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The storm had teeth, and it was determined to tear the R & D blimp from the sky.
Escha frowned as she scraped away tendrils of hair from the lenses of her aviator goggles. She used her free hand to force the blimp into position for the next gust of wind. Her hand slipped on the rain-slick metal steering rod and she forced herself to push harder, holding it in a white-knuckled grip. Logy wrapped his hand around hers and lent his strength to the effort, and with a desperate heave they managed to get the blimp into position before they were driven into the ground by the wind.
“How far away are we?” Escha yelled, over the rain striking the blimp balloon overhead with loud, heavy thuds. She could hear the wet, sloppy impacts of rain rather than the sharper, concentrated strikes of hail, which Escha thought was some good fortune. If it hailed, the balloon might be torn to shreds, leaving them with no option but to return home. Colseit was a very long walk away, and one that would be all the more disheartening if their exploration of the region ended before Escha and Logy had really explored anything. Marion would be so disappointed.
“Five or six miles due north!” Logy yelled back, his voice almost lost in a crack of thunder. “Escha, we’re going to have to land!”
Logy was sometimes overly cautious, but in this Escha suspected he was correct.
When they had set off that morning, the sky had been the sullen dull grey that foreshadowed rain. In preparation for a long, wet and miserable flight the two of them had changed into aviator leathers, and Escha swapped her metal hair clips for elastic ties. As the day progressed, the air had become increasingly heavy and wet, and Escha had mentally revised the time it would take to reach their destination. Logy had chosen as their starting point for their exploration of the region a way station once used by traveling merchants. Even when the air had taken on the tension that suggested a storm was imminent, they both had thought that they could make it. Then the storm had struck, hard and fast, taking them both by surprise. It had been a hard-fought battle to come as far as they had, and Escha was proud of their progress.
The wind changed again, hurling chill rainwater right into Escha’s face. “Eek!” she exclaimed, shuddering. Her movements were matched by the blimp twitching as it was buffeted by wind and rain. Maybe it didn’t like being wet either? That was something Escha could sympathise with; she thought she could barely remember a time when she was warm and dry. She patted the wicker basket once, gently, as if it were a twitchy cat in need of soothing pets. “Now, now,” she muttered. “Everything will be all right once we land.”
“Are you all right?” Logy asked, pitching his voice over the storm.
“I’m okay!” Escha chirped. She put both hands back onto the steering rod and tried to act as though she had never let go in the first place. She suspected that Logy would have a great deal to say about her treating their blimp as if it were alive, especially under the circumstances. He really did not have any sense of whimsy or romance! “Just startled. Is there anywhere nearby we can land?”
“Yeah. There’s a clearing just ahead,” Logy said. “I saw it on the map before.”
“I’m still really impressed you could read the map without getting airsick!” Escha corrected the blimp’s course with careful movements of the steering stick. Her forearms ached from the constant movements and she desperately wanted a break from piloting so that she could stretch out her wrists, but she was the better pilot. Logy wouldn’t be able to land the blimp in this storm.
“Steer a little to the left, if you could?” The basket rocked slightly under Logy’s footfalls as he backed away. Escha flinched, as his departure meant that the wind and water could get at her from all sides. Still, soon they would be in the warm and that was something to look forward to.
“Got it!” she yelled. She braced with her forearms and shoved the steering stick to the left. The blimp shuddered as it turned against the wind, and Escha had to put her shoulder in to the movement to get the stick to move as far as she wanted. As she turned the blimp, it gradually descended a foot. She stole a look behind her to see Logy manipulating the burner overhead, his face set in a mask of concentration obvious even behind his aviator goggles. He noticed her attention and nodded twice, a jerky stiff movement that betrayed his anxiety. Escha smiled at him, before she turned her head forward.
