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Alisaie shoved past the guards at the entrance to Solution Nine, not bothering with so much as an “excuse me” as she marched into the city at a hurried pace.
He was here somewhere - he had to be here.
Her eyes scanned the crowds, head whipping from one side to the other in search of any sign of familiar silver hair.
“Where in the seven hells is he?” she asked aloud, more to herself than anyone else even though the Warrior is behind her. “Alphinaud!” she shouted, loud enough that some of the denizens of the Alexandrian city turned to look at her curiously.
“This is the last time he gets to scout ahead,” she groused, clinging to her annoyance like a lifeline. If she was annoyed, or frustrated, or even angry, that didn’t leave room for worry. For fear.
For the “what if” that had haunted her ever since the mysterious dome had appeared in Shaaloani right after Alphinaud had boarded the train to Yyasulani.
She’d scarcely rested since then.
Encountering Namikka in the outskirts had been little comfort. And Cahciua claimed it had been thirty years since the dome had appeared along with the rest of what Alisaie now saw before her. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be.
So she kept running through the bizarre city with its too-bright lights, boots clanking on the metal floor with each urgent step. She would find Alphinaud and she would tease him and he would laugh and all would be well. There was no other option.
At long last, she spotted him in the distance. He was facing away from her, reading some papers he held in his hands. She didn’t recognize the attire he was wearing - wide-legged pants held up by suspenders in a neon blue color - but she would know the cowlick that stuck up from the top of his head anywhere.
“Oh finally,” she breathed, more relieved than she would ever admit. She made a beeline for him.
“There you are, Alphinaud!” she called, making him turn to glance over his shoulder as she approached. “Really, brother…”
She was about to chide him for hiding from her, as though they were children playing a game. But then she stopped short as she realized that the person in front of her was, in fact, a child.
He was Alphinaud’s spitting image, but the boy in front of her couldn’t be more than a dozen summers old. The lad looked at her with a mixture of surprise and apprehension, clearly having no idea who the stranger calling him “Alphinaud” was.
“Louisoix!” came a call from nearby before Alisaie could martial her thoughts enough to say anything.
“Coming, Father!” the boy called back, immediately turning on his heel and dashing off in the direction the hail had come from.
Alisaie felt like she had stopped breathing. Louisoix. Louisoix. Louisoix. The name repeated itself in her head. That boy had most certainly not been her grandsire. He looked nothing like the deceased Archon save the color of hair that everyone in her family shared.
Her eyes followed the boy to where he was standing with an older Elezen, ostensibly his father. The man was bent over, ruffling his son’s hair with affection while gently reprimanding him for running off. The boy mumbled an apology, though his tone suggested that he would be doing so again at the next available opportunity. It reminded Alisaie strongly of herself and her twin during their childhood.
Then the man looked up and met Alisaie’s gaze.
“Alisaie,” he said. Like he knew her. Because he did.
Tears burned in her eyes. She tried to speak but her voice couldn’t make it past the lump in her throat.
The adult Elezen before her was unmistakably Alphinaud. He was taller and broader and clearly into his forties with a deeper voice than the one she knew, yet it was him all the same. His earring, identical to hers, still hung from his ear just as it always had. He still wore his hair in the same style, which he had evidently passed down to the boy, along with nearly everything about the child’s appearance.
“Tis some decades later than expected, but I had no doubt that you’d make it, my sister.”
He was smiling at her. That same soft smile she’d seen countless times throughout their lives. The same one she’d seen just a few days ago when he’d bid her goodbye on the train station platform, reminding her not to do anything reckless before she and the rest of the party joined him in the Shetona town. She’d made no promises, of course, but he’d smiled at her joke about him being bored without her all the same.
The tears spilled over, hot tracks down her cheeks. She choked out a sob. Her shoulders shook.
“Al-Alphinaud,” she managed.
He rushed to her and wrapped her in a hug. Now at his full-grown height, Alphinaud dwarfed her. He was around the same size and build as their father, which made the embrace all the more bittersweet. He had grown up and she had missed it. He was an adult and she was still in the midst of adolescence. He’d had a child, her nephew, and she’d been absent for the boy’s whole life.
She clung to her brother, buried her face in his shirt, and wept. So much time lost. Thirty years.
‘He’s alive,’ she tried to remind herself. That was the most important thing.
