ETHAN

There were rules to the game. Rules Father reminded him over and over with a subtle word, a twitch of his unchanging facial features. Cold. Calculating. He scoped out the back roads outside of Roxton's boundary, a pleasant drive of minimal vantage points, though the distant construction zones encroached on the environment and built around quarries — the main forefront of the Azaika's chosen business., with the continuous push into theirs, Ethan drove at the end of the road when it curved into an abandoned house front, to keep the suspicion of anyone nearby lowered. If they were around, he wouldn't take the chance. Gravel roads crunched underneath his wheels, the traffic intensifying the closer he got to Roxton.

Not too out of the city, but still... I'll need to tell Jesti my plan to handle this. Efficient clockwork and knowing their side of the city, he listened to the distant music at the heart of Roxton. The deep longing for the sky swallowed his mind, a metropolis in the clouds. Hand on the wheel, he got past the traffic and to the school. Kids bounded out of the doors, to walk to school or meet up with parents. Family. Fathers, Mothers, Guardians. He rested his chin on his arm to wait for the arrival of Keren. There were no other incidents towards his classmates, a faint relief, but Ethan frowned when Keren sidled past the doors and around the hologram of the school name and mascot.

Keren hooked his fingers through his bag loops and kept his gaze on the ground. Back against his seat, Ethan opened the door for Keren to enter. The quiet rippled through his throat as the door slid closed with Keren safely in the seat. "So." He tapped the driving panel and got them far away from the consuming idealism. "How was school?"

Keren's bag squished between his locked legs, and he sank into his shoulders.

The chains of silence.

"Any trouble?"

"No."

"You sure? Usually I can't get you to shut up." Ethan chewed on his tongue to taste the fatal rust. One last memory, a lie, because Keren hadn't smiled since the funeral, his words measured, uncertain. "Just thought I'd ask, you know? Considering what happened last time."

'I can't control what you do, but he wants to be you.'

And I don't want him to be a monster like you.

Ethan rolled his neck at her distant reprimand. "Well, as long as you keep up with your classwork," he said to an unspoken reply, and the static from the tickled his ears. "Try your best, that sort of thing... Miamta would want that — stay in school."

"You didn't." Keren folded his arms and legs.

'I can't control what you do. You don't care about the consequences. Don't drag Keren into them'. Another snappy reprimand through the mirror, and he rubbed the wheel to feel something else through his skin. "We've already had this argument, Keren. I gave you my reasons as to why I didn't but am asking you to do the same." He tapped to an unheard beat of lies. "Look, as long as you don't start random fights with people where you don't know how they're going to respond in turn—"

"You can't dictate what I do."

'I can't control you.'

Ethan eyed Keren, who returned the stare. "You are thirteen. I think I can," he forced the sludge through his teeth. "Get back to me when you're my age." He lifted one hand to the top of his head and resisted the urge to tear his fingers into his skull. "Any homework?"

Keren refused to blink as he studied him, but he shook his head. "I did it all in class."

This ringing annoys me. He rested his knuckle against his ear and another urge to tear it off to escape the noiseless sounds prickled the edges of his fingertips, so he moved it to the wheel and ignored the pulsating agony of her despair. Stuck on pavement stained red. He sucked in his lips and dragged out a huff.

"You're shaking, Ethan."

"Hm?" Ethan checked on Keren, who straightened himself out against the passenger's seat. "I'm cold, can you turn the heat on?"

Keren drew his gaze over him with a half-open mouth of lost argument. "Whatever." He pushed his finger into the dashboard menu to fiddle with the settings, and Ethan tightened the iron claws to warm himself of the chill left to him. The temperature systems activated and cycled the air through the entirety of the car, to up the flames and melt the ice. "Better?"

"Very."

Keren's gaze lowered to his knees with a strained grimace as they came closer to their gated community. The front entrance rolled open to let them pass at the recognition of his car, and Ethan found their house in the middle of the quiet neighborhood. Into their lot, with Father's car long gone for what he assumed to be another prep meeting of what was to come tonight. Out of the car, he gathered his keys as Keren grabbed his bag. He walked Keren up to the front door, to make sure no one jumped out from the burning shadows of the clean-cut hedges around the lawn.

"I'll be back for dinner," he said. "I just might run late..."

Keren's eyes narrowed. "Where are you going? Or is it another 'unimportant' thing?"

Questions. Ethan stood at the threshold of his home, to his family. "I'm just going to Jesti's."

"Why?"

"To hang out with... my friend?" The word, too dangerous to speak out loud. Associate, a word too distant to describe Jesti. Urto was an 'Associate'. Jesti was something else.