She corrected their course further, keeping the swollen stream beneath them as a guide. It was sad that the rains had come now rather than a few years ago, when the villages to the north of Colseit had been scraping the last of their water from drying springs. The stream below them had been baked dirt earlier in the year, or so Escha had been told. Now it was a muddy, thundering torrent, snaking its way down from the hills to the sea. Not that Escha had seen the sea herself, but she had seen it on a map. She kept the stream to her left hand side as the blimp bucked and surged, caught up by one gust of wind before being captured by another. Their progress was painstakingly slow, creeping against the ferocity of the storm.
The blimp dropped suddenly before rising just as quickly, several times in rapid succession. The stick shuddered in Escha’s hands, and she swallowed back bile as her stomach flip-flopped at the changes of altitude. The basket rocked at a crash from inside the basket, and Escha started to turn to see what had happened.
“It’s just me! I’m okay,” Logy called, a little breathless. “Lost my balance.”
“O-ohh,” Escha said, and giggled nervously. “S-sorry about that …! I didn’t expect that to happen! I’ll try and warn you next time!”
“Now, when you can, a little more to the left,” Logy directed.
Escha worried her bottom lip between her teeth as she tried to time the turn to fall within the lulls between the gusts of wind rather than against them. She wasn’t physically strong enough to turn against the teeth of the gale, and from the tight tension she could feel as she pushed the steering stick, the steering mechanism was also at its limit. She thought she saw a gap in the wind and took it, steering the blimp sharply. The blimp’s steering mechanism seized up as she did so and she eased it back before putting pressure on it again. She could hear Logy groan as she did that, presumably about the damage to the delicate machinery and the work that would be involved in fixing it.
The blimp did not so much sail into the gap as flounder into it, and the now-oblique angle between the wind and the sides of the basket caused water to spray around, drenching everything not covered in waterproofing material. Any reprieve they got from changing position was marginal; the blimp then bounced off a pocket of higher pressure air before starting to fall — “Brace!” Escha yelled to Logy — and then the blimp started to nosedive. “We need more altitude!” Escha yelled.
“On it!” Logy reported.
He apparently was, as the blimp gained altitude rapidly, returning to where it had been before in a matter of moments. Escha scanned the horizon for the clearing Logy had been talking about, and saw it not far away. “It’s just over there!” she said, sparing one hand to point in front of them to what looked like a farmer’s field left fallow. It might have been just that once, before the rivers had dried up. It would serve admirably for a safe — if muddy — place to land.
“Beginning descent on your mark,” Logy said, and Escha repressed a quiver of excitement those words still sparked in her. Even if this was a rather disastrous flight, it was still her flying. She had guided them this far and she’d be the one to land the blimp. It’d definitely be a story to tell Awin.
“Mark!” Escha said back, focusing solely on their goal, both hands resting firmly on the steering rod. Most of her corrections were to resist the wind pushing them down and to the right but if this storm had proven anything, it was that it was incredibly unpredictable.
The descent was rocky. Ordinarily, Logy would gradually choke off the fuel supply to the burner, and as the hot air in the balloon cooled the blimp would slowly drift toward the ground. In wild winds like this, Logy had to alternate between choking and releasing the fuel supply to ensure that the blimp had enough lift to resist being smashed from the sky.
Despite their best efforts, though, they weren’t bleeding off enough speed. Escha tried every trick that Awin had taught her, along with a few that she was pretty sure that Awin would moan if he heard about them, and she couldn’t do anything other than steer it against the wind and hope for the best. It was terrible.
“We’re coming in too fast,” Escha cried.
“I know!” Logy said. “There’s nothing I can do about it!”
“I know!” Escha said, and felt guilty at the slightly wounded tone in Logy’s voice. She hadn’t meant for him to feel responsible for it. “We’ll just have to brace for landing!”
“Got it!”
There wasn’t time for much more conversation; the ground was coming up fast and there was only so much Escha could do to slow them down. The blimp had enough altitude that the bottom of the basket was mostly able to clear the top of the last tree. Unfortunately, the back of the basket clipped the top of the tree, causing the basket o swing in a way that made Escha feel queasy. She swallowed hard and focused on the ground rushing toward them as the blimp continued its rapid descent. There didn’t seem to be any obstacles immediately in their path, so Escha hit the floor of the basket and covered her head with her hands for impact. She looked for Logy and saw him reach up to turn the burner off, before joining her on the floor.
