Mechanical Illusions

micah’s designer: @nicotothestars

lucian’s designer: @simplyamoth

Topaz and Oti had been speaking for what felt like hours before Micah’s phone vibrated in his hand from a notification. 

Someone kicked Micah’s shin under the table, and he looked up to find Topaz giving him a side eye. His face flushed red, and he hastily shoved the phone back in his pocket, making sure it was on silent before he did so. 

The meeting continued for another three and a half hours before Topaz finally managed to get whatever it was she wanted out of Old Oti. 

When they made it out into the hallway, Topaz elbowed Micah gently. “So…” she said, putting on a smile, “who were you talking to in there that got you all smiley? Did you meet a girl on one of your missions?”

Micah gave her a strange look. “It’s a boy. But honestly, my personal business has nothing to do with you.”

Topaz gaped at him for a moment. “Oh, wow, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were…” She cleared her throat, looking a bit awkward. “Y’know.”

Micah blinked at her, confused. After a moment, her implication dawned on him, and he felt his face go bright red again. “What?! No—not—not like that! He’s just my friend! It’s not—“

He cut himself off, opening and closing his mouth repeatedly, completely unsure of how to finish that sentence without it sounding even more incriminating. 

“No, no, you misunderstand,” Topaz said, giving Micah an awkward smile. “I am too. My girlfriend works on the Herta Space Station.”

Micah forced his face to remain as neutral as possible. “I promise, we’re just friends,” he assured her, speeding up his gait in an attempt to leave Topaz in the dust. 

“What? Wait, Micah, slow down,” Topaz called, jogging slightly to keep up. “I’m sorry, I swear I didn’t mean anything by that. If you don’t like him, that's totally fine, I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”

Micah’s mind once again supplied the image of Lucian fixing his stitches, and he felt his face heat up. Topaz didn’t say anything, but he saw her eyeing him with an amused look out of the corner of his eye. 

“I’m done talking about this,” he announced, plastering a neutral expression onto his face. “Let’s just…get back to the outpost.”

Out of fear of more pestering from Topaz, Micah didn’t retrieve his phone from his pocket until he had safely made it back to his room. 

He sighed in relief, sinking down onto his mattress and checking his messages. 

Sure enough, he had a few unread messages from Lucian, though all of them seemed to have been from a couple hours earlier. 

Micah sighed, typing out a hasty reply. Hopefully Lucian was still online…

Micah paused. Technically, Lucian was correct. Until the last couple of weeks, he couldn’t remember having been to business meetings in several months. 

Even typing it out himself, it felt like a lie. In what situation would she realistically need a high ranking officer to be her body guard to a meeting with old Oti? His efforts were clearly better spent elsewhere. 

In their frequent discussions, Lucian’s disdain for the IPC was frequently made known to Micah, often completely intentionally. A couple of years ago, Micah would have shoved it away as pointless criticism, but lately…he’d be lying if said it wasn’t starting to take root. 

Micah didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. He put his phone down on his bedside table, and rolled over to stare at his ceiling. 

He knew that a lot of people weren’t overly fond of the IPC. Sometimes when they went to start new settlements there’d be protests, but they usually would fizzle out within a couple of days. He had largely assumed they were just resistant to change. Could things really have been worse than he thought?

He bit at his finger idly until his phone buzzed again. 

Lucian didn’t respond for a while. Just as Micah was beginning to worry he had crossed a line, finally the typing bubble reappeared. 

Micah stared at his phone for a long moment. He couldn’t place his finger on it, but something about the way Lucian was talking felt…wrong. Micah had only known him a few weeks, but he knew that Lucian was notoriously cagey about his past. 

If that was all there was to it, why was he always ducking out of conversations about it?

Micah swallowed down any of his doubts, and allowed himself to drift into a fitful sleep. 

—

The next morning, Micah awoke with a newfound determination. If Lucian wouldn’t tell him anything of importance about Melustanin, then he’d figure things out himself. 

He made his way to Topaz’s office the moment he was dressed. He opened the door just slightly to find that Topaz seemed to be on the phone. 

“It’s been so hectic lately,” she whined, dragging a hand along her face. “Ever since the incident with Micah, Diamond’s been pressuring me to keep him out of the field for a while. At this rate, I’m worried the kid is going to start getting restless and stumble into something he shouldn’t.”

Micah froze. Evidently too late for that, he thought bitterly. Lucian, as usual, had been right—they were intentionally keeping him out of the field. 

After a pause—likely the person on the other line talking—Topaz finally spoke up again. “I know…I just…I worry about him sometimes,” she said. “I was glad that he seemed to be coming out of his shell a bit, but when I talked to him yesterday, he was still deflecting just about every question I threw at him.”

Micah, unable to take anymore gossip about himself, knocked again on the door, louder this time. “Ms. Topaz?”

Topaz turned around, startled. “Sorry, something work just came up,” she said to the person over her phone. “Love you, talk later.” She slipped the phone back into her pocket, and then smiled at Micah. 

“Hey Micah! Also…please drop the Ms. It makes me feel old,” she sweatdropped. “Do you need something? It’s not usual for you to come to me directly.”

Micah darted his eyes around the room, until they eventually landed on an ID sitting on Topaz’s desk. Resolution steeled, he stepped the rest of the way into the room. “I was wondering if I’d be able to take the week off,” he asked, forcing himself to hold eye contact with Topaz.

Much to his surprise, Topaz seemed to light up. “Oh, of course! That shouldn’t be a problem at all. You haven’t used up any of your PTO since you entered the field with Jade, so including the rollover you should have at least 30 days. Let me just get the paperwork really quick.”

Topaz disappeared under her desk, digging in one of the drawers of paperwork. Micah eyed the ID on her desk, but didn’t dare move to grab it. 

“You know, that mystery boy you’ve been talking to must really be something,” Topaz said as she shuffled through her files. 

Micah froze. He swallowed, anxiety building in his gut. “How do you mean?”

“Well, ever since you’ve started talking to him it seems like you’ve been much more…” She paused, sitting up a bit so Micah could see her, and gestured one hand around in the air. “I don’t know. Happy’s not quite the right word…maybe peaceful?”

Micah exhaled in relief. So she hadn’t caught on to his plans for the day—she was just, as usual, reading too far into he and Lucian’s relationship. “Maybe you just feel that way because I’ve been more local in the past few weeks,” he said, trying to withhold the venom from his voice. “You’ve been seeing more of me, so it certainly stands to reason you’d get a better taste of my personality.”

Topaz sighed. “Maybe,” she acquiesced, before she suddenly stood up quickly. “I can’t find the papers here, let me go print new ones. I’ll just be in the room over. One sec.”

Micah held his breath as Topaz slipped into the other room. In one fluid motion, he swiped the spare I.D. off of her desk and shoved it unceremoniously into his pant pocket. 

Topaz returned a few moments later, stack of papers in her hand. “You’ll just have to sign at the bottom of the last page, and then you’ll be free for the week,” she said cheerfully, handing Micah the papers and a pen. 

She continued chatter at him about the “mystery boy” as he scanned through the paperwork. He largely tuned her out, for no reason other than his own embarrassment. With a quick scribble of the pen, he handed everything back to Topaz. 

With a slight bow, he interrupted her ramblings to say, “Thank you for the approval.”

Topaz waved her hand dismissively. “Please, don’t even worry about that. It’s literally my job. Have a good week off, okay?”

Micah gave a curt nod, and then slipped into the hallway. He began power-walking down the hall with a carefully maintained level expression, feeling the sweat drip down his back. If he was caught here, it could get him sent back to Jade—or worse, expelled from his position all together. He steeled himself as he made his way past the entrance to the dormitory without giving it a second glance. 

He glanced both ways down the halls when he came to the entrance of the higher security data room, and after he was certain nobody was coming, he scanned Topaz’s badge and quietly slipped in. 

The lights came on automatically, revealing several long rows of file cabinets on his right. On the far wall, a large computer screen with several dozen control panels underneath it was set up. 

He tentatively made his way toward it, and searched around on the control panel for a power button. To his relief he found that it functioned similarly to the previous model of his mech—he supposed that made sense, given that they were likely made at the same time. 

The screen flicked on, and an expansive search bar filled the screen. He felt his head spinning simply at the number of filtering options. 

The only thing he had to go on was the planet name, Melustanin. Even if the IPC hadn’t taken over the planet, they would likely have some record of it—especially if something truly had happened to it as Micah expected. He typed it into the search bar warily, and hesitated only a moment before hitting enter. 

Immediately, at least a dozen files containing the word Melustanin showed up. The first few seemed to  only contain some very basic information—the planet name, its wealth ranking…things he had gathered from his conversation with Lucian. He continued scrolling the results until, finally, he found something interesting. 

Melustanin Stellaron Crisis, Catastrophe, and Rehabilitation [Amber Era 2157]

That was the date of the previous Amber Era—the switchover only occurred a few months ago. Micah warily clicked into the file. When it opened, the first image on the page seemed to be of a war ground. 

Micah could feel himself going pale. He scrolled down slightly to reveal the written portion of the report. 

After the arrival of two Lord Ravagers during a pivotal battle against the Void Rangers, roughly 60% of the population of Melustanin has gone missing or been presumed dead. 

Remaining citizens refused the rehabilitation program, citing the project as not being worth the risk in their current state of renewal. The planet has been labeled “High Risk,” but will not be removed from consideration due to lack of potential subjects. 

[Access Level: P44+]

By the end of the report Micah had stopped breathing. The report was dated only 3 calendar years ago. Just as he had feared, this was far worse than Lucian had made it seem. 

Was his original mentor even alive?

Micah clicked out of the file feeling a bit sick to his stomach. It seemed the folder that the Melustanin file was located in was dedicated to the planet rehabilitation projects. Micah was, of course, familiar with them—Topaz’s planet was saved by them, and on occasion he’d escort her to check in the progress of the numerous colonies the IPC was keeping at any point in time. 

What caught Micah’s attention however, was a file labeled “Johon Rehabilitation [Amber Era 2157].”

That was the name of his home planet. 

Johon was part of the rehab projects? Micah frowned. Why did Topaz never mention it to me?

Micah clicked into the file, but once again, his heart dropped into his stomach. Much like the previous file, there were photos attached at the top. However, unlike Melustanin, these photos were clearly taken from somewhere off-planet. The photo at the very top painted a very horrifying picture.

Johon had been completely destroyed. 

Micah felt a wave of nausea pass over him, and covered his mouth one hand, the other gripping the desk in front of him so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. The report was initially filed 16 years ago—the same time the IPC took him in. 

Johon, struck by extreme poverty and lack of available natural resources due to a Stellaron disaster, sent an inquiry to Diamond about participating in the rehabilitation program. Diamond fast tracked the application, along with taking in several orphans and sending them to various divisions. Only one is intended to remain in the SID long term. 

1 Month Status - On Target

Fields are beginning to return to a usable state. Not much change has been observed in air quality, but that is typical in more extreme cases. 

6 Month Status - Behind Target

Air still seems unpurified. Many more reports of lung diseases have been reported in the poorer districts. Previous progress in the fields has been undone by another wave of drought. If conditions don’t improve soon, Diamond plans to call for withdrawal of IPC employees. 

8 Month Status - Employee Withdrawal

Due to a continuous downward trend, Diamond has recalled any employees still on planet. Communication will be continued with the local population in order to properly gauge progress for log keeping.  

12 Month Status - Planet Unresponsive

Contact with civilians has been lost. Any remaining survivors have been presumed dead. It’s expected that within the next month, the planet will begin to decay. Neighboring planets have been warned, and are prepped if the need for evacuation arrives. 

14 Month Status - Planet Unresponsive

After half of the planet decayed and broke off into pieces—which now orbit the planet as a ring—it has finally grown stable and the process of decay seems to have come to an end. The IPC will continue monitoring for the next 4 months, and in the event there are no changes, we will withdraw all resources. 

[Access Level P44+]

Micah stared at the TV and allowed the silence to engulf him. His heart pounded in his ears, and his vision began swirling. 

He reached up to touch his cheek, and found that it was because he was crying. 

When was the last time he had cried?

After taking a moment to regain his composure, careful to shove his feelings out of the forefront of his mind, he took out his phone. He didn’t have time to go through all of these files right now, so he’d do the next best thing. Plugging his phone into the console, he began to duplicate the entire folder of rehab projects to his personal drive. Once they were finished, he also downloaded a few additional articles on Melustanin before silently slipping into the hallway. 

When he finally arrived at the dormitory building, he was certain he was about as pale as a ghost. He reached into his pocket where Topaz’s I.D. sat, and gripped it tightly in his hand. 