Suspicion whipped across Keren's face. "I have never heard you say that you're going to 'hang-out' with Jesti. You mostly just complain about it. If you're just going to hang-out, can I come? I like Jesti. He's fun," Keren rambled, the last bridge to a sense of tranquility. "Why can't I hang out with you two?"

"You should be hanging out with people your age."

Keren scoffed and rubbed his arm. "You never give me a straight answer, I don't know why I try anymore."

'I don't know about you sometimes, Ethanius,' she gave him up.

"You can hang out with us next time."

Keren dropped his bag to the floor with a soft, strangled sigh. "You told me... that you were doing this for me," he rasped and turned with the same wrecked despair of her. "It still hurts, you know. You don't talk to me. You don't spend time with me. I can't make you happy." Keren shook his head once more with a crunch to his brow. "Like at the museum, I wanted to go with you, but you weren't there. You weren't responsive when I tried to tell you all about those ships inside. No, instead, you were looking over your shoulder, when I was right in front of you," he reiterated, and Ethan hung onto the threshold, gazing upon the damage he kept behind him with each step. "I wanted to do stuff with you, but you're... you're not here. Even when you're standing right there you're not here." One more shake, and mist fluttered the greens. "I'm just expected to go to school... and pretend that this isn't happening to me."

"Keren..."

The desolation of his consequences.

Keren took a small step back from him. "No. I'm not going to cry."

"It's fine if you want to."

"Yeah, I've heard the same song and dance, Ethan," Keren said. "Forget about it. You don't want to be here. You haven't wanted to be here since... since we lost Miama." He folded his arms and sank into his shoulders. "I just ask for too much, right?"

Ethan shut the front door behind him to trap them in the darkness of their life. His compearl buzzed with a confirmation message from Jesti, who waited for him at the meeting point they both agreed upon. A bone of a plan to crack into the marrow and send a final message. He stopped in front of Keren, who kept himself lowered. "You don't."

Another buzz of impatience.

Keren stiffened with the tension in his throat and across the city. "Can we do something when you get back?" he whispered. "Pretend that things are like the way they were?"

Ethan curled his fingers into his palm and choked on wordless confusion. "Keren, I might be a bit—"

"Late, but I want to do something," Keren pushed. "Show me that you're here, like you told me you would be."

Ethan drew his tongue behind his teeth and breathed out the rest of his pain. "Okay," he said. "Tonight... when I get back, I guess we can go out somewhere for dinner. Talk. If that's what you want, but I'll let you think about it while I'm out with Jesti."

If that's what it'll take.

Keren perked up from the weight of despair Ethan had him carry for his own well-being. A pale reflection of her smile. "Thank you, Kellzoro," his voice cracked, but he buried deeper into his shoulders and kept the wall up when he wiped his eyes. "It does mean a lot to me."

"No problem..." Ethan tasted the shattered falsehood of their family, then jolted when Keren bridged the distance, without fear, or a grimace when he wrapped his arms around him. An old question almost slipped past his chains of silence, but he ignored the final alert from Jesti to hold Keren closer. Lost in the lie, he patted the top of Keren's head, but found himself locked in her embrace within the darkness of the house. "I'll be right back," he said after the elongated moment, though his words made Keren cling tighter. "I will, Sellzora. You don't have to worry."

I'm just the messenger.

Keren let go.

She gave up.

Ethan tucked his hands close to his chest and turned away from her as she had done to him. For the family. It lodged in his throat as he left the house, with Keren standing at the porch with a faint smile. "Tell Jesti I said hi."

"I will."

Out of the safety of the community, he sent his own message to Jesti. Time ran short in the deck of cards life gave him. He met up with Jesti at the start of the route the Azaika Associate took on his schedule — the abandoned house not so abandoned.

"What took you so long?" Jesti asked when Ethan picked him up.

"I said I had to drop off Keren," Ethan said, and grabbed the parcel from Jesti to slip it in the glove compartment. "Sorry I took so long."

"I just want to get this over with," Jesti said with a touch of breathlessness. "Joz said to return these to him once we're finished here. Are you sure this will work? If we tip them off—"

"We're not going to tip them off, because Mr. Guon already gave us a way to them that won't set off any sort of alarms," he reminded Jesti as he drove down the marked path. "We'll stick to it, give them the message, and leave. That's all we're expected to do. As long as that gets done, the boss will be happy and we can settle things further." He ignored her voice, begging him to flee when she had told him moments before that they could not. Her life was stolen from her in the crossfires of shadows. It forced a weight upon Keren he couldn't tear off his shoulders.

Jesti squirmed in his seat with a stiff nod.