Sorry, brother, Escha thought ruefully. You’re going to have to give the blimp a bit more TLC when you’re back in Colseit.
The blimp landed forcefully, striking the ground at an oblique angle and spraying mud in all directions. The basket skidded across the ground, mud and foliage flying everywhere, and rattling Escha and Logy around the basket as if they were rag dolls. Most things had been stowed away — Logy had done that during one of his nervous cleaning fits as he had stared in disquiet at the brewing clouds overhead — but there were enough sharp edges inside the basket for Escha to be thrown up against. She couldn’t keep track of what she hit and where, but by the time the blimp came to rest she had been pushed up against the storage container near the centre of the blimp. Her ribs ached from that final impact. After she was sure that the blimp was not moving, Escha took a deep breath carefully, waiting for the sharp, stabbing pain that suggested broken ribs.
It wasn’t forthcoming. That was good news. Everything else hurt, but with a dull pain that suggested cuts and bruises rather than anything more serious.
“Ow ow ow ow,” Escha moaned as she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees to survey the damage.
The balloon silk, from what she could see, seemed intact. Through some good fortune, it had not caught on any low-growing branches and torn, and while they might need to check it over properly later, it was unlikely that they’d do that tonight. Now that they were down and Escha was no longer frightened, she was aware of how cold she was and how stiff her arms already felt.
She looked over at Logy. He had uncurled partially from the protective ball he had curled into, raising his head and blinking dazedly around them. There was a jagged rip of skin on the side of his face that was bleeding profusely, and his aviator goggles had been knocked askew. There was a bruise already purpling around the cut, and Escha suspected that he would have a terrible headache once the adrenaline wore off. “Logy? Logy, are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Logy said, clearly surprised that he could say that. He turned and looked at her, eyes widening. “Escha, you’re injured!”
Escha raised a hand to her face, and was surprised to feel the warmth of blood. “You too,” she said. “We’ll take a moment to fix each other up before we do anything.”
She knelt in front of the storage container and prised it open. Inside were their two backpacks of supplies, laden down with all the alchemical equipment and tools they had thought they would need, plus survival equipment. Escha pulled both backpacks out of the storage cabinet and closed it quickly. Inside her own pack were her first aid supplies, and Escha reached into the pouch at the front to pull out two bandage kits. The bandages would stem the flow of blood enough that they could move on. Further, the bandages had been made so that they eased pain over time, which Escha suspected would be sorely needed. The bruises around Logy’s cut, for example, looked dreadful. From Logy’s reaction to her injuries, she likely didn’t look any better.
“Logy, look up,” she said, and angled Logy’s chin so that she could see the wound on his temple better. She pursed her lips as she applied the adhesive tape to hold the gauze down over the cut, and was relieved that she had managed to synthesise the bandage so that it would stick even onto wet skin. Logy watched her steadily and didn’t flinch as she pressed the gauze down over the cut.
Logy’s attention made Escha nervous, and she looked away, blushing. He had returned from Central City unexpectedly only a few weeks ago, and Escha was still uncertain as to where they stood with each other. Logy had gone, with Escha’s blessing, and she had been happy for him. However, their relationship hadn’t been put on hold. For one, they would have had to have had one at all, and they hadn’t progressed past acknowledging that both of them wanted to be something more than colleagues. Before Logy had left for Central, Escha thought she knew where he stood. Now, she was not so sure.
For her, absence had made the heart grow fonder, but also less confident about what their relationship could be now. She was fairly certain, though, that there were few times at which it was appropriate to admire how pretty your coworker was, even if he managed to be so while soaking wet and with his normally carefully-styled hair plastered to his skull. It was especially not the case when they had just fallen from the sky and had to find shelter. These weren’t sensible thoughts, and Escha was trying so hard to be sensible now.
