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“Carey. Come on, babe, just a little further.”
There are arms around her. She feels the pressure, sees the blur of green skin and brushed aluminum. Hears the voices. Killian. Noelle. They’re going . . . they’re going . . .
Away. Away from the light and the noise and the soft voice that Taako only uses when he’s being serious but he can’t be serious because he’d told them that Magnus was gone and he can’t . . . she can’t . . .
She’s lost all her rogue senses and the ground pitches up towards her and then stops and she’s almost angry at that, and then Killian lifts her up and she’s being carried and she hears soft words and feels soft arms and she hates it, she hates it, she shouldn’t be able to feel anything good, not now, not if—
Points of pain bloom on her arms, and she watches dreamlike as her talons curl and scrape across her scales, and then Killian takes her hands and clasps them between her own, warm and soft and steady. Carey opens her mouth but there aren’t any words in her throat and the only words in her head are no and Magnus and please so nothing comes out. She feels the touch of Noelle’s hand on her tail, of Killian’s lips on the crown of her head. Her ribs feel hollow and heavy as a leaden birdcage.
One of her fingers curls around Killian’s hand and touches the carved rosewood ring she wears. And it’s only then that Carey Fangbattle starts to cry.
*
“Hey Mags!”
Magnus straightens and smiles as she approaches, draping the towel he’d been using around his shoulders.
“Good work today,” he says, and high-fives her. “You three really gave us a beating!”
They keep healing potions in the dojo, so the black eye and bruised ribs he’d been sporting a few minutes ago are gone, but his eyes are still heavy with exhaustion. He could have avoided the damage to his ribs if he’d spent the last drill dodging like he was supposed to instead of diving to knock Taako to safety, and Carey almost tells him that. But they’ve had the same conversation before and it never makes a difference.
“What can I say? We’re pretty great.”
He nods, shaking off his tiredness for a moment to grin at her.
Carey leans up against the wall. “So, uh, me and the girls were gonna hang out tonight. We got some of the good stuff from Avi and one of those big mead jugs from Fantasy Costco. You in?”
Magnus considers, and then he sighs. “Not tonight, I think. I . . . haven’t been sleeping well lately, and if the Director has another day like this planned for tomorrow . . . Sorry.”
She goes to punch his shoulder and he beams when he successfully sidesteps and catches her fist.
“No problem, big guy. Next time?”
“Definitely next time.”
Carey pauses on her way out the door. “Hey . . . everything good? You know if you wanna talk . . .”
Magnus is (slowly, very slowly) getting better at not telegraphing every thought he has to the entire moon, but Carey would have to turn in her thieves’ tools not to notice the flash of worry across his face.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll remember that. If I need to talk to someone.”
“Okay. Well. See you tomorrow!”
“Bye, Carey!”
Tomorrow comes, and they learn from a very high-strung Director that the Reclaimers have been sent out on their next mission. Carey stashes the rest of the mead under her bed to share with Magnus when he gets back.
The next day comes, and they hear that the Stones of Far Speech are offline. Angus and Avi worry. Carey doesn’t. They’re just rocks. They’re easy to break. Her friends are tougher.
And then it’s the next day, and Carey is picking at the dry scales on her knuckles while they wait for news, and then Avi is leaning out the door of the hanger and shouting that the Reclaimers are back, all of them, and then—
He couldn’t have had more than a glance, so it doesn’t count as lying. Carey knows this. And she knows as soon as she enters the hanger herself and sees Avi’s stricken face that something is wrong, but the joy that’s bubbling up in her chest is too strong and she runs forwards, ready to swing herself up onto Magnus’s shoulders.
She’s only made it a few steps before she realizes he’s missing, and she asks why even though there’s no other reason they would have come back without him.
They answer like she knew they would. The world blurs.
*
If it was a mission, Carey would have stayed on her feet. You learn how to compartmentalize when you’re a thief. She’d lost teammates before. She’d lost Boyland only a few months ago—they hadn’t been close, exactly, but she’d held onto Killian’s arm and cried through his Rites of Remembrance—and she knew how to survive things like that. Lock all the emotions up in an imaginary safe that it would take even her a good half-hour to crack and then hide it away in the back of her head and finish what needed to be done. Make it back to base. Debrief. Only then could she open the safe and let herself feel.
It didn’t make things better. But it separated out the shock from the pain, like numbing a wound until it could be treated.
At the moment, Carey feels like one of her flashbombs has exploded inside her own ribcage.
*
“Have you got the key?”
“She doesn’t use the key, she just picks it.”
“Well, nuts.”
There’s a muffled boom and then the door to Carey’s quarters is hanging off its hinges while Noelle lowers her blasting arm and looks abashedly at the hole where the lock used to be. The edges are charred and ashen. She stares at it as Killian carries her inside.