Topaz’s apartment was at the front of the dormitory hallway, so when Micah passed by on the way to his own apartment, he did his best to subtly slide the I.D. into her mail box. 

He continued down the hallway, and eventually arrived at his own room. The moment the door slid shut behind him, a newfound wave of nausea struck. He rushed to the bathroom, barely managing to make it to the toilet and pull his hair out of his face before he threw up. 

Once he was confident he was no longer going to actively be sick, he let his hair fall over his shoulders, and forced himself to stand up. The toilet flushed automatically, and he stumbled over to the nearby sink. 

As he quickly rinsed his face and hands, his mind drifted back to the files he had actually gone looking for—the ones about Melustanin. Guilt shot through him again, and he shoved it down, swiftly moving to grab his toothbrush. 

He couldn’t tell Lucian about what he’d done. In fact, he couldn’t tell anyone. His phone was issued by the IPC anyways—in all likelihood they had ways of peering into his conversations. The last thing he needed was to be caught red handed. 

He managed to wrangle himself into casual clothes before collapsing into his bed, too tired to bother with a shower. He pulled out his phone, and stared warily at Lucian’s contact. After a moment of hesitation, he finally caved and clicked on it. 

Micah smiled despite himself, curling further into a ball in his bed. 

For a while, neither of them said anything. Micah couldn’t conjure up a response that didn’t make him nauseous, and at first it seemed Lucian had nothing left to say. 

A few minutes later, his phone finally chimed again.

As much as he hated to admit it…that offer was wildly tempting. Micah swallowed, and forced himself to put the thought out of his mind. If he left now, it would only make his activities today more suspicious. 

Micah laughed slightly. He could tell that even with such a brief conversation, his bad mood was already dissipating. He thought back to Topaz’s original assumption the day before. Had her words actually carried some truth? He turned his head upwards to stare at his ceiling, a flood of conflicting emotions running through him. His guilt began rising to his chest again, now combined with some form of panic laced with the fondness towards his friend. 

The chime of his phone drew him out of his thoughts, and he held it up to his face. 

“That’s completely besides the point,” she sighed, rubbing a hand across her face. “If nothing else, Diamond will want to eliminate the risk these bandits are posing, but the only way an operation would be approved is with actual evidence.”

Micah scowled at his feet, but acquiesced. “Yes, ma’am,” he said through gritted teeth. “If you could please send the reports to my bunk, I’ll fill them out with any relevant information.”

Topaz exhaled in relief. “Thank you, Micah. You’re dismissed. Oh, and on your way back—please stop by the medical station. A concussion doesn’t magically heal itself in only a couple of hours.”

Micah gave no response, wordlessly slipping out of Topaz’s office. 

The fluorescent lights in the hallway caused Micah to flinch slightly as he shielded his eyes in a desperate attempt to ward off the searing pain that spiked behind his eyes. 

The walk to the apartments was brief. With a shaky hand he managed to slide open the door to his tiny bunk. The light came on automatically, and he hastily covered his eyes with one hand, swiping blindly at the wall with his other to find the switch. 

A gentle click sounded, and Micah warily opened his eyes to find that he had successfully turned the light off. He let out a sigh of relief, slid the door shut behind him, and promptly collapsed onto his bed. 

—

A loud knock echoed through Micah’s silent room. With a wince, he managed to force himself to roll over and check the clock on his bedside table. It was already 3 PM?

“Officer Micah, Topaz sent me to give you the incident reports,” someone called from behind the door. 

Micah groaned, hiding his face in his hands. “Please put them in the mail pocket,” he called out, hopefully loud enough that the grunt could hear him, “I have the next 48 hours off due to injury, so tell her it’ll be a couple days before they’re done.”

“Yes sir.”

The sound of papers sliding into the pocket was shortly followed by footsteps as the guard left, presumably headed back to report to Topaz. 

Micah forced himself to sit up, running a hand across his face. Evidently, he hadn’t bothered to take off his boots or even let down his hair the night before. He was pretty sure he smelled like a dead animal. 

He fished his phone out of his pocket where he had accidentally left it the night before. Much to his chagrin, his only messages were notifications from a number of IPC work chats. Hadn’t that knight said he’d message him?

Well, reaching out now would only make it more awkward, Micah sighed. He’d need to eventually for his reports, but all he wanted right now was a cold shower. He’d worry about that shit later. 

He pulled his boots off—making a mental note to ask for ones with zippers when he put in the request for a new mech—and stumbled towards the bathroom. 

He started trying to carefully peel his external armor off, but froze after removing only one shoulder pad when he made eye contact with himself in the mirror. 

A long scar, still red from the blood that had seeped out of the wound the day before, carved over one eye and all the way down to the opposite side of his face. The stitches Lucian had helped with were still quite visible, and despite the thread originally being mostly transparent, it was now stained red with blood. 

Put quite frankly, he looked like a zombie. 

He traced the scar carefully with the tips of his fingers. 

I don’t give a shit how high your pain tolerance is, Lucian had said. A concussion is a concussion. 

Looking at himself now, he was finally starting to see the source of Lucian’s concern. 

After another long moment Micah forced himself to tear his gaze away, shoving the thought down as he continued to pull off his armor. He could redo his stitches after his shower. He had more important things to worry about. 

He turned the water to the coldest setting and tugged his hair out of its usual ponytail. He could feel the grease on his fingers as he pulled his hand away.

The dull ache of his wounds flared sharply as he stepped under the faucet. Micah winced, which only served to pull painfully on his stitches. Nonetheless, he was met with a brief sense of relief as the cool water poured over his aching muscles.

Five minutes later, he was clean and dressed in an undershirt and a pair of athletic shorts. 

Warily, Micah eyed his phone on the counter. After a moment, he finally caved, grabbing it and making his way back to the small table and chair in his room. 

He sunk into the chair, and took the small slip of paper with Lucian’s contact information out of his phone case. 

Hello, this is Micah from the IPC. I’d like to thank you for… He trailed off mid sentence. What was he doing? For Qlipoth’s sake, this wasn’t a business email, it was a text to a friend. Acquaintance? Certainly not a coworker, at the very least. 

Micah realized with a jolt that this would be the first time he was messaging someone, not because he needed to, but because he wanted to… Surely it couldn’t be that hard, right?

He deleted everything he had written, and tried to recall the way he’d seen Topaz interact with her family over the phone. Would that be too familiar for someone he’d just met?

Micah stared at the message for a minute. Eventually, he forced himself to push send and shoved his phone back into his pocket, staring at the wall in front of him as though doing so would cause him to forget everything that happened in the last 48 hours. 

Instead, his brain offered him the image of Lucian carefully stitching his wound back together. Micah frowned as a rush of conflicting emotions settled in his stomach. He sighed and shook his head, trying to rid himself of the thought entirely. 

His phone buzzed his pocket, and he pulled it out to find that Lucian had already responded. 

Micah exhaled in relief as he typed out a quick reply. Joking was a good sign, right?

Smiling to himself, he placed his phone on the table and ducked back over to where he had hung his uniform up to be washed. Micah was pleasantly surprised to find that Lucian had successfully returned his med kit to the correct pouch after using it. Micah pulled it out and carried it back over to the table, where he used a couple of IPC handbooks and one of his boots to prop his phone in front of his face with the camera on. 

With both of his hands free, and not shaking nearly as much as they had been at the bandit encampment, using tweezers to pull out the original stitches was an easy feat. His hand slipped once near the bottom of the scar, but after a brief assessment it didn’t seem too noticeable. Just a small amount of blood, easily wiped away with a piece of gauze. 

With quick, practiced fingers he quickly restitched the wound, carefully working around his eye in the way Lucian hadn't been able to. After about twenty minutes, he deemed his work adequate, and moved to find a bandage to wrap around his face while the skin finished healing.  

When he assessed his appearance in his phone camera after tying the bandage over his eye, he was surprised to find that he looked awfully similar to a certain knight of beauty. Against his better judgement, he chuckled to himself and took a quick picture, which he sent off to Lucian.

—

Micah hummed along idly to the rock music blaring through his mech’s internal speakers as he finally finished filling out what felt like his thousandth form in the past two weeks. He hadn’t been on a field mission since the incident with Lucian, and he was starting to get restless. He couldn’t remember the last time he had gone this long without doing some kind of combat mission…he was starting to get restless. 

Micah was startled out of his thoughts as his music was interrupted by his comm link’s blaring ringtone. Swearing under his breath, he fumbled to grab his phone and hastily accepted the call without checking the caller I.D.

“This is Agent Micah of the IPC’s Strategic Investment department. Are you looking to schedule a meeting with Topaz?”

“Geez, you gave me your work number? I thought it would have been your personal phone…what happened to keeping me off the IPC’s radar?”

Micah paused. He gaped blankly at his monitor for a moment before finally remembering how to form words. “…Lucian?”

“The one and only.” The knight replied with an audible smirk.

“Not to be rude, but why the hell are you calling me?”

“I need your help with something,” Lucian said. The sound of shuffling echoed from the other end of the call, but it settled after a moment. “Do you have access to the Strategic Investment Department’s old auction logs?”

“Why would you assume I’d help you?” Micah scoffed. “Just because we worked together once doesn’t mean we’re suddenly partners.”

“I know that, dumbass—“ Lucian paused. Micah could hear him take a deep breath, evidently trying to calm himself. “It’s not like I have any better options. So do you have access to the documents or not?”

“Probably, but I have no reason to give them to you. It’s a breach of just about every protocol in the book.”

“Are you serious?” Lucian groaned. “I really need this—can’t you make one exception? Since when are you so stringent about some bullshit rules anyway?”

Micah scoffed at his monitor. “I’ll have you know those ‘bullshit rules’ are what stop information on just about anything you can think of from getting leaked to the public. You’re not exactly making me more inclined to your cause.”

“Why is that even a bad thing? Isn’t it, like, common knowledge that information monopolies are the root of all evil?”

“That’s not how that saying goes,” Micah rolled his eyes. “If you don’t have anything else to say, I’m hanging—”

“—Wait, please don’t!” Lucian cried. Micah winced, tuning the volume down another notch. “I’ll do some kind of favor for you in return. Information for information—a proper trade! Or…I’ll help with, like, a mission or something.”

Micah glared at his monitor. “What information do you have that could possibly be helpful to me? I have access to most of the IPC’s database.”

The line went silent for a moment, and Micah rolled his eyes. As he was reaching for the phone to hang up, Lucian chimed back in.

“You guys don’t have much on the Beauty ever since THEY…went missing, right? I have plenty of info on that.”

Micah considered this for a moment. “In all honesty, I don’t give a shit about a dead aeon. However, I am…regrettably curious about why you seem to care about these logs so much. So you have a deal. Plus, it’s not like I have anything better to do at the moment.”

“Oh thank Idrila,” Lucian muttered. 

“What specific logs do you need?”

“There was a recent auction that offered up a mirror shard similar to the ones I use when I’m fighting,” Lucian explained as more shuffling came through the speaker. “I’m not sure what it was listed as, but as far as I can tell it was sold last November.”

Micah hummed to himself, doing a cursory search through his mech’s database just to find… Nothing. Micah sighed, rubbing an exasperated hand over his face as he disconnected his phone and prepared to power down his mech. While he’d been equipped with a new, top-of-the-line model, the IPC engineers had sacrificed computational power for mechanical power. His mech was stronger and faster than ever, but it was unable to access the full scope of the IPC’s expansive data logs.

“I’m going to have to sneak into one of the file rooms to find this, so you better be pretty damn grateful I even considered helping your sorry ass.” Micah grumbled as his pilot seat spun around, allowing him to slip out of the hatch that had opened at the back of his mech’s chassis.

“Oh no, I’m making you walk a whole 30 meters,” Lucian drawled sarcastically, scoffing into the receiver, “It’ll probably do you some good with how cooped up you must be in that tin can of yours.”

“I will hang up and march right back to that tin can if you don’t shut the hell up.” Micah snapped back, stalking through the spaceship’s austere, metal hallways with a bit more force than was strictly necessary.

“Sorry, sorry. I forgot how short your temper was. Is the massive stick up your ass part of the mandated uniform or..?”

Micah opened and closed his mouth several times before eventually giving up and ignoring the question altogether. “Anyways,” he spat, “We had a deal. So what's your personal stake in collecting these mirror shards?”

“Well,” Lucian began—and Micah hated the way he could still hear the lingering grin in his voice, the smug bastard—“it’s kind of a long story… How much do you know about the Mirrors of Transcendence?”