“Escha?” Logy said, interrupting her thoughts.
“It’s nothing!” she said, her blush intensifying, and taped down the other side quickly. She patted the sides down and nodded to herself. “There, all done!”
“May I do yours?” Logy asked.
“Uh, sure!” Escha replied, handing the gauze and tape over to him. It was her turn to have her chin angled so that Logy could see her wound better. His bare fingertips were cool and rain-slick, but deft and sure, as he placed the bandage and pressed it down firmly. “After this, we’ll have to find the way station,” Logy said as he tilted his head to study his handiwork. “Sooner rather than later.” He shivered, and Escha remembered that he felt the cold more keenly than she did.
Escha handed him his backpack from where it had come to rest, and then shouldered her own as she stood up. “Then let’s go!” She climbed out of the basket of the blimp.
It had been some time since Logy had secured a blimp basket from the elements. When he had returned to Central City he had proposed the idea of field trips on several occasions, an idea met with dubious expressions. He was told that if he needed something he could request it and it would be delivered to him, that there was no need for him to go and collect his own supplies for his experiment, and that it was a waste of his valuable time.
Going out into the field had been something he had yearned for while working in his sterile atelier, where everything was analysed and studied and controlled. He missed the smell of loamy fertile dirt, and the way that the astringent sap of taun clung to his fingerless gloves. He had missed the sight and sound of a well-tended camp-fire as it crackled and popped, and warming himself on cool nights out in the field. He had even missed sleeping in a tent in close quarters with Awin and Reyfer, and the careful way he had had to slip out of the tent to avoid waking either of them at dawn so that he could check the alchemical mechanism of his gauntlet before they set out for the day.
Now, with both hands full of slick waterproofing material, rain hurtling down from the sky with furious force, and wind that whipped his hair and slapped his face with icy fingers, he thought he might have romanticised their expeditions somewhat.
So far they had a routine of Logy holding the fabric in place while Escha applied the alchemical powder that dehydrated the mud underneath, allowing her to slip a peg into the soil as it changed from mud to hard-packed ground. It was a painstakingly slow process, as Escha had to secure nine pegs on each side to be sure that the balloon cover would not be caught up by the wind, and it took time to make sure each peg was firmly embedded in the dirt. Logy had to stay as still as possible to hold the fabric in place, which was difficult as he was shaking with cold, though he waved Escha on when she looked like she was about to swap roles with him. She was shivering too, full body shivers that made him feel awful to see them. That said, Escha’s shivering didn’t require immediate action. It was when Escha stopped shivering that he should worry.
“How are you feeling, Escha?” he asked as she stood up and put her pack on. “Are you okay?”
“Yep!” Escha said, shifting the balance of her pack as she turned to face Logy. “I mean I’m cold, and I don’t think I remember what it’s like not to be wet, but things could definitely be worse.”
“That’s a new definition of okay,” Logy said ruefully as he curled his fingertips up into the palms of his hand, interlinking them as he did so. It didn’t do much to warm them, but it did a little. He blew on his fingers and stretched them out before adjusting the balance of his own pack. One of the straps had been working loose, and he pulled it tighter. There. That felt better. Familiar.
“We should go,” Escha urged. “It’s not going to get any warmer here!”
“You’re right,” Logy agreed. He reached into the pouch at his hip and pulled out the compass that he and Escha had been refining over the last week. The initial design had been a weighty, cumbersome device involving a wheel and two handles, with the lodestone spinning freely in the wheel. After a week of solid work, they had reduced it down to a small shallow cylinder that would fit easily into Logy’s palm, with the lodestone suspended in fluid. This kind of project had drawn Logy to Colseit in the first place; he had wanted to use his skills to help people, not plumb the depths of alchemy.
He rested the compass in his palm, and held that hand steady with his other hand to try and stop it shaking. The lodestone turned, from straight ahead to a finger width from north. Logy turned with it, and nodded in satisfaction when he confirmed that he was facing the same direction as the needle. “The way station should be two miles this way, give or take.”
