practice.

  “Nice of you to join us,” Adalai sneered at Grier. Her almond eyes had heavy bags and dark circles. Even her neon-yellow hair looked limp and dry.

  Planning their mission into Ingini hadn’t been easy for her. He’d found her pacing up the corridors of the Zephyr for several nights as they had gotten closer to Dansbrill. He understood the importance a
s well as everyone else, but she was taking it to a new level, pushing the limits with the Ingini prisoner, as well. If he were to guess, Adalai getting back in the good graces of General Orr, proving she was the right leader for the RCA, was too important to risk. But it was clearly taking its toll on her.

  “We were training,” Emeryss said. “Which reminds me, we need to work on your casting, too.”

  She’d been helping Adalai learn how to cast without the use of grimoires, but according to Emeryss, it was slow-going at best. Adalai had a strong work ethic and didn’t want to give up, but she also couldn’t tolerate not grasping things the first time.

  “And I’d like to remind you, Adalai, that you interrupted us,” he said.

  “These days, when am I not?”

  “You sound jealous, Ada,” Urla teased.

  “Hardly.” Adalai clapped her hands together as her illusionary, purple masked tulisan, Miss Tiddlybottom, munched on imaginary food beside her feet. “So, we’re nearly to Dansbrill. Mykel has cut off the transponder.”

  Grier fought back the lump building in his chest. He’d told Emeryss he wanted to do this, to sneak into Ingini, to find how the grimoires were getting through and help his country. It was the truth, but he also wouldn’t lie that Emeryss was his distraction from it. Though he wouldn’t change it for the world, she was his addiction, his weakness. With her, it was easy to forget that they were throwing themselves headfirst into enemy territory. It was easy to forget that one of their countries could be betraying the other.

  Adalai’s current plan was to sneak across the border of Ingini from the southern beach between Stadhold and Ingini. They’d have to fly through the valley first, but that’s how she’d figured they’d get in with the least number of eyes seeing them do it.

  “Disconnecting the transponder should ruin the chance for anyone—Stadholden, Ingini, or Revelian—to pick up on our signal at all,” Adalai said.

  Vaughn shook his head. “And how’s it going to look when somebody sends a signal to identify us, and nothing comes back to them? We’re gonna get shot out of the sky.”

  She rolled her eyes and motioned to Sonora. “Sonora will be on the lookout for any signals coming at us. It’s just to make us a tad quieter as we get closer and as we go through the valley to the beach.”

  “You can do that?” Grier asked.

  Sonora scratched the top of her head. “Yeah. They’re all on slightly different frequencies. I can pick them up okay. Sending them back is trickier. It happens almost instantaneously, so I will have to be quick.”

  “She has to get it perfect,” Adalai said. “Not only does she have to get the right signal to the right person asking, but she has to relay the right information for whatever we’d be likely flying.”

  Grier gripped the ache also building at the back of his neck. That would be damn hard. Responding to the Ingini with a shipping vessel, while Stadhold might expect a distributing ship from Revel or a Stadholden passenger airship. There were too many variables for her to think of. And nearly all at once.

  “And if we fail?” Emeryss asked. Her hands clasped together under her chin. It’s what she did when she worried. He’d not seen it often in Stadhold, but on this trip alone, he’d gotten familiar with her little tells of stress and anxiety.

  “If we fail,” Adalai continued, “we’re done for. Or as Vaughn said, we’ll be shot out of the sky.”

  The bridge was silent save for Tidbits munching on her imaginary biscuit.

  Emeryss turned to Sonora. “You can do this.”

  Vaughn huffed. “What if they lie? What if Ingini sends out a signal looking for Revel airships and shoot us down because of it?”

  “I’d be telling them we’re Ingini,” Sonora said.

  “Yeah, but what if they know we’re not and shoot us down, anyway?”

  Sonora rubbed her forehead and shrugged.

  ”Why can’t I shrink us?” he asked.

  “Because the air currents off the beach into the rift valley are difficult enough to fly through,” Jahree said. “On the wrong day, they’re difficult enough at normal size. I’d hate to see how it would mess us up when we’re bug-sized.”

  Emeryss let out a shaky breath beside him. “Then, what?”

  Adalai smoothed back a few yellow strands of hair from her face, turning them into a dark shade of brown. “We keep our eyes open going through the valley. We need our evidence to be solid because we’re basically fugitives now. So, if we see Stadholden ships trading grimoires over the border from Stadhold—”

  “Screw off with that,” Grier snapped.

  He hadn’t meant it to come off so quick and harsh, but she’d been implying all week that Stadhold must be the ones breaking the treaty and sending grimoires over to Ingini. It was getting old.

  “You know damn good and well that the Ingini are probably stealing them,” he reminded her.