“Just that they’re a collection of relics that the Mirror Holders are convinced are shards of Idrila’s ‘divine form’ or something. One of the Xianzhou’s diviners confirmed it to some extent, I believe.”

“Load of bullshit,” Lucian muttered.

“Aren’t you working with them?” Micah replied incredulously, “I mean, from what I gathered the entire reason you went to that mining planet in the first place was to track down one of those mirrors…also, are they not why I’m about to go digging through an unholy amount of auction logs?”

“Working with them wasn’t exactly my first choice,” Lucian huffed, “and while I do believe there’s something more to the mirror shards themselves, the Mirror Holder’s overarching goal is to ‘reunify’ peoples’ perceptions of beauty, whatever the hell that means. Frankly, I believe it points to a fundamental misunderstanding of the path as a whole. I mean, Beauty itself is inherently subjective, so the very notion of attempting to ‘unify’ it is not only impossible but—”

Ah, fuck, Micah groaned to himself, Here go the floodgates. 

“While their…confusing intentions are certainly interesting, I must admit it still doesn’t answer any of my questions,” he deadpanned. One of the guards walking by gave him a weird look, which he shot right back with a withering glare. “Why do you want the mirror shards if you hate the guts of every Mirror Holder in the known universe?”

“Hate is a strong word,” Lucian hummed.

“Stop avoiding the question.”

Lucian snickered. “Impatient, much?”

“Well it’s not like I have all day,” Micah snarked, his frustration with the knight only growing stronger the more he talked. 

“I’m getting there! So, as you already know, the shards clearly have some sort of connection to Idrila. They’re able to reflect what the viewer sees as most Beautiful and project it into reality, which changes from person to person. Like I said, It's subjective for a reason-”

“For the love of Qlipoth, can you at least try to stay on topic?” Micah hissed into his receiver, rushing over to hold the door open for someone stumbling out of one of the monitor rooms, carrying a box overflowing with several stacks of reports balanced precariously on one arm. The haggard looking technician sent him a grateful nod before hurrying off, giving Micah the perfect opportunity to slip through the door into the darkened room without having to swipe his ID.

He flicked the nearby lightswitch back on as Lucian scoffed. “Are you sure you actually want to hear what I have to say? All you’ve done so far is interrupt me.”

“Whatever,” Micah muttered, rolling his eyes. “How about we switch topics. If you aren’t working for the Mirror Holders anymore, who are you working for? And what happens to all of the mirror shards you’ve collected?”

“I…turn them in to the Mirror Holders.”

“But did you not just say—”

“Again with the interrupting!” Lucian exclaimed, “Look, I know it sounds hypocritical, and I promise I’m going to explain, just give me a minute. I don’t have the resources or the connections to be able to unravel the secrets surrounding the Mirrors of Transcendence on my own. The Mirror Holders, however, have been doing this kind of work for decades. So while I don’t necessarily agree with the motives behind their research, I do think that the research itself can help further our understanding of Idrila and the true meaning of Beauty.”

“So you don’t think that piercing together all of the shards will homogenize people’s opinions on what is beautiful?” Micah asked, booting up one of the monitors plugged into the dozens of rows of thrumming computer banks that occupied the center of the room.

“Exactly,” Lucian confirmed, “but I do think it will accomplish… something. I’m not exactly sure what, but for years it’s been the only sort of lead I’ve had on The Beauty, and by this point I’ve devoted so much time to tracking down the shards that it would feel like a waste to abandon the cause entirely.”

“I suppose I can understand that…” Micah mused, balancing his phone between his ear and his shoulder as he began browsing through file after file of miscellaneous auction listings, searching for the correct date. “In that case, is that person you’re traveling with also helping you track down the shards? The tall one with the fancy armor that picked you up back at the oasis.”

Lucian laughed, the sound surprisingly warm even over the phone’s grainy speakers, “Argenti? No, it’s… complicated,” he said, as though that explained everything. “We have some…contrasting opinions on the subject. It’s the main reason I’m reaching out for help.”

Micah glanced down at his phone, waiting for further elaboration, but none came. “So is he trying to stop you from looking for them?” He prompted as he filtered through page after page of November sale listings.

“No, nothing like that.” Lucian hastily corrected. “He’s actually pretty supportive, all things considered. I think he won’t help out of principle…Honestly I don’t blame him, especially given how ridiculous the Mirror Holders’ beliefs are.”

Micah resisted the overwhelming urge to roll his eyes. Could this guy go five seconds without mentioning the Mirror Holders? “How’d you start traveling with him if you disagree so heavily about these shards? I feel like that’s a pretty big conflict of interest, no?”

The other line was silent for a moment. 

Eventually, Lucian seemed to gather his words. “That’s another… complicated story,” he began hesitantly. "The short end of it is that he’s agreed to take me on as an apprentice so that I can finish up my training and become an official member of the Honorclad. I’m still technically a squire, and it’s traditional for us to follow a more experienced knight for a few years before we officially set out on the Path of Beauty.”

Micah hummed his assent. “Sounds pretty similar to ranking up in the IPC,” he said. “At least for younger recruits.”

“Like you, I’m assuming?” Lucian asked. Micah could practically hear the eye roll.

“Obviously,” Micah muttered, scowling at the screen. How many auctions did the SID hold? This was taking an absurdly long time. “I was actually on the younger side…I’m pretty sure they first picked me up when I was, like…two? Three?”

“Holy shit, that’s, like, a baby,” Lucian interjected. “Did you start training that early?”

“Of course not,” said Micah with a scoff. “In what universe can a literal toddler do combat training? I joined the beginner program at 6. Most of my group was around…8-10ish, I think”

“Six!?” Lucian squawked. “I started 3 years early with the knights and I was still twice that! That has to be illegal.”

“That’s probably why you knights are…below average in strength. Instead of starting with healthy combat habits, you grew naturally. Makes them harder to overwrite.”

Now Lucian scoffed. “Weaker? Pretty sure I beat you in both of our previous fights.”

“There were extenuating circumstances,” Micah shrugged. “If it hadn’t been for—

“Oh, wait, I found it!” he exclaimed, cutting himself off mid-sentence as he finally scrolled past a file detailing the sale of a vaguely titled ‘magic mirror,’ along with several other artifacts that had been auctioned off during winter of the previous year.

“Already? From all the fuss you were making I assumed it'd take at least a little bit longer.” Lucian noted sarcastically.

“You’re just disappointed that you won’t have a captive audience to listen to your obsessive ramblings anymore.” Micah grumbled back, starting to seriously consider keeping the document as blackmail for a while longer as he downloaded a copy to his phone.

“How funny…I seem to remember you specifically asking for information about me as part of our deal.” Lucian replied smugly.

“I clearly didn’t know what I was getting myself into.” Micah huffed, jabbing at his phone screen with a bit more force than was strictly necessary as he sent the file over to Lucian.

“Well either way, it was a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Trust me, I won’t make the same mistake again.” Micah replied, rolling his eyes as he meticulously erased all traces of his activity from the computer.

“Whatever you say…” Lucian hummed, sounding far too proud of himself, “Please try not to get caught on the way back to your mech. I’d really prefer to avoid having to extort a new IPC officer the next time I need confidential information.”

“Oh shut up,” Micah said, a slight smirk tracing his lips. “You’ll have to anyways, ‘cause there’s no way in hell I’m doing this again.”

“Yeah, sure,” Lucian snickered. “I’ll just offer up my life story and you’ll come crawling back…Ok, but for real, thanks.”

Micah hesitated. “No worries,” he said after a moment. “Tell me if you find that fancy shard of yours. I kinda wanna see at least a picture of one.”

“Will do,” Lucian replied just before the line cut off, Micah’s music filling the empty silence that followed. Micah sighed as he slipped out of the monitor room into the empty hallway, trying to ignore the conflicting emotions settling uncomfortably in his stomach.

He’d just funneled classified information to someone who was a known enemy of the IPC. If Topaz ever found out…He sighed. Lucian wouldn’t do anything to hurt the IPC with some old auction logs. He may have been a bit of an asshole, but even for him that was unrealistic.

Micah was startled out of his head once again by a sharp chirp from his phone. He glanced down at it to see that Lucian seemed to have sent another text.

Lucian wracked his brain, attempting to recall the last things he’d seen before he blacked out. Micah had, somehow, found a way past his illusions and slammed his mech’s fist into Lucian’s side, Lucian remembered, grimacing as the pang in his chest flared up with renewed ferocity. After that things had grown… Fuzzy. Lucian had faded in and out of consciousness, desperately trying to maintain control as…

Fuck.

Lucian allowed his head to fall back against the side of the tent, instinctively raising his trembling hands to his face and finding it, just as he’d feared, bare of his usual bandages. Lucian cursed to himself as he found the discarded gauze looped around his neck, somehow managing to tug it back over his eye with bound hands.

He'd let his emotions take over, Lucian thought bitterly to himself as he tugged the bandages tight. He’d let himself spiral out of control and played himself right into Hyde's hands. Again.

The sound of shuffling pulled Lucian from his panicked thoughts. He glanced over at the source of the noise, squinting as he forced his eye to adjust to the dim light of the tent. A figure across from him was doubled over, attempting, not very successfully, to fish something out of the pouches on their belt with bound hands.

“Micah?” Lucian croaked, wincing at the roughness in his voice.

The figure froze for a moment, before looking up and meeting Lucian’s gaze with an irritated frown. “Finally finished your beauty rest?” Micah scoffed, turning his attention right back to the pouch at his waist.

Lucian opened his mouth to retort but cut himself off with a sharp inhale, his stomach dropping as he caught a glimpse of the nasty gash carving its way diagonally across Micah's face. 

Head wounds bleed a lot, Lucian of all people was very aware of this, but that didn't make the rivulets of crimson streaking Micah's face look any less grisly. Lucian felt the empty feeling in his gut turn sour, a sharp, gnawing guilt that could only be caused by one person. Hyde.

Lucian felt the sharp sting of tears welling up at the corners of his eye and quickly blinked them away, taking a deep, shaky breath as he shoved his guilt deep, deep down, until it no longer felt all consuming, and instead boiled quietly in the pit of his stomach. He forced himself to take stock of the situation, glancing up once more into the dim light of the tent.

The gash seemed to be the most pressing issue, as Micah didn't have any noticeable limp or other injuries, but he did seem to be a bit off balance. Lucian squinted, watching Micah with mounting concern as his hands kept fumbling clumsily with the clasps on his pouch, his gaze looking strangely... far away, as though he couldn't quite focus his eyes right. A concussion maybe? Shit, this wasn't good. What the hell had Hyde done?

"Do you... Need any help?" Lucian whispered, trying to keep his tone as open and friendly as possible. Micah paused, still doubled over in a contortion that made Lucian's bruised ribs ache just looking at him.

"No." Came the terse reply as Micah continued his search for... Whatever he had concealed in his pockets.

Lucian frowned, hovering anxiously for a moment, unsure of what to do. Finally, Micah let out a relieved exhale, straightening up with a palm-sized med kit clutched in both bound hands. He set the container on the ground, fumbling at the clasp with clumsy fingers as he removed a small, curved needle and a packet of suture thread.

Micah paused, squinting hard at the small needle as he pursed his lips in thought. He sighed, looking up and making eye contact with Lucian for the first time since this morning, which felt like a small lifetime ago in Lucian's mind. Lucian pressed back against the wall of the tent, swallowing nervously as he attempted to make himself look as non-threatening as possible. Petty rivalries aside, the last thing he needed to do was freak Micah out, especially given that their cooperation with each other could now mean life or death.

"Do you have a mirror I could borrow?"

Lucian sputtered, staring at Micah as though he'd suddenly grown a second head. "You're not seriously going to try and stitch that up yourself, are you?"

Micah's expression was completely deadpan as he leveled Lucian with a steely glare.

"...Right. I actually do, second pouch on the left. Unfortunately, I can't exactly bend down at the moment."

Lucian squeezed his eye shut as Micah leaned down over him, unable to watch as the gory evidence of his failure was thrown into sharp relief. Despite the darkness of the tent, it felt as though Lucian could trace every jagged edge of the wound, that familiar, sour feeling bubbling up into his gut as he realized that Micah would probably carry this mark with him for the rest of his life.

"Not your left, my left," Lucian choked out, forcing himself to claw his way out of his spiraling thoughts.

Micah drew back, clutching one of Lucian's mirror shards, and Lucian let out a shaky breath.