Ashes. They said that he was ashes and they were alive and suddenly Carey is furious that the other two dared to come back without him, with nothing, and she’s sobbing so hard she can’t breathe. Magnus would never have left them behind.
He’s gone. He’s gone and the world is going to forget him and the thought makes Carey retch. She needs to remember. She needs to remember because so few other people will, will know the way he smiled when he told a bad joke or figured out a new move, will know what a patient teacher he was or what a good friend. She tries to cram every memory she has of him into her head at once and etch them there so they’ll never fade.
The first time she saw him, nervous but excited in his Null Suit as he looked down at Lucas’s floating laboratory.
His shyness when he first asked her to teach him thieving. His excitement the first time he picked her pocket. Magnus doubled over laughing as she told him about the time her brother tried to flirt with Killian and got thrown in a lake. Magnus knocking on her door in the middle of the night to demand his stolen wallet back and then planting a smoke bomb under her pillow. Magnus knocking on her door in the middle of the night with tears on his face and sharing a bottle of mead while he didn’t quite tell her about what had happened in Refuge. Magnus sticking his tongue out in concentration as she tried to teach him how to waltz. Magnus and Killian sitting next to each other in the Bureau mess hall with Carey curled up across both their shoulders. Magnus beaming the first time he saw Killian wearing her ring. The time she’d taken him planetside and broken into a fancy dog breeder’s kennels and they got caught because he was too happy to run when the alarm went off.
The last time she saw him, the smile he’d put on to wave her goodbye faltering as soon as he thought she was out of eyeshot. The slump of his shoulders.
He’d been so tired. Too tired—all those days of training with no rest. The Director shouldn’t have sent him out like that. He shouldn’t have gone out like that! He shouldn’t—
“He—he saved them,” she says, and it’s the first words she’s been able to make since she heard the news.
“I know,” says Killian, stroking Carey’s arm.
“He shouldn’t—I told him . . .”
“I know.”
Magnus offering to swap out his intact helmet for Killian’s cracked one. Magnus wrinkling up his face in puzzlement when Carey told him that fighting smarter meant not taking the big hits. Magnus in training, shooting a thumbs-up to an uninjured Merle and Taako before limping over to the rack of healing potions. Magnus rushing in.
“S-stupid . . .” She doesn’t even know who she means. Magnus, for getting himself killed? Herself, for being surprised by it? The Director, for sending him out there in the first place? Taako and Merle, for having the audacity to make it back?
She’s clutching a carved wooden duck in her hands—one of her early efforts, but cleaned up, with a pair of Thieves Cant glyphs cut into the base. They’d steal it back and forth from each other—something that had started out as practice and turned into just a game. And now it’s just hers.
“Carey . . .” Noelle says from the foot of the bed, hesitant. “The Astral Plane is—”
Whatever she was going to say isn’t just a platitude. Noelle’s been there, and maybe eventually Carey will want to hear about it, maybe eventually she’ll think it’s comforting, but everything is so raw and she can’t, she can’t—
She screams, and it doesn’t make her feel better at all, but it shuts Noelle up.
“I don’t care!” she shouts. “I don’t care how great it is or how happy he’ll be or even that he gets to see Julia again! I’m selfish and he’s my best friend and I just want him back!”
The others don’t say anything. Carey curls up as small as she can around the stupid, lopsided duck they’d carved together and presses her thumb into the glyph so hard it will leave imprints on her skin.
*
“What’s Thieves Cant for ‘friend’?”
They’re in the mess hall after a training session. Taako and Killian have just left, rolling their eyes at the scribbled notes Carey and Magnus have been passing to each other as if Taako doesn’t have secret conversations with the human in Elvish at every opportunity.
Carey grabs a napkin and sketches out the symbol. When she comes back from getting more water, Magnus is still staring at it.
“What’s eatin’ ya, Maggie?”
He twists the napkin around in his big hands. “We learned this one. But all it really means is ‘not enemies,’ right? Is there some word that’s less . . . conditional?”
“You makin’ me a friendship bracelet or something?”
“Weeeell . . .”
“Wait.” She blinks. “Really?”
“Not a friendship bracelet. But a something!”
“Heh. Fair enough. There’s not, like, a one-to-one word, you get me? But here’s one . . .”
The next day he leaves the Training Duck out on top of his gear, practically asking to be stolen. She nabs it carefully, suspecting a trap, but nothing goes off. As she stows it away in the pouch at her belt, she notices the new carving Magnus has added to the underside. And then she looks up and sees Magnus grinning at her from across the dojo.
Team, says one glyph, and the other says family.
Carey runs her fingers over the words and smiles back.