“It’s alright, sister,” Alphinaud soothed, rubbing her back the way their mother had done for them when they were young. “Come, let us retire to my apartment. We have much to discuss.”
Scrubbing her eyes with one arm and trying to bring herself under control, Alisaie nodded. Alphinaud took her hand in one of his, holding onto young Louisoix with the other, and turned to look at the Warrior.
“Apologies, my friend, I know you must have many questions. But might I beg some time alone with Alisaie?”
The Warrior nodded and muttered something about going to find Lamaty’i before dashing off.
Alisaie’s head spun and her feet were leaden, but she managed to cooperate with her brother’s direction as he led her through the streets to the Residential Sector.
Through massive automatic double doors, up several stories using a mechanical contraption powered by electrope, down a hall, and into a smaller door that was opened with a thin metal square that Alphinaud fished out from one of his pockets and tapped onto a lit-up pad.
“Loui, go and fetch a tonic from the kitchen, please,” Alphinaud said. His son - even thinking the word made the whirling in Alisaie’s brain worse - did as he was asked as Alphinaud supported his twin across the threshold and into the apartment.
The place was spacious - all one open room with partial walls helping to differentiate the areas. Giant windows looked out onto Solution Nine, but inside the home the lights were kept a little more dim.
Louisoix darted into one section in the far side of the quarters and rummaged in a cabinet while Alphinaud guided Alisaie to a sofa where he sat them down next to one another. Loui appeared again after only a few moments and held out a small, iridescent container with a green spout on one end to his father. Alphinaud, in turn, opened the spout and pressed it into Alisaie’s hands, encouraging her to drink. She took a sip and found it to be a pleasant, if somewhat strange, liquid mixture of salty and sweet.
“Thank you, darling,” Alphinaud said, looking back to Louisoix. “Why don’t you knock nextdoor and see if Quartz is available to play.”
The boy was out the door before Alphinaud could even finish his sentence, tossing one last suspicious look at Alisaie over his shoulder as he went. A faint, fond smile lingered on Alphinaud’s face as he watched Loui go.
“So…so that’s really…?” Alisaie tried to ask.
“My son, yes,” Alphinaud confirmed. “We just celebrated his tenth nameday last week.”
“And…his…?”
“Mother?”
“Mm.”
“She died when he was only a few years old. She had an aetherial sickness related to the oversaturation of lightning-aspected aether in this shard.”
“Oh, Alphinaud,” Alisaie whispered, grabbing her brother’s hands. “I am so sorry.”
Alphinaud’s smile this time was sad, wistful.
“I wish you could have met her,” he said. “She and Loui are the reason I cannot regret getting trapped in here, even though I missed you terribly.”
He leant against her, resting his head atop hers. Alisaie felt her muscles lose some of the tension they’d been holding for the past several days, though her heart still ached.
“What was her name?” she asked.
“Constance,” Alphinaud replied, reaching across her to grab a piece of parchment from the table next to the sofa. On the paper was a drawing in a style that Alisaie recognized as distinctly Alphinaud’s. A portrait of an Elezen woman with dark hair and darker eyes holding a baby swaddled in a blanket. In the picture, the woman had eyes only for the babe in her arms as she gazed down at them, the most serene smile on her lips. She could have been any mother on the Source, or in the First, save for her Alexandrian-style clothing and the regulator on the side of her head.
“No one but Loui and I can remember her now,” Alphinaud remarked quietly when he saw Alisaie notice the device. “We alone grieved her. And even his memories are fading because of how young he was when she died.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about her,” Alisaie said, voice full of her own feelings of regret that her brother had suffered such a loss without her there, “so that I can remember with you.”
“Thank you, sister.” He sounded so genuinely grateful. Like he had that night in Tertium when they’d been captives. For Alisaie, that was less than a year ago. For Alphinaud, it was more distant than she could have fathomed.
“I hope it goes without saying that I will not be letting you out of my sight from this point forward,” Alisaie declared, trying to muster up some of her usual determination. Anything to move forward from this sad, sinking feeling at the gulf that had been created between her and her twin. And when Alphinaud chuckled, bringing a hand to his mouth the same way he always had, she did feel herself lighten just a bit.
Just a bit. It was a start. She could only hope the rest would heal in time.