Lucian chewed his lip nervously as he watched Micah position the mirror in between his knees and carefully thread the needle. Well…attempt to thread the needle. The darkness of the room and his sudden, abnormal lack of fine motor skills were proving to be an unfortunate combination as he missed the eye of the needle once, twice, three times.

On the fourth failed attempt, Lucian finally spoke up, keeping his voice hushed with what he hoped was a gentle tone. "Let me try. You're going to poke one of your eyes out."

Micah's gaze snapped up to lock onto Lucian with a hostile glare. "I don't see why your one eye would fare any better than mine."

"I can actively see your hands shaking, even in the dark," Lucian pointed out with an exasperated huff, "Just... Come here a second."

Swiftly losing patience, Lucian reached out towards the mirror and crooked his fingers, tugging at the invisible thread that connected him to each shard. The glass vibrated for a moment before slowly floating up to hover just slightly over Micah's face, emitting a soft glow in the darkness of the tent.

Lucian slowly lifted his hand, extending it palm-up towards Micah as he motioned for the needle and suture thread.

“Please. Let me help,” he pleaded, keeping his voice soft and low.

“You were trying to kill me just a few hours ago, what’s with the sudden change of heart?” Micah scoffed, glancing down at Lucian’s proffered hand with a look of blatant disgust, “Is this some kinda bullshit addition to your hero complex?”

“Would you just tamp down your fucking ego for a second and actually accept a bit of help for once?” Lucian admonished, using the last dregs of his patience to keep his voice low enough so as not to accidentally alert the guards. 

Micah glared at him in silence for what felt like a small eternity before finally, with trembling hands, he passed the sutures to Lucian, his tense posture deflating as he let out a small puff of air.

Lucian let out a relieved sigh of his own, the tense atmosphere of the cramped space dissipating in the wake of Micah’s concession. Lucian slowly scooted himself closer to Micah, wincing as the motion jostled his tender ribs.

He held the needle up to the faint light of the mirror, slipping the suture thread through in one try. Despite his attempts at patience, Lucian couldn't resist shooting Micah a smug smirk, receiving only an irritated huff in response as the pilot rolled his eyes.

Lucian's smirk quickly faded as he realized the difficulty of the task at hand. The gash was deep, but it had stopped actively bleeding, leaving flaking streaks of red down Micah's nose and cheeks. Lucian grimaced, fishing an alcohol wipe out of the med kit and gently wiping off the dried blood, taking extra care to disinfect the wound as gently as possible.

“This might sting a bit, but it should only take a second.” He murmured as the mech pilot screwed his eyes shut.

Lucian set aside the antiseptic with a shaky breath, adjusting to get a better grip on the needle with his bound hands. He'd done basic first aid like this on himself countless times, but doing it to another person with his hands tied together was a different task entirely, especially when he was the one who had caused the wound in the first place. 

Lucian gripped the needle tighter, willing his hands to stop shaking as he leaned in close, squinting in the mirror’s dim light.

As he gently guided the needle through the ragged flesh at the edges of the wound, Lucian closely monitored Micah's expression, watching for any signs of pain or discomfort. To his surprise—and mild concern—Micah hardly even flinched, staring blankly into the darkness of the tent somewhere over Lucian's shoulder.

Perhaps the constant pain from the gash had numbed him to the needle’s pricks? But if that had been the case, then how had Lucian witnessed little to no reaction from the mech pilot since he'd woken up?

Lucian had minimal knowledge about the IPC and how they treated their employees, but from the few rumors he had heard during his travels, combined with Micah’s… disconcerting calm at having his face quite literally sliced in half, it painted a disturbing picture.

Lucian finished stitching up the wound as quickly as possible while working with less than half of his usual fine motor control in lighting that could be described as dim at best. While a bit crooked, and certainly more sloppy than his usual work, the sutures would at least stop the bleeding and seal the wound from the worst outside contaminants.

“The thing I'm the most worried about is it getting infected…” Lucian murmured with a slight grimace as he tied off the final knot. “We need to get you to an actual doctor and some proper medical care as quickly as possible. That means back to the trading outpost. Did you happen to see where they stashed our weapons?”

“Again with the self-righteousness,” Micah snarked, “Would you drop the whole ‘knight in shining armor’ bit already? I honestly preferred it when you were trying to kill me.”

“Do you wanna get out of here or not?” Lucian rolled his eye. He placed the needle back into the med kit and snapped the container shut with a sharp click, the gentle concern in his gaze instantly being swallowed up by irritation as he passed the kit back to Micah.

His grim expression immediately lost any weight it might have held due to the fact that his throbbing ribs still refused to allow him to twist down towards the pouches along his belt, and he was forced to recruit Micah's all too smug assistance once more to tuck the mirror shard away.

Lucian was certain that Micah lingered just a moment too long crouched in his personal space, but just as he opened his mouth to comment on it, the pilot had already leaned away, fixing Lucian with a serious expression of his own.

“There's a tent that seems to be functioning as an armory directly across the camp. Unfortunately, last I saw they had two men posted outside as guards, meaning that we'd have to sneak around the back.”

Lucian hummed thoughtfully, crossing his arms and trying not to let his mind linger on the creeping chill biting into his thin undershirt. Those bastards had the nerve to strip him of his armor while he'd been knocked out! He hadn't had the chance to dwell on it before, but he felt… strangely vulnerable without it.

“Any guards in front of our tent?”

“One. Pretty sure they think we're too injured to put up much of a fight.”

“I’m starting to get a bit worried that they might be right about that…”

Micah scoffed, “For you maybe, but one hit isn't enough to put me out of commission.”

“Hy- I nearly cleaved your skull in half! And I'm certain I landed far more than one hit, give me some credit here.”

“Oh did you land any others? Funny, they must have been so light that I couldn't tell,” Micah shot back with a half-assed smirk.

“I will rip those stitches right back out and leave you to rot in here, officer,” Lucian snapped, furious, flustered, and at an utter loss for what to do with the sudden heat that had risen to his cheeks. “We need to focus on figuring out a way to sneak into the armory without waking the entire camp.”

Micah rolled his eyes, a newfound mischief tugging at his lips as he raised his hands in mock surrender.

“It’s your call, captain,” the pilot drawled lazily, leaning back to observe Lucian with an expectant arch of his eyebrows. “You’ve clearly come to the, unfortunately accurate, conclusion that the only chance of us making it out of here alive is if we make it out together. I'm the only one who has any method of contacting a transport to get us back to the oasis, and your axe is the only weapon we've got that isn't scattered into a million pieces across the desert. Thanks for that, by the way.”

Whether his behavior was a result of the concussion or general assholery, Lucian couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t quite sure that he cared. Lucian closed his eye and took a deep breath, trying to remember some of the calming exercises Argenti had taught him.

“I have an idea on how to deal with the guard outside, as long as you’re sure that there’s just one.”

“I may have hit my head fairly hard earlier, but I’m pretty sure that makes you see double, so we should be in the clear.”

Lucian let out an exasperated groan, burying his head in his hands. “I can’t believe I'm stranded out here with you of all people… We might actually die…”

Lucian took another deep breath and counted backwards from ten, resisting the urge to simply bash his head into one of the tent poles and get this over and done with. No… even if he’d wanted to, Hyde would never let him.

“Ok, I have a plan, but I’m going to need one of my mirror shards again.”

“Again?” Micah shot him an unimpressed frown, “I just went through the whole ordeal of putting it away.”

“Well at the time I didn’t know I was going to need it again. Besides, it will take you at most five seconds.” Lucian huffed back, not thrilled with this development any more than Micah was.

Micah grumbled something nasty under his breath as he complied, leaning back in towards Lucian and fumbling with the pouch attached to his belt with bound hands.

One sliced finger and an unnecessary amount of swearing later, Lucian and Micah sat crouched next to the door of the tent, eyes carefully trained on a faint shadow reflected underneath the gap between the canvas and the floor.

After taking a moment to calculate the proper angle, Lucian slipped the mirror shard underneath the canvas flap and directed it to shoot upwards.

The tense silence was interrupted by a brief slicing sound as a dim flash of light sparked behind the tent wall.

Micah’s eyes widened in surprise as Lucian immediately whipped the door open and made a beeline for the source of the sound. A surprised yelp from outside was suddenly interrupted by another dull crunch before Lucian poked his head back into the tent.

“Ok, we’re clear for now. I’m assuming you remember the way to the armory?” Lucian stared at Micah expectantly for a few moments, blinking in confusion as the pilot continued to look up at him with a slightly bewildered expression. 

“…What is it? Are you coming or not?” Lucian asked.

After a few more moments of awkward silence, Lucian frowned and leaned over to haul Micah to his feet, practically dragging him out of the tent and past the crumpled body of a raider. “Come on, don't freeze up on me now. This isn’t exactly the best place to dawdle…who knows what kind of night patrols they have set up.”

Lucian nudged Micah forwards a couple of steps before the pilot shook his head sharply and finally seemed to come back to his senses.

“Couldn’t you just… cut through our ropes using that?” Micah asked, still looking slightly taken aback as he gestured to the shard with his bound hands, eyeing the shard with a bit more trepidation than he had before.

“Well, yes, in theory… But with how thick the material is it would probably take nearly a quarter of an hour to free us both… and without knowing what the security or patrol situation is like here that’s just not time we have to spare.”

Micah nodded, uncharacteristically agreeable as he silently turned and began to lead Lucian through the messy rows of tents, looping around the back of the encampment towards a nondescript structure located in the opposite corner.

They were frequently forced to dart around tents to dodge the small group of raiders patrolling the perimeter of the camp, crouching low and hoping that the sound of their shuffling wasn’t enough to wake the tent’s inhabitants.

While the effects of his injury hadn’t been as obvious when they were sitting down, Micah’s steps were slowly becoming more and more uncoordinated as they crept forward, on multiple occasions forcing Lucian to yank him back from veering off and stumbling into a tent wall. After the third time Lucian kept his bound hands firmly planted on Micah’s shoulder, steering him forward as he pointedly ignored the pilot’s irritated grumblings about how he wasn’t a toddler and was perfectly capable of walking on his own.

“Are you sure this is it?” Lucian asked, leaning forward to whisper in Micah’s ear as the pair came to a stop behind the tent nestled securely into the far corner of the encampment.

Micah tensed under Lucian’s hand, turning to shoot him an irritated glare. “How many times do I have to tell you? This is where I saw them stash our weapons. If they’re not here then they were moved after we were shoved into that damn tent.”

“Okay okay, I believe you, I’m just trying to make sure.” Lucian took a small step back, trying to keep his expression as neutral and inoffensive as possible. This was a delicate situation, and he and Micah could not afford to get into another screaming match less than fifty feet away from the two guards Lucian had spotted in front of the armory.

“I’m going to slip around and handle the two raiders standing guard, and before you say anything,” Lucian hurriedly continued as Micah's mouth immediately opened to protest, “I know that you’re more than a match for them, but that's under usual circumstances. I don’t give a shit how high your pain tolerance is—a concussion is a concussion, and right now you can’t even walk in a straight line.”

“Do you seriously expect me to just sit here and wait?” Micah hissed, his eyes narrowing as he took a threatening, if a bit unbalanced, step forward.

“Pretty much.” Lucian nodded as he reached out and gently but firmly forced Micah to the ground, opening his palm and allowing the mirror shard to hover menacingly just a few short inches from the pilot’s face, his message clear. “You’ll either get hurt or get in the way.”

Micah hurled whispered curses at Lucian’s retreating form, glaring up at the knight with a look of pure, unbridled rage as the mirror seemed to glint smugly down at him.

Lucian let out a long breath, hoping Micah wouldn’t hold his… admittedly rather harsh methods against him for too long. Putting the incident out of his mind, he crouched low along the wall just around the corner from the two guards, peeking his head out for the briefest moment to get an idea of their general positions.

Flexing his fingers, Lucian took a moment to steel himself before leaping around the corner and raising his bound hands above his head, only to bring them crashing down on the back of the first raider’s skull with a dull thud. 

Lucian immediately followed the attack with a swift kick to the man’s back, not giving him any time to recover from the first blow before he was sent hurtling to the ground. Lucian stomped on his neck for good measure, hoping to crush his windpipe and prevent him from alerting the patrol unit.

Startled, the second raider let out a shrill cry of alarm that was quickly cut short as the mirror shard whizzed around the corner and buried itself solidly in the woman’s throat. Panting, Lucian called the mirror shard back to his palm, choosing to ignore the sound of stumbling footsteps rounding the corner before coming to a sudden halt.

“Come on, we've only got a couple of minutes before the patrol finds these two.” Lucian nodded towards the tent, stepping inside without meeting Micah’s gaze.

