Terkell chattered as she brewed tea, while Kerani remained silent. The supervisor poured two cups and slid one over on a saucer.
“Take a drink and relax, you poor thing. I didn’t mean to work you so hard.”
Kerani took it on reflex. She’d had tea with Terkell hundreds of times. Before she thought about it, she had already taken her first sip.
Someone hammered on the office door.
Terkell didn’t seem surprised. “Could you get that for me, dear?”
Kerani had her hand on the door, but Burning Swan was vibrating in its case, trying to extend fiery wings. Danger!
She removed her hand. “Why don’t you get it?”
“It has to be you.” Terkell sipped from her own tea and smiled. “Go on, girl.”
A man’s voice came from outside, regal and assured. “Let me in, Kerani, and I will explain everything.”
She stumbled back from the door and looked from her tea to her supervisor. “You brought me into a dream.”
The steel container strapped to Terkell’s left wrist was open, and there was no shimmering purple light coming from inside. Her dream-Remnant was missing.
She’d used a technique. Or an elixir in the tea. Or both.
Kerani looked at the window, which was made of the same thick, barely transparent glass as most in this place. She wasn’t strong enough to break her way through.
But she could melt it.
Swan…please.
With a quick flick of madra, she released a panel on the side of her spirit-tank. A wing of flaming madra emerged and plunged into the glass, which began to glow red-hot.
Terkell leaned back so fast she spilled her tea. “Really, now! You’re going to dry out my skin!”
Kerani’s own skin was singed by the time she melted enough glass, and she wasn’t even sure that going out a different way would help her escape. How much of this was a dream, and how much was real?
She had to try something.
She almost leaped through, but the red-hot glass around the hole made her hesitate.
As did the voice from the door.
“There’s no risk to you,” the stranger said. “Life is far safer for my friends than my enemies.”
If Kerani hadn’t been warned, she might have opened the door already. But she knew who the voice belonged to.
The Silent King.
She gritted her teeth and prepared to plunge through the hole in the glass to the desolate, metal-and-concrete streets outside. It was late enough that no one was nearby, and she wasn’t sure if that was a curse or a blessing.
The burning glass was a threat, but one she could risk. She snapped her goggles over her eyes and pulled up the collar of her thick fire-resistant work uniform.
Then she screamed as a face floated out of the shadows from the window. A face, but not a human one.
It was like a floating head with pebbly flesh such a dark purple as to be almost black. One giant eye took up most of its face, and its mouth was stretched into a strange almost-smile with an expression she couldn’t read. It had two boneless arms that undulated slowly.
[I have come to pull you from the abyss of silence,] the spirit whispered. [To free you from the chains that bind your mind and restore you to the waking world.]
Then, as though it had suddenly remembered something, it added, [And don’t be afraid.]
Kerani commanded Burning Swan to attack, but its fiery wing shivered and retreated.
Not enemy, the spirit told her. And…strong.
There came a crash from behind Terkell’s desk. The supervisor had hurled her teacup—part of a set she’d inherited from her mother—to the ground, where it shattered. She glared furiously at the one-eyed spirit with teeth bared.
“Get out!” Terkell shrieked. “I’ll claw out your soul!”
The dark, floating spirit giggled. [That would be impressive.]
The Silent King’s voice from the door was amused. “Intruders. How bold.”
A force slammed into the door, shaking the room. Kerani hesitated only another instant before she reached out to the strange spirit’s tendril.
If this was an elaborate trick by the Dreadgod to get her to walk outside, it was working.
The spirit pulled her out through the glass, coming within an inch of searing her flesh off, but Kerani didn’t land on the street outside Terkell’s office.
She was back in the engine room, standing before a welded steel panel. Had she fallen asleep after finishing her job? How would that be possible?
The dark spirit still floated before her, chuckling in an unnerving voice. [Walk with me, unless you wish to see the void of death.]