Escha looked at the covered blimp, a mournful expression on her face. “Poor blimp. It worked so hard to get us here.”
“I think you did the best you could with what you had,” Logy offered. From the set of her shoulders, Escha wasn’t convinced. “We can come back tomorrow and see what’s broken.”
“All right,” Escha said, nodding. She turned to Logy then, and smiled brightly before stepping forward decisively ahead of him. “Things will look better once we’re dry!”
“Only you could be so enthusiastic right now,” Logy said. He shook his head at her retreating back before striding after her, feet slipping uncomfortably in the mud. He caught up with her, then settled into a familiar, easy walking pattern.
It took sixteen steps for Logy to realise that he hadn’t needed to consciously match his strides to Escha’s. It took twenty to realise that he always walked like that now.
He’d missed Colseit when he had returned to Central City. He’d told his superiors when he had put in his transfer that he’d wanted to see his alchemy improve people’s lives, and that was true. But he would never have realised that that was what he wanted if not for Escha.
Escha, the ridiculously talented alchemist who intuited alchemical concepts he had learned through years of careful study, who had shown him that there was more to alchemy than creating new and esoteric inventions. Escha, who even soaking wet and shaking, lips going blue with cold, still managed to move forward with a spring in her step.
Escha, who had grown into herself while he was away. He had heard stories while he was away of Escha’s inventions, and how she had single-handedly made Colseit’s R & D division a leader in its field. He’d been anxious that she wouldn’t be able to balance her responsibilities as an alchemist and a government official, but she had risen admirably to the task. She was now as capable an alchemist as anyone in Central City, without losing anything that made her who she was. She didn’t think that going into the field and collecting her own equipment was beneath her.
He’d missed her. And being back put these feelings into sharp relief, because she’d grown so much since he was gone that she might have grown past him.
Logy carefully pushed a branch aside, and told himself that it was really his own fault that he and Escha were colleagues rather than anything more. He had been the one who chose to leave. It had been his choice to cut their budding romance short to chase after his professional dreams, and so he didn’t have the right to mope about what might have been. Escha was a colleague. A very pretty colleague, who had a way of smiling that made his breath catch, whose green eyes always sparkled in anticipation of what the next day would bring, but a colleague nonetheless. If he wanted to change their relationship he’d have to think of something, and he was out of clever ideas.
It was getting harder to think of anything other than how cold he was. His whole body felt clumsy as he moved branches out of the way, and he didn’t remember when he had lost sensation in his fingertips. He cupped the hand not holding the compass in front of his mouth and blew on his fingers, which didn’t help a lot. Under the cover of trees, there was less wind, but the rain still continued to fall, leeching away what little warmth he had left. His shivering made it hard to focus on the compass as it pointed straight ahead. He kept walking forward, because that was all they could do.
“Logy?” Escha sounded concerned, her voice thin and shaking. She spoke her words carefully and deliberately, a far cry from her usual quick, animated pace. Logy shook his head, focusing on her face.
“What is it, Escha?” His voice didn’t sound much better than hers, hollow and flat and without any inflection. It was hard to move his jaw to talk.
“Are you okay? I know it’s warmer in Central City…”
Oh, Logy thought. It’s hypothermia. They must both be suffering from it, if Escha’s voice was lacking her usual energy. “I’m really cold,” Logy conceded.
“Me too,” Escha said. She sighed, shoulders slumping.
“We’re making progress,” Logy said, trying to be reassuring. The lodestone still pointed directly ahead, and he knew that they had not yet crossed the creek outside the way station, so they hadn’t been turned around. While it felt like they had been walking forever, Logy knew that they hadn’t been walking for all that long. “We’ll get there soon.”
“We will,” Escha said. “But … it’d go faster if we talked, don’t you think?”
