KEREN

Voices mixed in a background of music.

Ugh... He sat up from the pull out bed, and the blanket tumbled down to his lap. Underneath the dim lamp at the dinner table, Ethan sat with his head in his hands, silent of his previous words and all alone. Outside, the moon reigned higher in the sky, but he dreamed of ships twisting and turning among the stars. He pushed his palm against his temple when it pulsed with exhaustion. "Kellzoro?" He frowned when Ethan lifted his head. "How long has it been? Where's Jesti?"

"He's not here yet." Ethan lifted himself out of his chair with a shake to his frame. "I'm expecting he'll be here soon." Keren slouched deeper into his shoulders when Ethan approached him to sit on the edge. "You were only out for an hour, but you should go back to sleep."

He tested the acidic words on his tongue. "Any news about... Mom?"

Ethan's posture slacked forward and his brow met the tips of his fingers. "All I know right now is that they extracted her to a hospital in Roxton with other people injured in the attack. I know nothing past that." Irritation and terror both filled the greens.

Keren sat up straighter to grab onto his forearm. "Ethan..."

Ethan sent his hand into his shoulder. "Get some more rest, Keren. I'll wake you when I've figured things out from Jesti."

"But—"

"No, Keren."

It was never enough — Mother and Ethan's shared hesitance drove a knife into his throat when Ethan sat back at the table and put his head back in his hands. Silence strangled him, he couldn't stand it. He tossed the blankets off his lap to haul himself out of the bed. He swung himself into a chair beside Ethan, whose movement stilled into a statue, though he peeked at Keren from the side. Keren scooted closer, then rasped, "I just want you to talk to me, Kellzoro. I want to know what's happening." What's going to happen?

Ethan placed his hands flat against the table, but snapped his head up when footsteps creaked the front porch outside. Though Ethan had closed and boarded all the metal shutters to the windows in the time he was asleep.

"Maybe it's Jesti?" Keren whispered, then huffed when Ethan used the top of his head as a lift out of his chair. His hand swept to his coat to tug out a knife into his hand, creeping to the side of the door. Claws raked against the atmospheric pressure growing within the cottage, with Ethan setting his foot against the door and listening close.

"Ethan!" Jesti hissed. "It's me!"

Ethan's nose scrunched and the knife remained at the ready. "Alone?"

"Yes, I'm alone." Ethan removed his foot from the door and let Jesti in, who hauled two bags between his arms, but kept the knife tight in his fingers with a hyperfocused glare zoned in on the one person Ethan tended to trust out of his two friends. Intensifying when Jesti drew closer to him to set the bags on the chair across from him. "I got what you told me to bring as fast as I could..."

"News, Jesti," Ethan bit.

"North Park got closed down and is swarming with Sanctum Personnel for the time being — no Elites yet, though there's no hiding what it was," Jesti said, and Keren leaned back when he tugged out a blaster and handed it to Ethan, who checked it over. "I haven't heard anything on our end... not about your mom, I'm sorry." His brow furrowed when Ethan sank back into the seat beside Keren.

"Did you get me anything?" Keren blurted out, anything to break apart the atmospheric tension, though Ethan remained empty with his fingers tangled together and head low. "Sorry."

Jesti's smile softened. "I thought you might ask, so I came prepared — miraculous, I know. Ethan always gets on my case for not being prepared." He tugged out a smaller bag and dropped a respectable pile of candy chocolates, and Keren grabbed the closest package to unravel it. "I tried to grab most of your favourites."

"Thanks, Jesti..." He dragged the pile closer to him to sort through the haul, but it left a bitter, tear-stained taste on his tongue when he sucked on the candy, waiting for the truth to hit his heart.

"Don't eat it all at once, Sellzora," Ethan said with a pat on his back, but returned his attention to Jesti. "So you've heard nothing apart from that?"

Jesti shook his head. "No."

Ethan dropped his brow against his fingers once more with a heavy breath before twisting them to a tent with a strangled curve to his cheeks. His thumb pressed into his nose, and Keren dared to set his hand on his forearm, expecting a jump, but Ethan gave him no reaction in his discomfort. Keren mused, "What about... the other people, you said? What about them?"

"Probably trying to figure out what went down and why," Jesti answered.

Keren held onto his brother and peeked at the metal shutters to the windows when car lights tore underneath them to send a cascade of rolling shadows across the wall. Keren grunted when Ethan snapped out of his chair and pushed him out of his to the pullout bed as he swiped a blaster to slam his shoulder back against the wall with Jesti in pursuit. Their feet trapped the lower frame of the door as car wheels crunched gravel. Keren scrambled to push the blankets out of his way to sit on the pull-out as Ethan lowered his head, finger resting near the unloader of the blaster.

"Ethanius, we know you're in there," a familiar voice called. "It's Jozten. We're here to take you home."

Jesti's shoulders slacked, but Ethan scowled at the handle and refused to respond to Father's closest associate.

Shadows flitted through the shutters, and a trickle of unease swept through to his boiling stomach. Ethan twisted his head to the handle when it rattled, but he refused to move his foot, and raised the blaster closer into a prepared position. "Not until you tell me how many are with you," Ethan bit with a hand on the handle.

"Five in total," Joz responded with a hint of annoyance. "Boss wants you and Keren back home." It went silent on the other end, but Ethan's eyes widened when he added, "We have news about your mother."