—

The familiar weight of his armor settling on his chest and shoulders finally eased that horrible feeling of vulnerability that had been slowly eating at him ever since he'd woken up. His fingers curling around the well worn leather of his axe handle banished it entirely, despite the sharp stab of pain that sliced between his ribs as he gave it an experimental swing.

Reclaiming their weapons was certainly a big step forward, especially once they were able to slice through their bonds with the help of Lucian's axe, but they were still both heavily injured. Especially Micah, whose eyes had gone slightly unfocused as he held his reclaimed brass knuckles in a loose grip.

Lucian settled a gentle hand on his shoulder, taking a small step back when Micah flinched at the sudden contact. “Woah, hey, I'm just checking in. How's your head feeling?”

“Like someone took an axe to it, thanks for asking.” Micah spat, shrugging off Lucian's hand with an irritated scowl.

“...right.” The pair fell into a tense silence for a moment before Lucian hesitantly spoke up once more, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. “Is there anything else of yours in here? I… know your mech is pretty much out of commission.”

“I'm just surprised they were able to salvage parts from it so quickly.” Micah replied with a shrug, looking over the messy bundles of cords and piles of metal shells that had once been one of the most formidable pieces of IPC technology, now shoved haphazardly into a corner.

“You don't seem all that torn up about it.” Lucian remarked, watching Micah’s slightly detached expression with growing interest. What was this guy's deal? If Lucian's axe had been destroyed and stripped for parts he'd be devastated. But Micah… hardly seemed to care at all.

Micah shrugged again, pocketing his phone from one of the many shelves of confiscated gear before making his way back towards the entrance of the tent. “It's just a tool, I can request a new one when I get back. Besides, I've been hoping to get some upgrades for a while now… the reaction time on that model was total crap.”

Lucian's brow furrowed in confusion, but he didn't question the pilot any further as he followed him out into the silent desert night.

—

“You wouldn't happen to have a compass in one of those pockets by chance, would you?” Lucian asked once they'd managed to put a substantial distance between themselves and the raider camp. The lack of cover in the rolling expanse of sand made Lucian slightly nervous, but there was nothing to be done about it. In all honesty, they'd been more than lucky to make it as far as they already had, Lucian just had to pray that their luck would hold out a little longer.

“No… but my phone actually has a faint signal. It's not enough to contact anyone yet, but it does mean that we shouldn't be too far from the outpost.” Micah replied, tilting his phone screen to show Lucian the faint bar flickering just at the top of the screen.

“So… just follow wherever the signal is strongest? Like a homing beacon?”

“Exactly. Once I've got enough of a connection to make a call, I'll send Topaz our coordinates and ask her to send someone to pick us up.”

Lucian's eye narrowed. “Hang on. Do you mean Topaz as in the Stoneheart Topaz?”

“Obviously? How many other Topazes have you met?” Micah scoffed.

“...Just how high up are you in the IPC?” Lucian muttered, glancing over at Micah with renewed interest as the two trudged through the seemingly endless swells of sand dunes.

“Well my official title is Direct Assistant to the Stonehearts of the Strategic Investment Department-”

“Damn the IPC are wordy… I guess that explains all the acronyms…” Lucian muttered to himself, looking slightly amused.

“Are you going to let me finish?” Micah asked, shooting Lucian that same irritated glare that he was swiftly becoming all too familiar with.

Lucian raised his hands in surrender, making a show of zipping his lips and flicking away the key. Micah rolled his eyes, but Lucian thought he might have noticed the mech pilot’s glare soften just slightly.

“On paper, that all essentially means that I have seniority over the employees within the Strategic Investment Department—other than the Stonehearts, of course. But what it means in practice is that they send me off to do all of their dirty work.”

Lucian hesitated, conflicted on whether he should feel impressed or mildly concerned. For someone so young to have climbed the corporation’s ranks so quickly… Lucian couldn’t help but wonder what he’d done, or what had been done to him, in order to get him there. “Well… Do you like it at least?”

“Of course.” Micah replied, almost a little too quickly. “It’s hard work, but it’s fulfilling. Besides, I don’t think there’s another job out there that would be more tailored to my strengths.”

“What, beating shit up from inside a tin can?” Lucian asked with an amused smirk.

“Exactly.” Micah agreed, his sharp grin suddenly cut off by a pained grimace as the motion pulled unpleasantly at his stitches. He quickly brushed past it, either not catching or simply ignoring Lucian’s look of concern as he continued on. “And I have access to all the latest technology pretty much as soon as it's released, meaning the piloting never gets old.”

“Where did you learn how to pilot anyway?” Lucian asked curiously, jumping at the chance to actually have the questions that had been clamoring in his mind answered. He wasn’t quite sure if Micah’s sudden… Well, friendliness was a bit of a stretch, but willingness to hold an actual conversation that didn’t just consist of hurling insults back and forth was a result of the concussion or actual good will, but he was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“I’ve been piloting for most of my life at this point, and obviously I wasn’t always ranked as high as I am now, so whoever my superior officer was would train me and give me pointers.”

“But… Why'd you start?” Lucian asked, unable to help himself from digging deeper as he unconsciously shifted closer to Micah.

“It seemed interesting.” Micah replied with a noncommittal shrug. “And I wasn’t good at any of the diplomatic shit so… Fists it was.” Micah punctuated his words with a couple lazy air punches, his brass knuckles glinting in the moonlight.

Lucian’s eye darted down to Micah’s hands, lingering on the mech pilot’s brass knuckles before he asked, “Are you any good with those? I’ve never seen you fight outside your mech so…”

“No, I just carry them around because I think they look pretty.” Micah scoffed, rolling his eyes as he slipped off the weapons and stuffed them into his pocket.

“You know what I meant…” Lucian huffed, crossing his arms as he turned away from Micah with an indignant frown.

Micah chuckled, not bothering to hide his amusement. “I did. It’s just funny to see you get so grumpy about it.”

Lucian, for some strange reason, felt his cheeks get a bit hot. Without allowing his gait to falter and potentially alert the pilot that something was off, he continued to stare moodily off to the side, counting sand dunes until he felt it was safe to turn back.

“I’m definitely more skilled with my mech, but I can hold my own just fine in a fist fight.” Micah finally answered with a confidence that only served to peak Lucian’s interest further. He had just opened his mouth to ask Micah if he'd be willing to do a rematch if they ever made it out of this desert alive… but as he turned towards him, his eye caught on the line of messy stitches bisecting across his face… and he immediately shut his mouth as the all too familiar weight of guilt settled deep in his stomach.

“But enough about me, what’s up with you and those bandages?”

Lucian shook himself out of his reverie, only to be immediately thrown head first into another bout of internal conflict. He reached his hand up, tugging self consciously at the strips of bandages that had fallen slightly loose during their escape until they were wrapped securely around his head.

Should he tell Micah about Hyde? What did the pilot think had happened when Lucian lost control and nearly cleaved his skull in half? While it might make him appear less guilty from an outside perspective, Lucian knew it was still his fault for allowing his emotions to get the better of him, for playing right into Hyde’s hands and giving him the opportunity to take control. 

No… He shouldn’t give himself the opportunity to hide from the consequences of his own actions. It was all too tempting to pin the incident entirely on Hyde, better to simply erase that possibility entirely. Besides, he was actually managing to have a normal, civil conversation with Micah for once, and he found that he didn’t want to jostle this fragile truce they’d somehow stumbled into. Hyde’s existence wasn’t exactly common knowledge, and he didn’t want to have to face the potential disgust or anger that could come with such a revelation.

Mind made up, Lucian lowered his hand and turned to Micah with an awkward smile. “Just an old injury from when I was a kid. It still flares up sometimes, so it’s nice to wrap it in something that’s easy to change.”

Micah stared at Lucian, his brow furrowed as his eyes traced over the barely-visible edge of a scar peeking out from underneath the bandages. Lucian chuckled nervously.

“...Can I see it?” Micah asked after a long pause.

Lucian spluttered in surprise, taken aback by the pilot’s sudden bluntness. “What the hell?! No!”

“Why not?” Micah pouted, having the gall to look disappointed.

Before Lucian had the chance to properly beat a lesson on boundaries into that thick skull, concussion be damned, he was suddenly distracted by a shrill ping chiming from Micah’s pocket. “Oh! Hey does that mean we aren’t going to die of dehydration out here?” Lucian asked, suddenly in a much better mood.

Micah fished his phone out of his pocket, a conflicted expression flashing across his face as he nodded his confirmation. “Yes. I should have enough of a signal to send out a distress call to Topaz. That woman is always on her phone, if the message actually gets through all we’ll have to do is hang tight for a half hour or so.”

It may have been Lucian’s imagination but Micah’s tone almost sounded a bit bittersweet. Lucian didn’t quite know where to go from here. He supposed he felt the same as Micah, after all… this was it, right? They would have to act like complete strangers to the IPC employees who came to pick them up, lest Lucian attract unwanted attention. 

But damn it, Micah was interesting. Lucian wasn’t quite sure why but he found himself unsatisfied by their relatively brief interaction. Sure he hated the guy… Well, maybe hate wasn’t the right word anymore. He certainly found him irritating, if nothing else, but even that didn’t erase the sense of camaraderie they had reluctantly developed during their escape.

No. He didn’t want this to end… He just didn’t know how to take that final step.

He was startled out of his thoughts by the sound of a piece of paper being ripped in half. “Here.” Micah grumbled, his brows furrowed as he shoved a torn sheet of notepad paper into Lucian’s hand. Lucian’s eye widened in surprise as he saw a string of numbers scrawled messily onto the note, his hand unconsciously tightened on the paper, crumpling its edges slightly as he looked up at Micah, the question evident on his face.

“Use it or don’t.” Micah said with a bored shrug, turning away from Lucian and plopping down onto the sand to type out his message to Topaz.

Lucian joined him a few moments later, looking vaguely shell shocked as he stared down at the phone number clutched tightly in his hand.

Yes, it was true that he didn’t want his interactions with Micah to end here… But for him to offer Lucian his contact? Even after all Lucian had done? Skull splitting aside, Lucian had killed, or at least gravely injured, three people in front of him. At the time it had been a necessary evil, but… even still.

“Could I borrow that notepad for a second?” Lucian asked, the words coming out more hastily than he’d intended.

Micah wordlessly passed the small pad and pen over to Lucian, his conflicted expression noticeably easing as Lucian wrote out his own phone number before handing it back to him.

The two sat in comfortable silence for a moment, looking out over the rolling sand dunes as the first rays of the morning sun began to crest over the furthest swells. After what might have been five minutes or twenty, Lucian couldn’t trust himself to be sure, a plume of dust on the horizon signaled that their time together had almost come to an end.

Keeping his eye fixed ahead on the transport ship rapidly drawing closer to their dune, Lucian spoke with more calm than he felt, “I’ll use it. …Your number I mean. Thank you for giving it to me.”

Curse that foolish, meddling knight for involving himself in matters that had absolutely nothing to do with him… It wasn’t as though he had any sort of personal stake in the matter, he wasn’t even from the damn planet! What could he possibly have to gain from helping the locals? Micah sighed, allowing his head to tip back against the warm metal of his mech and immediately flinched back as the sun flashed directly into his eyes.

Micah cursed loudly, rubbing at his eyelids until the spots of color quit flashing in the corners of his vision. This stupid dust-bowl of a planet… Micah couldn’t wait for his “temporary reassignment” to be over.

A loud crash from one of the many stalls cramped inside the trading outpost forced Micah back into the present. Micah cursed again, setting down his clipboard and stalking over to the source of the sound. Of course the one moment he’d decided to slack off on his guard duties some idiot decided to go and cause trouble.

As he approached the nearby booth, which seemed to be selling an assortment of spaceship repair components, Micah thought he caught a note of a familiar voice speaking a hurried apology. Rolling his eyes, he quickly brushed it off as his own mind getting caught up in the memories of his all-to-recent failure.

It seemed as though a customer had managed to fumble a particularly heavy piece of machinery, which had in turn knocked several display pieces from their shelves. The shopkeeper only looked vaguely irritated, yet the blonde man in front of the booth appeared ready to bolt at any moment as he frantically hurried to clean up his mess. It was only when the customer glanced nervously over his shoulder that Micah froze, finding himself staring at an all-too-familiar face.

Micah flinched, his expression morphing into a nasty scowl as his eyes settled on the very knight whose meddling had gotten him assigned to this hellhole in the first place. The knight clearly recognized him even though Micah had been piloting his mech the first time they met. It must have been Micah’s cursing earlier that set him on the alert, the shock of hearing the familiar voice causing him to drop whatever spaceship part he’d been examining.