  Even the rest of the group rustled at her comments.

  “It’s best not to say anything, yet, Adalai,” Urla urged. “We need to keep our eyes and ears open, but we shouldn’t assume to already know.”

  Vaughn moaned. “Nothing that interesting is happening. Sure, it’ll be a big deal if we find out how and where they’re stealing them from, but it’s fairly clear they’re stealing them, Ada.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just in case. If we see it as we move through the rift valley between Ingini and Stadhold, we’ll intercept them.”

  Grier shook his head. “That wouldn’t be smart at all.”

  Mykel took a ball of metal and shaped it into several different things right after the other. He’d turned around to focus more on the conversation while Jahree did the actual piloting. “They might have multiple trade-off points or several entry points for the shipments. If you’re careless, they’ll just alert the others, and you won’t figure out the rest.”

  Adalai crossed her arms. “We don’t need to find them all. We need to find out how they’re getting them.”

  “And if someone has broken the treaty?” Grier asked. “You’re going to just run back and tattle on the whole operation without the full story?”

  “Look, we’re going to start at some shipping points first—somewhere. We’re not sure where yet, but we won the fight at Marana, didn’t we? Look at how Emeryss turned out. I’m obviously not that clueless.”

  Adalai had taken credit for training Emeryss, for turning her from Scribe to Caster, and Emeryss couldn’t care less. She’d said it was Adalai who’d given her the idea of how to reframe her thinking, but that didn’t mean he liked how Adalai had gone around for the last week boasting as if it was all her.

  “We’re not saying that, Ada,” Sonora said. “We’re saying we shouldn’t hope it’ll be easy. If one of the countries is betraying the other, we have to be even more careful where we go from there.”

  The bridge fell silent again, the weight of their looming task thickening the tension between them. The ship hadn’t felt right since Marana, since Kayson and Tully. It hadn’t felt right since Orr had ordered their team be dismantled, either.

  “And the Ingini woman?” Grier asked. “What about her?”

  Adalai put her arms behind her back. “We need a landing zone close to the southern border in Ingini that’s equipped to receive shipments. Those crates of grimoires have to be coming in somewhere. We’d hoped she would’ve told us by now, but I have one last idea for getting it out of her. Otherwise, we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Are you actually surprised she hasn’t talked?” Mykel snorted. “You’ve offered nothing in return.”

  “She’s the prisoner,” Adalai said.

  “Well, do you want answers, or do you want everything to be as hard as possible?”

  “I don’t negotiate with Ingini,” she snarled.

  “Her name is Clove, people,” Jahree called from his seat.

  Emeryss fidgeted, and her elbows brushed against Grier’s arm. They looked at one another for a brief second before
returning their focus on Adalai. This wouldn’t be easy, he knew that, but worse, he’d encouraged the whole thing.

  “So, what’s your last idea?” Vaughn asked. “Actually torture her?”

  “No—” Grier started.

  “No. It’s actually my idea.” Jahree lifted a hand from his navigation panel but kept his eyes on the land ahead of them. “It’s more humane.”

  Adalai scoffed as Tidbits wandered over to Mykel and clawed for snacks. “Says the guy who’s been spending an awful lot of time with her.”

  Jahree ignored her. “My plan will take Vaughn, Mykel, and Adalai to make it work.”

  They looked at one another.

  Vaughn and Mykel’s face fell.

  “What is it?” Mykel asked.

  “Warstory.”

  Urla laughed.

  “No,” Vaughn said. “I’m terrible at that game, and no offense, Sonora, but we don’t have Kayson anymore. We can’t fix the wounds Adalai gives the Ingini girl already, and I refuse to die from something as stupid as ethyrol poisoning.”

  Emeryss looked up at Grier. “Warstory?”

  Before he could answer, Mykel was already standing and joining in protest with Vaughn. “And let’s not forget the key point here that she’s Ingini,” Mykel added. “She probably has ethyrol in her blood.”

  Jahree shrugged. “I’ll ask the trivia questions, and I’ll work my way to asking about the shipping zone. She’ll have to be good and drunk if it’s going to work. But I think it’s worth a shot to get her to speak, and I’ve never seen anyone beat Adalai in Warstory.”

  Vaughn sighed, and Adalai smiled with her chin a little higher. “Don’t be a wimp, Vaughn.”

  “Well, threatening the girl’s life isn’t working.” Sonora shrugged and left the bridge. ”Good luck. I’m not going to watch.”

  Jahree spun back to his navigation panel. “We’ll land outside Dansbrill. Vaughn and Mykel can get us set up in the rec room. I’ll get Clove to agree.”

  Vaughn stomped off, mumbling to himself about losing every time they’d played.

  Emeryss mirrored the same confused and shocked expression from before. “What’s Warstory?”