Lamps fluttered in yellow illumination as the night crawled over the horizon to pull down the light of the sun and her warm presence. It was a moonlit night, a mask of shadows of the planet to its orbiting celestial body at the peak of its fullness. His radio remained silent of Keren's battle for music tastes. Lights danced over the metal canopy of Roxton, a myriad of colours, but crimson drowned out the flutter of freedom left in his heart. Gravel crunched underneath his wheels in time with Jesti's intake of breath, an attempt to calm their burning souls.

Reprimand. Reprimand. Reprimand. Her knife drove into his heart as the buzz between his ears stifled the ringing. Out of the light of home, into the dark of what rested beneath it, the forest of trees made out of bony bark.

Jesti ceased his squirms.

He parked the car on the side of the road near the no longer abandoned house. A car sat in the garage. Boxes piled high in the corners, a flaunt of bravery for a thief to search through their contents. A single lamp glowed in the window of the solar, but nothing betrayed anyone who lived within — or used it to stay off the grid and away from the heat.

Both of them left the car in sync, packages tucked in their coats — the message.

Their footsteps crunched past the fence where a flowerbed of persistent weeds chewed at the base of the wood. Up the partly rotted porch, Jesti released one last wriggle with a nod at Ethan.

He knocked on the door, then placed his hands around the package as heavy footsteps sounded on the other side.

A man about Chalen's age answered the door. "Yes? What do you kids want?"

"Are you Drex Kealo?" Ethan asked.

Drex narrowed his eyes. "Who's asking?"

"We were sent by Mr. Guon about some sort of deal?" Ethan kept his voice measured, his words light. He tugged out an infopod signed by Mr. Guon, a falsified agreement to lull the opponent into a false sense of security. "We work for him."

Drex took the infopod from his hand. "Did he tell you anything?"

Keep the silence.

Ethan pursed his lips to taste the confusion in the air.

"Not really. He's been blathering on about finding a new business partner though — said you were the one to give this to once he made up his mind," Jesti complained, falling into the ploy with a nervous stride. "He'd have come himself but-but he had an important client to handle, and we're too new as he said."

Grass fluttered at Jesti's habitual rambling of nervousness.

"Hm." Drex gazed at them. "Thanks for delivering this, then. I'll be sure to tell his business partners that the negotiations about the business turned out well."

"Yes!"

Jesti's voice flustered out with her soft words.

So many weeds underneath his feet. Wood rotted at its foundations. His foot creaked against a loose floorboard, though Drex nodded along with irritation at Jesti's sudden sales pitch. Talk. Talk. Talk.

'Run,' she begged, pleaded. 'I don't want you to be a monster.'

"You sure talk a lot," Drex mumbled, but his voice echoed in a watery bubble of her tears. "Don't you two kids have somewhere else to be at this time of night? Like partying? Or whatever you do these days..."

Another creak, and Ethan tasted the air. A pleasant, sweet aroma to layer over his tongue as an I-Screen in the living room behind Drex showed the nightly news report. Blood oozed around his hands when he tried to stop her from leaving him, from giving up on him.

From turning away from him.

Jesti's voice faltered and popped.

The weeds withered.

Rot. Weeds. Flowers. Drex kept one hand on the door, as if waiting for the moment Jesti shut up and close them out.

To close him out.

Darkness fluttered when he traced the doorway. The carpet at Drex's feet.

The silence.

The distant curdling roar of Roxton.

Blasters skidding off shields.

Jesti's arms hung limp at his sides, separated by the light from the moon, and the shadow of the porch trellis above their head. Scattered stardust at their feet, Ethan tasted cherry pie. Keren cried into his arms and begged for the pain to stop. His burden on his little brother.

Keren stood beside him in Jesti's place, uncertain, scared.

The weight of the message in his hands with Jesti long lost the will to deliver the moment his mouth closed off the tumble of word vomit to keep Drex in place.

Run. Run. Run, Ethanius! she pleaded.

He ignored her.

"Drex Kealo," Ethan found his voice through the mud to speak the end of his name.

"What is it now?" Drex demanded with his irritated turn.

Brown eyes.

Ethan lifted the blaster, loaded with edevium.

It clicked against his finger.

Crimson mist sprayed across his vision when he sent the message across the dark moonlight.

Once more to settle the score.

It fell into the moon's silence. Over a lake, wrapped in tears.

He drew his tongue over his lips, then turned his back on the desolation he created to walk out into the lawn of silver-splattered grass.

'Tell Jesti hi for me?'' Keren said with a drifting smile, his arms latched around him to cling onto his back.

He let him go.

Jesti remained on the porch, head lowered at the fallen shape. Liquid oozed into the carpet at his feet. Ethan walked into the shadows of the forest to release himself from the tug of moonlight scattering like glass across the water beside the cottage.

For the family.