The knight fidgeted anxiously, a conflicted expression flashing across his bandaged face as he took a slight step back, clearly wanting to flee this interaction as quickly as possible. Absolutely not. Micah wasn’t about to let him walk off and pretend like this had never happened. It may only be a small, IPC trading post situated in the middle of a deserted wasteland, little more than an interstellar rest-stop, but this was still Micah’s territory. He refused to allow himself to rot here, stewing in his own boredom and rage until the IPC chose to take pity on him and accept him back into their good graces once more. No, he would take full advantage of this golden opportunity to show that idiotic knight just what his little “savior act” had managed to accomplish.

Micah wrestled his livid expression back into a cold indifference, glaring over at the knight as he stalked towards him. The knight swallowed, glancing desperately around the rows of stalls as though searching for someone to bail him out of the impending confrontation.

“Listen…” Lucian began, keeping his voice carefully composed, “I realize that we’ve had our… conflicts in the past, but I honestly have no quarrel with you personally. I was only trying to help those miners out of the shit the IPC got them stuck in.”

“I don't need any of your damn excuses,” Micah spat, the knight’s even tone only serving to make the hand at his side clench into an angry fist, “your actions speak loud enough. Besides, I’d prefer to keep the amount of time I’m forced to listen to your voice to a minimum.”

Lucian reached up and tugged the bandages wrapped around his right eye tighter, his irritation mounting. “You must recognize that what the IPC was doing to that planet was wrong, if not borderline illegal. I couldn't just sit back while you strip-mined their only valuable export! An export that, might I remind you, could only be harvested in very specific amounts in order to maintain the integrity of the planet’s natural ecosystem.”

Micah scoffed, “Did I ask for more of your ramblings? Aeons, you talk so much it’s a surprise your voice hasn’t gone hoarse.”

Why should Micah have to justify the IPC’s actions to this sheltered brat with his ‘holier-than-thou’ sense of ideals? The IPC was an organization devoted to improving the lives of all those it chose to strike deals with, why would they ever act in their own partners’ disinterest? Everything was constructed on a foundation of mutual benefit.

“Fine,” Lucian shot back, rolling his eye, “Keep living under their thumb. With that nasty temper of yours it’s probably better to have someone keeping you on a short leash anyway.”

Micah’s hand thumbed the set of brass knuckles stored securely in his front pocket, his plans for a mere verbal confrontation starting to look less and less appealing. “At least I have a path I’ve chosen in life, rather than floating listlessly from planet to planet searching for… oh what was it again?” Micah asked, his tone noticeably mocking as he mimed putting a finger to his chin as though deep in thought. “Oh right! Some shiny glass shards that somehow you’ve been convinced are the divine body of your dead aeon.”

Lucian took an instinctive step back, his eye widening in shock and mild hurt. Even the shopkeep, who was still trying to tidy up his booth, winced, glancing nervously between the two before slowly reaching out and sliding the curtains at the front of his stall shut, blocking out the swiftly mounting tension.

“What the hell is your problem?” Lucian asked, “You’re the one who approached me! Was it just to insult me and my life decisions?”

“I could ask the same of you.” Micah retorted, “Do you really expect me to believe you just happened to stumble upon this random, middle-of-nowhere trading outpost out of all the other space ports out there? No, I can tell when someone’s come to gloat.”

“Are you really such a narcissist to believe that I somehow found a way into the IPC’s employee assignment records, tracked you down to this pitiful rock, and wasted the fuel to get here all in order to rub it in your face that I… What? Beat you in one fight?” Lucian snorted, shaking his head in disdain, “Be realistic. I may be ‘floating listlessly from planet to planet,’ but even I have better things to do with my time than stalk some corporate lackey.”

Micah felt his left eye twitch. He was gonna punch this guy so hard he forgot his own name. “You wouldn’t have been able to claim that victory anyway without the environmental advantage. Those mines were so cramped I couldn’t even get my mech to stand up straight.”

“Do you seriously think that clunky heap of scrap is fast enough to keep up with me? I land one solid hit to any of the joints and you’re out of commission.” Lucian replied with a sharp smile, taking a slow step forward as his hand drifted up to rest threateningly on the handle of the battleaxe strapped to his back.

Micah raised his eyebrows, crossing his arms as he met Lucian’s smirk with a look of cool indifference. “Why don’t we find out?”

A spark of excitement flashed in Lucian’s eye as he stared down at Micah, his hand tightening around his axe. “Alright. Go suit up in your tin can and we can deal with this somewhere less… populated.”

“Of course, we wouldn't want me knocking you into some poor vendor's stall…”

“Oh shut up and grab your mech.” Lucian huffed, shaking his head in exasperation as he spun on his heel and strode off towards the market’s entrance.

—

Micah grunted, skidding backwards in the loose sand as sparks flew from the fortified metal of his mech’s forearms. Despite the size advantage his mech gave him, the raw power behind each of Lucian’s swings was nothing to scoff at, and Micah found his armor sporting several more dents than he’d care to admit. Not to mention, there seemed to suddenly be… three of him?

A few minutes earlier, Lucian had darted out of Micah’s range, taken something out of the pouch on his waist, exhaled over it, and tossed it to the side before launching himself back into the fight. Preoccupied with defending himself against the sudden onslaught of attacks, Micah didn’t notice the… Copies? Clones? Of Lucian that had darted around behind him until twin blows struck the backs of his mech’s knees, sending him reeling off-balance.

Lucian had managed to partially sever the joint on his mech’s left shoulder soon after, its movements sluggish and delayed as it spat out a shower of angry sparks, rendering it nearly useless. Micah, in turn, had left Lucian with several nasty gashes across the relatively-exposed flesh of his unarmored legs and arms, blood staining the sand crimson as the three Lucians staggered forwards, seemingly unbothered by their matching limps.

Micah gritted his teeth, toggling his artillery to fire into the clustered group, only to have each copy narrowly dance out of the way, darting forward into a close enough range where Micah was forced to cease fire or risk literally shooting himself in the foot. Growing progressively more frustrated, Micah swung his blade down towards the nearest image of Lucian, only to have it pass harmlessly through the reflection and land heavily in the sand. The fake Lucian had the gall to wink at him, before scrambling off to mix itself between the other two in an infuriating parody of a game with a ball under three cups Micah recalled seeing some of the other IPC officers play during slow afternoons.

The three reflections threw themselves forwards in rapid succession, refusing to give Micah a moment to breathe. His HUD spit out an overwhelming barrage of proximity alerts and error messages as his mech was repeatedly knocked backwards with the force of the blows. Lucian’s movements, once a unified blur of motion carefully choreographed to distract his opponent, were now choppy and erratic. The raw power behind each swing of his axe was still devastating, but it lacked the usual finesse he’d possessed at the beginning of their fight.

Getting hit with a sudden burst of inspiration, Micah flipped a set of switches and set his monitor to infrared vision. While the two copies were certainly adept at creating openings and making it harder to anticipate Lucian’s next movements, they didn’t seem to be able to land any substantial blows of their own. Micah grinned as his fingers flew across the panels of buttons lining the mech’s interior. He hastily reactivated his turrets and directed them to target the smudge of red that marked Lucian’s form, which was currently hidden behind two paler figures that must have been his reflections.

Lucian easily dodged the first rounds, sending one of his duplicates forward to divert Micah’s attention, but the bolts of energy kept coming, crackling as they sped through the air towards Lucian with a frightening accuracy. It was harder to see Lucian’s expression with the infrared filter, his surroundings painted in cool blue tones interrupted by the occasional burst of red and yellow, but Micah hoped he hadn’t imagined the way the knight’s eye seemed to widen in panic as a blast grazed past his ear.

Realizing he only had a few moments before Lucian regained his composure, Micah rushed forward, shouldering past the two reflections, and swung his sword down towards Lucian. Despite being caught off guard by Micah’s sudden disregard for his illusions, Lucian still managed to sidestep the blade—directly into the path of the mech’s fist. A loud clang echoed across the empty dunes as Lucian reeled backwards, skidding across the loose sand as he was knocked off balance with the force of the blow. Crumpling to his knees, Lucian let out a pained groan and clutched, not at his side where he had just received a solid blow, but at his head.

Micah paused, squinting at his monitor as he clicked his infrared vision off. He could clearly see Lucian clawing at the bandages wrapped tightly over his right eye like a man possessed. The lack of activity on his mech’s motion sensors informed him that the two clones seemed to have dissipated, or at least frozen in place when their leader collapsed. Lucian was gasping, attempting to stand up on trembling legs before falling back down onto the sand. Micah scoffed, piloting his mech forward to close in on Lucian while he was still knocked prone. 

Micah had hit him hard, the officer thought to himself, but not this hard. Either the knight was simply being dramatic, or it turned out he wasn’t quite as tough as he tried to present himself. Before Micah was in close enough range to launch an attack, the distressed sounds below him suddenly stopped. Only to be quickly replaced by… Laughter? Wild, unrestrained laughter that pierced through the uncanny silence of the desert, causing Micah to pause his movements once more.

Lucian slowly hauled himself to his feet, successfully this time, still holding one hand over his right eye, but no longer acting as though he was trying to gouge out whatever was hidden beneath the bandages. For a long, quiet moment, everything was perfectly still. Lucian stood, posture rigid as he stared blankly off into the dunes, before slowly and purposefully tugging the layers of bandages down around his neck, exposing a dark, gaping socket where his right eye should have been. Micah, accompanied by an inexplicable sense of mounting dread, cringed as he noticed that there seemed to be some thick, dark liquid oozing from the socket as though it were an open wound.

“I do believe I owe you a bit of thanks,” Lucian crooned, his voice oddly smooth around the edges, “You’re awfully good at getting him riled up… Almost as good as me, although I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he praised in that same oily voice.

Lucian wasn’t making any sense…had Micah actually managed to give him a concussion? He could have sworn the punch didn’t make contact with his skull, but perhaps Lucian had sustained damage earlier in the fight that was just now becoming noticeable? If he was just rambling nonsense, why was Micah suddenly starting to feel cold sweat bead underneath the neck of his uniform?

Micah took a cautious step back, keeping his turrets trained on Lucian’s every movement. “Unfortunately, my gratitude doesn’t mean much.” Lucian continued, his sharp grin bordering on a leer as he responded to Micah’s retreat with a matching step forward, his tone unbothered. “However, I do appreciate the opening you’ve given me. He’s been annoyingly vigilant with those mental barriers lately, and it gets awfully stuffy up there.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Micah demanded, attempting to drown out the anxious energy buzzing in his limbs with anger as he brandished his sword towards Lucian, bristling with rage as the blonde simply tilted his head towards the mech in amusement.

“I’m afraid we don’t have all that much time before that poor excuse for a knight is able to suppress me again,” Lucian huffed with an irritated roll of his eye, “and I have so been looking forward to having a proper spar with you.” That creepy grin was back as Lucian took another threatening step forward, spinning the handle of his axe around his forearm and into an unfamiliar fighting stance.

Micah instinctually shifted down into a defensive position, raising his forearms to guard his mech’s chassis and visor. “Have we not been sparring this whole time?” Micah gritted out, but rather than dignifying him with an answer, Lucian dashed forward with a burst of speed that Micah’s motion sensors barely had time to warn him of before the view of his entire monitor was obscured by a mad, sharp-toothed grin.

“Oh fuck-” Micah cursed as the groan of straining metal echoed throughout his mech, a swarm of warnings flooding his moniter before the lights in the cockpit fizzled with a surge of electricity and went dark. 

—

Hyde smirked, wiping the blood from his mouth after cleaving his axe down into the mech’s head. 

The helmet clattered to the ground with the rest of the mech not far behind. That IPC grunt’s head was visible from the top of the mech, and when Hyde returned the axe to his side it was dripping with blood. 

“Thought that would be harder,” he muttered, to no one in particular.

Hyde swung the axe over the top of his head, preparing to make the final blow, but paused as he caught the faint sound of muffled footsteps creeping up behind him. Just as he was about to whip around and face his unwelcome audience, Hyde briefly felt something slip underneath the metal of his breastplate before his entire body exploded with stinging pain. His weapon dropped from his hands with a soft thud against the packed sand behind him as Hyde convulsed, every muscle in his body protesting violently as he collapsed to the ground.

As Hyde’s vision began to fade, his limbs going numb with the pain, a dark figure crouched over him, silhouetted by the harsh sunlight. 