Keren frowned when Ethan took his entire weight off the door, and crept into the spreading light with a pointed interest when the parade of suits trampled into their safe place. Jesti huddled in a corner and kept himself in the shadows as Joz looked over the place, then nodded. "Is it just you three?"

"Yes," Ethan hissed. "What about my mother?"

"If you'll come with us back to the house your father can—" Joz narrowed his eyes when Ethan raised the blaster again.

"Now."

Another Suit shook his head and rifled through a bag, but Joz sighed. "Ethanius—"

"Tell me," the words came out a plea, but there was no denying the flaming rage in his brother's face.

"I will if you put the blaster down."

Ethan lowered it an inch.

Jozten nodded and considered Ethan, before turning his attention to him. "I had hoped for this to wait until you and your brother were secured, but since you don't want to cooperate..." He sorted through an inner pocket in his jacket, then held out the holopaper, where the news grew in blood-red letters. "I'm sorry, Ethanius, Keren. Your mother didn't make it in the first four hours in the hospital."

It sank into his chest, but it came out dry instead of wet on his face. Keren lowered his attention to his hands, where her smile echoed out of the darkness as she recalled memories he'd never experienced. He tried to make himself cry, to get out the tightening atmosphere, but it never left his throat, soaking deep into the cracks of his tongue. Ethan lowered the blaster in full with an expression of agonized stillness. Jozten put the holopaper back in his coat. "Your father wants you back home and in a safe place."

A dull throb expanded in his throat, and Keren drove his teeth into his own jaw. "How?" he mused, unable to understand the why. He held onto the emptiness of the news told twice, but Ethan dropped the blaster to the ground. It clattered at his feet as the mist filled the greens.

"What the fuck were our people doing?" Ethan snapped, causing some of the Suits to eye him. "North Park is our territory, why was there an attack on our protection area?"

Keren lifted his head further to his older brother, to make sense of his words.

"You need to keep a cool head, Ethanius," Old Joz murmured when Ethan clenched his fists. "We're just here to take you home, nothing more. We have a transport outside. We sent people to investigate—"

"And what about my mother?" Ethan asked, shrill.

"Things will be discussed by your father back home. We're to secure you and your brother first," Joz insisted. "Ethanius, it's not safe out here."

Keren went to grab the blankets, but stopped when the nearest Suit crept to him. Ethan turned in one full, practiced and graceful movement. He released his fingers from the comfort of the blanket. "Wait," Keren said before whipping to Ethan. "Ethan, I want to stay—!"

Ethan lunged with the glint of a knife.

"Grab him!" Joz snapped when Jesti tried to reach Keren as well.

The Suit who shuffled through the bag wrapped an arm around Ethanius' chest and neck. He writhed and swung, but a Vitamask latched onto his face and breathed out mist. It sizzled with his rage as he tried to squirm out of the grip of the Suit as another stopped Jesti from his own approach. Keren went to jump out of the bed, but another whisper of mist left his brother empty.

His squirming weakened into a full stop, and his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

The knife clattered to the ground to join the blaster.

Ethan fell to the floor, and he longed for the joke and the tease in the grass, where he feared monsters.

And Ethan chased them away.

No... this can't be real...

Webs laced his throat to create the river of tears he tried to find before. He inched from the Suit who resumed his approach to him. "Wait," he pleaded. "Wait. I'll cooperate." He slipped off the bed when all the Suits stopped, and he rushed to Ethan's side to grab onto his shoulder, to shake him, to wake him from the nightmare. "He was just scared." One tear escaped its prison, but he hid behind the stone walls and tried to hold in the terror. "You didn't have to..."

You didn't have to do that to him.

He leaned over Ethan's unconscious shape when the Suits drew closer.

He longed for him to open his eyes and declare his joke. Tears swelled in his throat, but he looked up at Jozten and the other Suits, resting his hand against Ethan's head. "I won't fight. I just want to go home."

No, I want him to wake up, but I have to play Chain Winch. Never let them know... your hand. You taught me...

He refused to break eye-contact.

"He'll wake up in a couple hours," Old Jozten responded after a minute of consideration. "We don't want to make the transport trip harder than it needs to be. Understood?" He turned to the other Suits. "Get them moved out of here. Boss wants them secured, then we go to North Park to join the others."

Keren swallowed blood and nodded as Jesti pushed past the Suit to join him on the floor next to Ethan. Some of the Suits grabbed the bags Jesti brought to leave to the cold outside, and Keren bit down on a whimper and pressed Ethan against his knees as Jesti placed a hand on his back. He shook Ethan's shoulder again, almost losing his grip on his tears, but Jesti's supporting hand grounded him out of sight of the Suits.

Until one moved to scoop Ethan off the floor.

Keren scooted to Jesti when they stole Ethan from him.

Jesti lifted him off the floor to stand him on his feet, not that he had the strength to move without a prod. He followed along the Suit's path when they placed Ethan in the back of the transport in a pile of blankets. Keren swallowed air when Old Jozten put a hand on the door, then said, "Jesti, I need you in the other car. Keren, you can sit with Ethan. As long as you lay low in the transport."

Keren climbed inside where his brother rested, and the doors slid closed behind them. Energy swept through the locks and through the floor.

He waited as Jozten climbed into the front, but closed the front access to the back. Another ripple of energy tightened the air.

He heard nothing save for Ethan's scattered breathing.

Unable to hold it anymore, he burst into tears. Mom... what's happening? I don't understand...

He clawed at his own cheeks to try and hide his cards.