Niala69 [nice]

I wasn’t a leader. I was a follower, and I’d always known that. I liked orders and simplicity. Maybe that’d change when I got older, but I didn’t want to think in a fight. I wanted to win. Gaff acted as my voice of reason, now, because winning dominated my thoughts. My first instinct had been to take out sentinel soldiers as easily as I did our human captors, and If I wasn’t taken off guard and slammed around a tiny room with Gaff half-dead on the floor, I might be able to get one-up on them. But I might have been biting off more than I could chew, I admit—literally…

Gaff placed his hand on my shoulder, and I felt the strained mana peaking around us.

“They’re in there!” a voice shouted.

“Just fire through the fucking windows!”

In the wake of gunfire, just as lead barely breached the window, before glass even started to fall, we disappeared with a blinding flash of light.

“Where are we?” My nose scrunched as I looked around. We sat above a building in the protected alcove of one of those billboards near an overpass. Our footing slipped precariously over gridded metal rungs. Gaffriel spaced his feet out and sat with a rough sigh. I saw the ground thirty or so feet below, but the height didn’t bother me. Though, the vibrations and sway of what we stood on certainly did, and my wings wanted to lash free.

“The gas station off 90 with the slushes. We’re inside their billboard.” He seemed tired, and I couldn’t blame him. He held his head in his hands and sighed.

“This… isn’t too bad.” I sniffed around and couldn’t smell the stink of humans, so nobody had been up here in a long time, probably because of how the billboard sat on the roof of the building. It’d been years at least, as boasted a faded sign advertising whatever gas they sold.

“It’ll have to do for now. Think the sentinels know where we’re going?” He asked, strain in his voice.

“I think they’re spread out over everywhere we’re familiar with.” I couldn’t smell any ault in my radius, and I didn’t feel any auras, but they only worked at a distance. “How did you know this place up here existed?”

“Nodak dared me to climb up here last year and then left when I had my back turned. I ended up having to catch a ride down to Billings with Ferrin, Silcy, and their kids.” He shifted uncomfortably at that admission.

“Nodak is an ass.” I moved to sit down beside him and laid back on the rusted metal rungs. They pressed warmly against my back, and while it was uncomfortable, sheer relief tickled at me over something hotter than myself pressed against my skin. Though, I wouldn’t have argued if that thing pressing against my back were Gaff. I felt my stomach churn, and I wanted to just close my eyes. From the steady breathing of him beside me, he’d already done just that. How could he try to sleep so soon after what had happened?

“Ni, when it’s dark out, can you go grab a map, some pens, and water. I think we should start plotting out where we should go next. We need an action plan,” he said as his breath went steady.

“Yeah. I can do that.”

“Good, because you can use the oblivion, and I’m beat.” Gaff laid his head back.

I couldn’t agree with him more, but the warm evening sun, the hot metal, and the drain of the day caught up with me, so we both curled up to sleep as far apart as possible as I resisted the urge to kick him off the edge of the railing. He had no right to make me feel these things.

Closing my eyes and attempting sleep brought so much needed relief. I had been tired since I got my fires, since before that. My molt peaked now, and my wings looked sharp, thin, and flat. Every time I moved, the feathers shook loose. Come morning, I’d need to let them out again to shake them out from the feathers and the numbness. I got more uncomfortable being cooped up than Gaff did. I wasn’t sure how the wanderers were able to stay pent up for days at a time.

Beneath my bed, at the barracks, I kept a set of hand weights. I hadn’t done it in a while, but every time my tail started getting restless, I’d have one in the curl of it, lifting and strengthening it to keep it from atrophy. But, of course, Kiromir worried about atrophy too and made concessions for it. So I’d kept working with it in quiet, stole away to the elders to get permission to lock down the gym to use on my own, and went off with Kiromir on late night flights.

Maybe if I stayed with Gaff, we could have late-night flights together, and I could have time with Kiromir still. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so attached to my ada. I’d spent two years fighting the separation, trying to stay with him and near him. But, Thanus bound Kiromir now, and the time I occupied in his life needed to be separate so he could enjoy his time with them. So instead, now, they’d be going on late-night flights together, without me.