“I would say I was sorry about this,” the man said in the strange, warbled tone of a voice modulator, “but I’m really not.”

He bit his lip. He didn’t really want that, of course, or else he wouldn’t have applied for a switch in the first place. He sighed again, clicked his comm channels closed and leaned forward to rest his chin into his hand. Soft music drifted through his internal speakers, and he found himself beginning to drift to sleep. 

“Officer Micah, we seem to have a situation.”

Micah startled, fumbling to reopen the tab containing his comm links. “Ah, Avery,” he said, reading the contact name of this unknown agent. Since when has there been an Avery on his team? He really needed to review the roster Topaz gave him… “What’s happening? I haven’t heard anything over any of the other channels.”

“Seems there actually a reason for that,” Avery said. Micah could hear the frown in his voice. “Several agents have been knocked out.”

Micah could feel a frown growing on his own face. “Is there any evidence of a fight?”

Avery hummed noncommittally. “Seems possible…none of the surrounding areas have been attacked or pillaged, so it likely wasn’t a robber, but the agents all have some form of gashes, likely from a sword, axe, or something similar.”

Micah’s scowl only deepened. “Could it be local rebels?”

“Unlikely. We aren’t really near any inhabited—Hey, stop that!” a loud thud, followed by some shuffling and then a harsh crunching sound echoed from the other line, and Micah’s eyes widened as the line fell into static.  

“Avery?” He asked. “Agent Avery, do you copy?”

He received no response. 

Definitely an attacker, then, Micah nodded to himself. He began to properly power on his mech as he closed the communication line. He sent a brief description of the situation to Topaz and set out toward this “Avery’s” last known location. 

—

Lucian was starting to get sick of these IPC grunts. 

He bent over and pulled out his most recent target’s in-ear communication device, dropped it on the ground, and stomped it into the dirt. 

“Can’t have a single day without you fuckers,” he muttered. He gripped the handle of his axe tighter, and began marching further into the little base they had set up. He didn’t have long now…that guard had definitely been contacting their leader. 

As had happened more often than one would hope, the moment that Lucian had arrived on this poor planet the locals had practically begged him to clear out the IPC. They had evidently been stealing local resources and completely refusing any form of negotiation. 

Are these idiots able to go a single day without touching something that’s not theirs?

He shoved that thought down, and took a slow breath. Just take care of these grunts for the townspeople and then find the mirror shard…surely it couldn’t be too hard, right? He’d cleared out plenty of IPC encampments in his time with the Mirror Holders, and for the most part it wasn’t even a particularly challenging endeavor. The average IPC worker was much weaker than you’d imagine. 

Famous last words, he thought grimly. 

While he was fairly confident the mirror shard wouldn’t be held here, Lucian supposed it couldn’t hurt to check. He slipped through the camp without much luck. He didn’t run into any guards—or people in general, for that matter. Are they so cocky they only bother with a couple sprinkled around the front entrance? 

He was drawn out of his thoughts abruptly as the mirror shard in the pouch strapped to his belt began vibrating. 

Finally, something, he exhaled in relief. In one swift movement, he swung his axe over his shoulder and fastened it into place. He slid two fingers into the pouch to fish the shard out. 

When he removed it, his heart clenched as the flicker of a familiar campfire reflected on the mirror’s surface. He shook his head to rid himself of the thought, and allowed the shard to float in front of him. It didn’t seem to be shaking as much now that it wasn’t contained in his pocket, so he wasn’t as close to the next shard as he had hoped. However, at this point, anything was progress. The shard seemed to glow brighter when pointed north, so he exited the camp without a second glance.

-

The walk was slow and, if Lucian was being frank, draining. The environment in this rainforest was not exactly suited for long walks. Not only were there plenty of vines and roots to trip over, the humidity made his shirt cling uncomfortably to his back and chest. He swallowed hard, clutching the mirror in his palm. “I’m going to take the most amazing shower after this…” he muttered to no one in particular. 

After what felt like several hours of walking, Lucian arrived at another IPC encampment. Unlike the previous one, this camp was bustling with people, only some of whom were in the standard IPC armor. In fact, he recognized several of them as the townspeople he had met earlier in the week. He quickly ducked behind a tree, and assessed the mirror shard in his hand. It was vibrating so strongly that he was struggling to keep hold of it. The next piece had to be somewhere in the encampment, which meant he had to get past these guards.

“Man, I cannot wait to be done here,” one of them groaned. 

A second guard snickered. “Don’t let Topaz’s newest guard dog hear that,” he said. “I heard he used to work for Jade doing ‘clean up,’” he added. “He’s so loyal to the IPC he’d probably kill someone for them without a second thought.”

Lucian rolled his eye, irritation bubbling in his gut. This was the last thing he needed to be dealing with right now.

“Dude, you probably shouldn’t be gossiping about that kind of guy,” a third chimed in. He sounded nervous. “He’s technically our boss now…Do you want to get fired?”

Lucian’s scowl deepened. So they were probably talking about the person the other guard had been contacting.

“They forced me on anyway,” the second guard waved dismissively. “If I get fired it just means I can go back home to my girlfriend.”

The first rolled his eyes. “You’re gonna get us all in trouble. Just do your job."

The guards settled back into silence, leaving Lucian alone with his thoughts. He fiddled with the bandage covering his eye as he reviewed his options. Realistically, he didn’t have all that long until this mysterious boss showed up. It wouldn’t be difficult to track him to the main base of operations if it seemed like he was hunting the IPC. He couldn’t exactly attack head on—while he was confident he could take these three grunts, there were enough people around that he would be noticed the second he appeared. 

He peaked back out around the tree, assessing the few civilians he recognized from town. They all seemed to be in normal clothes, with some small amounts of padding. A few were wearing typical mining helmets, but even those seemed scarce. While his chest piece was far too conspicuous, Lucian’s shoulder and knee pads and the belt of armour around his waist were similar enough to what the civilians were wearing that the guards would likely not give him a second glance. 

After a long moment of deliberating, Lucian did his best to carefully slip the chest piece off over his head, and dumped it and his satchel onto the ground near a group of roots. Using some carefully placed leaves and sticks, he was able to mostly conceal them from view. 

Just in and out, he breathed, peeking back around the tree again towards the guards. They won’t even know I was here.

Lucian made his way forward to the guards. When they saw him approaching, their faces immediately morphed into something more neutral. They were clearly trying to do their best to look like they were being more helpful than they actually were. Lucian resisted the urge to roll his eye, instead continuing forward. 

Just as he was about to pass through the entrance, the second guard placed a firm hand on his shoulder, stopping him in front of the gate. 

“Sorry, but we’re gonna need to see an ID,” he drawled. The lighthearted rebellion that Lucian had heard in his voice earlier was traded for near exasperation. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”

“Since when did we need ID here?” Lucian asked. He was frantically trying to develop a proper cover story, but based on the looks on the guard’s faces, he would be starting at a disadvantage. 

“For, like, six months,” the third guard said. “I’m sorry, but you can’t enter the mines unless you can prove you’re supposed to be here.”

Lucian bit his lip. These were the mines the chief had mentioned? “But—okay, you can’t tell anyone this but…I’m technically not. I’ve been sick for a full year—it’s what,” he faked a surprisingly believable teary eyed sniffle, “it’s what caused me to need the bandage on my face. My vision isn’t as good as it used to be, so my Dad hasn’t been letting me go to the mines. But he’s—now he’s been getting sick, and Mom’s income isn’t enough so I came to talk to the chief. I really need this—can’t you please make an exception? Just this once?” 

The three guards shared a wary glance. The second one sighed dramatically but nodded. “Just this time, okay, kid? You come without an ID next time we won’t go so easy.”

“Thank you so much,” Lucian said, bowing slightly. 

Once he was through the gates he let out a relieved sigh. That was…a much closer call than he would have preferred. 

He spared a glance around the camp, and found that many of the civilians seemed to have dispersed at some point during his discussion with the guards. There were several other IPC members standing around, but none of them really paid Lucian any mind. 

“Ah, young Lucian!”

Lucian stiffened. He cast a wary glance over his shoulder in the direction of the voice to find that the village chief he had met a few days before was smiling at him cheerily. Crap, what was his name? Definitely O-something… Was it Orsen?

“I’m glad you’ve finally recovered enough to return to the mines!” the man smiled. Lucian paused. Had Orsen heard his cover story?

Lucian forced a nervous laugh and rubbed the back of his neck a bit awkwardly. “Me too…Anything I can do to help my…dad.”

The lie tasted bitter rolling off his tongue, and it seemed like Orsen could tell. He gave Lucian a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you come to my tent? I can give you a proper recap on what you’ve missed.”

Lucian nodded a bit too enthusiastically. “Ah—yeah, that would be super helpful,” he said after a moment. His face was heating up, but he did his best to ignore it. He could wallow in his embarrassment later—right now he had a job to do. Well…really, it was closer to half a dozen jobs. 

As Lucian followed the chief to his tent, the further they walked the less  IPC staff seemed to be lurking around, but the more attentive the guards grew. His fingers twitched for the axe strapped to his back, but he forced them to stay pinned at his sides. Carrying around a battle axe was suspect enough, but drawing it would bring him far more attention than they needed. By the time he was led inside a tent, there were no IPC guards in sight. 

“That was incredibly stupid, young man,” Orsen said, turning towards Lucian and crossing his arms. Lucian gaped at him, clearly at a loss for words. “You’re lucky those guards don’t care very much, or you could very well be in a prison cell right now.”

“Well it’s not like I had any other options,” Lucian defended himself, throwing his hands in the air. “I know absolutely nothing about this place! I didn’t even know this was the mine until halfway through my conversation with the guards.”

Orsen let out a heavy sigh. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said, clearly exasperated. “I certainly appreciate your willingness to help, but running off to pick a fight with the nearest IPC outpost you see before even learning the full details of the situation won’t address the root cause of the issue.”

“Didn’t you say those IPC guards had been harassing villagers?” Lucian protested indignantly.

“Well, yes, and again while I applaud your… assertiveness, if it had devolved into a more pronounced conflict the IPC could have used it as justification for a full-scale military takeover of the mine. It worked out well enough, but I wish you’d have been more careful.”

Lucian huffed, pursing his lips to resist the automatic urge to mutter something foulmouthed under his breath. “So what should I do instead?” He gritted out, just barely managing to shove past his irritation.

“For right now, I need to brief you on the current situation in the mines,” Orsen continued as he led Lucian to a large map spread across a rickety table.

“As I started telling you earlier, the mine began as a naturally occurring cave system that we’ve now widened to grant ourselves access to the large basin of fuel that lies in one of the lowest chambers.”

Lucian nodded, his eyebrows furrowing in concentration as he peered down at the maze of winding caverns depicted on the map.

“While the fuel does multiply itself over time, harvesting too much at once could put the reservoir at a deficit, meaning that it would take considerably longer to regenerate. We have specific mining quotas that we match each quarter in order to balance both profit and sustainability, quotas that the IPC are blatantly ignoring despite their claims towards a ‘mutually beneficial alliance.’

“These three offshoots,” he continued gravely, gesturing towards two small channels on the map that seemed to feed directly into the main reservoir, “have been completely emptied by the IPC, and the remaining two are under their strict surveillance. We need them to stop by the end of the month or else we will be in serious danger of having our only valuable export compromised.”

Lucian hummed in acknowledgement, the crease between his eyebrows deepening as he realized the complexity of the task ahead of him. “So where do I come in with all this? I’m afraid that my talents don’t exactly lie in the business or political direction…”

Orsen chuckled, his eyes crinkling in a knowing smile as he smoothed out a crease in the map’s parchment. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to participate in any negotiations, my only request is that you lend our demands a bit of gravity. The only language the IPC will truly listen to is money, and if they don’t believe our mine to be a worthwhile investment due to some… unforeseen complications, they’ll be more inclined to leave us be, or at least to sign a proper business deal.”

A look of mischief flashed across Lucian’s face, his eyes glinting as he shot Orsen an eager grin. “So what I’m hearing is that you need me to be the hired muscle.”

“Something like that, yes,” the older man agreed with a slightly exasperated puff of laughter, “we just need someone to offer the intimidation factor that our meager military force can’t. Someone to force the IPC to actually listen to our demands.”

“Earlier I heard some of the miners talking about a new IPC director who’s just been assigned on-planet? Do you want me to-”

“No, no, no,” Orsen cut in quickly with a nervous chuckle. “Nothing that dramatic. All we need you to do for now is lay low until we start pushing back through the proper legal channels. Then when the IPC, inevitably, starts to try and pressure us into compliance, that’s when we’ll ask you to step in.

“You mentioned earlier that you’re looking for some relic in the mines? How about I add you to our system and give you a set of credentials so you can poke around. As long as you don't get in the workers’ ways or mess with any IPC employees, you should pretty much be free to explore.”

“And… If I find the mirror, you don't mind if I take it?” Lucian asked hesitantly. Things were going… too smoothly. After years of hunting down shards for the Mirror Holders, Lucian was far too used to how these types of situations usually went, and he knew his streak of good luck wouldn’t last forever.

“Consider it as our way of returning the favor,” Orsen answered with a warm smile, “the shard doesn’t carry any significance to us anyway.”

Lucian nodded, allowing the chief to press an ID card into his hand as he was ushered out of the tent and back towards the mine’s entrance. “We can't linger here for much longer,” Orsen began in a hushed whisper, “we want to avoid as much suspicion and attention as possible,” he said, shooting Lucian a pointed look. “Go look around for that trinket of yours, and we can regroup again to continue discussing later in the day.”

“I understand,” Lucian replied with what he hoped came across as a grateful smile. Shoving the ID into one of the pouches strapped to his waist, he tugged his bandages tighter over his right eye before turning on his heel and heading towards the mine.

—

Slipping into the crowd of worn out miners, Lucian kept his head down as he followed a small crew deep into the heart of the caverns. The shard was vibrating so violently in its pouch now that Lucian had to keep one hand clamped over it to avoid drawing any confused stares.

The mine’s passages were rough and cramped, carts full of metal canisters thundering by every few seconds on rickety tracks that ran along the inside of the tunnels. Dim oil lamps flickered in their sconces, tinting everything in a rusty, orange glow.

Lucian deliberately avoided making eye contact with the dozens of IPC guards stationed none-too-surrepticiously throughout the mine, taking extra care to seem as unassuming as possible as his small group passed by a tired looking supervisor whispering in hushed, irritated tones to another officer equipped in a full mech suit. It was a bit funny watching the pilot stoop their mech’s shoulders and crane its neck down to avoid scraping against the low ceiling, however, the large guns attached to each shoulder pauldron quickly wiped the smirk from Lucian’s face as he fixed his eyes back down to the floor.

After a few more minutes of trudging through the seemingly endless maze of tunnels, Lucian paused as he felt the vibrations from the shard suddenly stop. He stepped out of line with the crew and slipped into a small side passage hewn into the rock. Waiting until the passageway was clear of people, Lucian fished out the shard and allowed it to hover in front of him, squinting against the sudden light as the dim hall was suddenly lit up in bright white.

Lucian cursed under his breath and grabbed the shard, darting further down the narrow passage in the direction it had pointed as he hoped against hope that the sudden flash hadn't alerted any of the patrolling IPC guards. Unfortunately, his uncanny streak of luck seemed to have run out, as he hadn’t gone more than ten steps before a pair of heavy, metallic footsteps began echoing down the rocky corridors. Lucian barely had time to shove the mirror shard back into his pouch before the hulking mech rounded the corner, crossing the distance between them in just a few short strides.

“Everything alright over here?” A much younger voice than Lucian had been expecting echoed out of the mech’s speakers, its owner not bothering to mask his suspicion.

“Of course, sir,” Lucian stammered, trying to relax his rigid posture into something more natural instead of looking like he was ready to bolt. “Everything’s fine, I just… accidentally turned on my flashlight.” Shit, he wasn’t carrying a flashlight… Was it plausible enough that he just had one strapped to his belt?

“...Right.” The mech pilot deadpanned, obviously unconvinced as he took a menacing step closer to Lucian. “Could I see some ID?”

Ok, this was fine, Orsen said he’d added him to the system. Lucian presented his ID card with a polite nod. The mech’s giant servos made the card look like it was the size of a domino as it held the flimsy plastic up to its visor, scanning it with a brief flash of red light.

Lucian tried not to fidget in place as the mech angled its visor back down towards him. “It looks like you were added to the database just this morning. How long have you been working here?”

Shit. Lucian wasn’t exactly the most well-versed with technology, but he’d expected Orsen to hide his tracks at least a bit better. “I… got hired a couple weeks ago,” Lucian began, wiping his sweaty palms on his pants, “and my family really needed the money, so they let me start a bit before they’d officially rang me up in the system.”

“Odd. I don’t see any record of you actually clocking in. Not even this morning.” The pilot observed with a sarcastic hum. “Do you want to tell me why that is?”

Shit. Lucian clenched his jaw until his molars ached, desperately trying to ignore the way the stone walls of the mine seemed to be closing in around him. “Were we supposed to do that?” Lucian muttered with an awkward chuckle.

“Yes. It’s explained quite plainly during employee training.” The pilot replied, matter of fact. His deadpanned tone was marred by a slight undercurrent of sarcasm as the mech stepped forward to loom over Lucian, whose non-ore-stained clothes alone were enough to mark him as a foreigner.

Lucian opened his mouth to interject with some other nonsensical excuse, but found his traitorous mind completely blank. The mech tilted his helm at him in confusion as Lucian stood frozen for several, progressively more agonizing, seconds, before spinning on his heel and bolting down the passageway, his heartbeat pounding in his ears as he skidded around the opposite corner and out of sight.

Metallic footsteps echoed down the passageway as Lucian desperately tried to come up with a plan. This was certainly not what the village elder had meant when he’d told Lucian to ‘keep a low profile,’ but now was a bit late for second thoughts. Lucian rounded a second corner, chest heaving with exertion and his mind so clouded with adrenaline that he almost missed the way that the mirror shard clutched tightly in his fist began flashing once again, this time with renewed urgency.

Lucian’s head snapped up, scanning the passageway for a twin flash of light as the stone walls blurred past him in his mad dash for safety.

There.

A faint glimmer of light winked out of a crevice in the rock just a few feet ahead. If Lucian could time it just right, and if the shard wasn’t embedded too far into the wall, he should be able to grab it without losing any momentum. If he could just… Perfect.

Lucian couldn’t help the victorious grin that spread across his face as he tucked the new shard safely into his belt and continued sprinting down the passageway, the sound of the mech’s artillery humming to life spurring his aching legs to move faster.

Encountering a fork in the road, Lucian hesitated for a moment before dashing right, and immediately cursed his shitty, shitty luck when he was forced to skid to a stuttering halt in front of a solid stone wall. Lucian immediately whipped around, hoping to retreat back to the crossroads, but found his path blocked by a hulking metal form, the light from its visor illuminating the cramped space an angry red.

How had the pilot managed to close the distance between them so quickly? Lucian wondered, cursing the mech’s long legs and endless stamina as he attempted to catch his breath, slowly retreating until his back hit the rough stone wall. 

…Wait, why the hell was he running away? Because Orsen had said to try not to cause a scene? That ship had long since sailed. Because he was afraid? No, fuck that. He was a knight of beauty damnit- Not quite yet, a voice crooned unhelpfully from the back of his mind. Well… regardless, he wasn’t going to be intimidated by some IPC grunt.

With a renewed determination, Lucian glared up at the mech and unhooked his axe from its sheath on his back, balancing it in one hand and giving it an experimental swing. 

“Place your weapon on the ground and I’ll consider refraining from eviscerating you where you stand.” The mech pilot ordered with an audible frown.

“Go fuck yourself,” Lucian growled in response, his brain too clouded with adrenaline and the panicked rage of a cornered animal to participate in any sort of witty back and forth. Tightening his grip on the handle of his axe, Lucian darted forwards and slammed the head down towards the mech’s chassis, only to be blocked by the reinforced metal on the mech’s forearms as the pilot raised an arm to guard himself from the blow.

Lucian let out a pained grunt as he was flung backwards through the air, hitting the stone wall with a dull thud. He really should have figured out a way to smuggle his armor into the mine, Lucian thought bitterly to himself as he fought to stay upright, feeling as though all the air had been knocked from his lungs.

The distinct hum of motors echoed down the narrow cavern as one of the mech’s large servos folded in on itself, only to be replaced by a wickedly sharp blade that must have been longer than Lucian’s entire torso. Lucian grimaced, bracing himself against the jagged rock as he watched the mech stalk closer, dragging its sword along the stone wall in a flurry of sparks. Hefting his axe back up into a defensive position, Lucian swung out to block the pilot’s next attack, only to duck at the last moment, the momentum from the mech’s sword ruffling his bangs as he threw himself forward into a roll. Lucian just barely managed to avoid getting trampled as he slipped between metal pedes and popped up behind the mech, cursing under his breath as the turrets on its hulking shoulders spun around to face him.

He didn’t have enough time to make a quick escape back down the hallway without being reduced to a scorch mark on the stone floor, especially given the lack of cover in such a claustrophobic space. However, Lucian’s eyes light up with the spark of an idea as his fingers accidentally brushed over the pouches at his waist; he’d have to pray to Idrila once more to bless his accuracy, and one misplaced angle could lead to disaster, but… What other choice did he have?

As the guns whirred to life, rotating with the mech as the pilot turned to face him, Lucian quickly dug a hand into one of his pouches and flung five of his mirror shards into the air, the glass glinting wickedly in the red light of the mech’s visor as they darted about wildly, reflecting each individual blast from the twin turrets and sending them right back towards the pilot. 

Lucian heard a pained grunt from the mech’s speakers, the sound suddenly cut off by an ominous crunch as one of the wooden supports that had been jammed haphazardly into the unfinished passageway was struck by a stray laser, splintering through the middle as it struggled to maintain the crushing weight of several tons of rock in its newly weakened state. Noticing an opportunity, Lucian angled his next two deflections towards the collapsing beam, scrambling backwards as it gave way with a low groan, the loose rocks at the back of the cavern that it had just barely managed to contain tumbling free. The mech pilot, standing directly below the crumbling boulders, only had time to swivel his helm around in alarm before he was knocked to the ground with a metallic clang, nearly half of what had once been the tunnel’s low ceiling now pinning him to the ground.

Lucian coughed as the dust from the cave-in slowly settled, recalling his mirror shards back to their pouch before slowly creeping forward towards the downed mech, a victorious smirk tugging at the corners of his lips as he realized just how thoroughly the pilot had been pinned. “You alive in there?” Lucian called out, kicking the mech’s helm with a dull thud.

A quiet groan emanated from the flickering visor, metal struts groaning in protest as the pilot attempted to push himself up and out of the debris. Lucian grinned, crouching down so that he was at eye level with the pilot’s visor. “You’re pretty high up in the IPC, aren’t you? With that fancy tin can of yours I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re that new supervisor everyone's been talking about.”

The pilot grunted his assent. Lucian pat the helmet with a sly smirk. “I think it’s time we make a deal.”

-

Micah bowed his head as Topaz slipped into the room. “Ms. Topaz.”

“Just Topaz is fine,” she waved dismissively. “Why’d you schedule a meeting on such short notice? Having issues already?”

Micah bit his lip. “Something like that…There’s been some…dissent among the villagers. After speaking with the village chief, I believe it would be in our best interest to reassess our deal with them.” 

Topaz frowned. “Surely a little dissent isn't enough to cause a full overhaul of our contract. You’ve been working as a team leader for what, 2 years? What’s with the troubles now?”

“Some external force got involved. I haven’t been able to trace him, but he refused to budge until I…drafted a new contract.”

“Why can none of my projects seem to go right,” she muttered, beginning to pace slightly through the room. “First Jarilo VI, now this…ugh. What terms were included?”

“The main thing was limits on the quantity of our exports,” Micah managed, nausea building in his stomach. “It significantly decreased the amount we were allowed to farm at any given time, and they also requested that we withdraw at least 30% of our workers from the planet. They asked me to return to you with the contract since you’re…well, more of the overseer than I am.”

Topaz sighed. “And why didn’t you just decline?”

“He totaled my mech,” Micah admitted, forcing his eyes to remain glued to the floor. “I had no choice, or else I likely would have been left there, trapped in a collapsed mineshaft. It was my personal failure. The punishment should lie on my shoulders alone.”

Topaz sighed for what had to have been the tenth time since she had arrived. “This will probably result in a temporary demotion if you take the blame. Do you really wanna do that?”

“Yes,” Micah said. He picked idly at his fingernails, trying to distract himself from the growing frustration and guilt in his gut.

“Alright,” Topaz said. “I’ll review the contract and meet with the village council. You’re dismissed; I’ll schedule a meeting once I figure out what Diamond thinks would be a suitable punishment.”

With a curt nod, Micah slipped silently out of the door.