“Sure, okay.” Talking would help, as they’d have to concentrate to hear each other over the storm. He tried thinking of a conversation point to start them off, but came up blank. He wasn’t good at starting conversations at the best of times, let alone when they were slowly freezing. Maybe Escha would have ideas. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Hmmm …Oh, I know! Did you get to do any gathering while you were in Central City?”
Logy breathed a laugh, remembering the conversation they’d had about gathering when he had first come to Colseit. “Once,” he said. “My manager then told me that in future I should use the requisition form, as that’s what it was for.”
“Oooh,” Escha moaned in sympathy. “At least Marion won’t do that to you here. I don’t think I’d like having all my gathering done for me. It seems … lazy?”
“It’s supposed to free up alchemists for research,” Logy explained. “It also means that whatever you use is standardised.”
“Oh,” Escha said. “That doesn’t sound like fun, knowing what will happen all the time.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” Logy agreed. “You can make unexpected discoveries with your way, but it can be useful knowing that you’ll always get the same result. That way you can experiment with how you synthesise materials and find more efficient ways of doing things.”
“I just do that anyway,” Escha confessed. “When you left and I needed new recipes, I just did what felt right.”
“Did it work?”
“Sometimes…” Escha left unsaid what happened when it didn’t, but Logy could fill in the blanks. He made a mental note to check for burn marks on the ceiling later. Still, Escha’s intuition meant that she was able to come up with ideas that more formally trained alchemists from Central City wouldn’t think of trying. In amongst her successes and failures, there was a pattern suggesting a previously unknown interaction between ingredients. Perhaps if he analysed her results, he could help her uncover that pattern. She could then write up her discoveries and get the recognition that she truly deserved.
“I can review what you did when we get back,” Logy said. Struck by a thought, he added “You did take notes, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did! I thought that if you came back, I could show you and we could work out what happened,” Escha said. She exhaled sharply, a movement too pressured and irked to be a sigh. “I just hope they’re not ruined by the rain…”
She brought them with her? Here? I’ve been back for two weeks! That said, the last two weeks had been a whirlwind of administrative tasks. Solle’s insistence that he prepare paperwork correctly over the years meant that completing the necessary documents to release him from Central to Colseit was as painless as realistically possible, but he’d been breathing triplicate for the entire time. He would have welcomed a break from transferring his payroll details from one branch to another. He supposed, though, that Escha may have not wanted to bother him while he was busy, even if he really would have preferred that she did.
They could study her notes during the down time on this expedition, at least. It was a comforting thought, thinking about the two of them studying her notes in their tent, bouncing ideas off one another as to what she had discovered and what it meant. It kept his mind occupied as they laboured up a hill to the summit. The hill was too thickly forested for them to be able to see anything once they reached the top, but if Logy remembered the map correctly, there would be a watercourse they would have to ford at the base of the hill. On the other side would be their way station.
“Hey, Escha,” he said, as they picked a path from the summit. “When you were doing your experiments, did anything go … wrong? Like an explosion? Or … worse?”
“Did Marion tell you about that?”
“Uh … no …” He was still trying to think of what to say when a growl cut through the air, audible even over the storm that thundered overhead. Logy and Escha looked at one another, wide-eyed. The growl was answered by another, higher pitched and aggressive. Then another. He thought there may be as many as five different growls, though it was hard to tell when they overlapped each other. His heart pounded and he looked around, trying to gauge where the growls were coming from. Behind them, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t think they were surrounding him and Escha, at least. They were a lot closer than he would like.
“Monsters?” Escha asked. She reached for her staff, and Logy shook his head.
“We’re in no condition to fight them right now.” He tried flexing his fingers against his wrist as they held his hand steady, and couldn’t feel the movement or pressure. His body felt heavy and slow, and he doubted that Escha felt any more alert. He tried to think of a plan, but all he could think of was that these monsters would be a lot stronger than the ones they were used to fighting, and that they wouldn’t cross running water.
“We can’t be far,” Escha said, still gripping her staff tightly. “If we run, we can make it.” She smiled at Logy, tight and nervous.
He hoped she was right.
They stumbled through the forest, twigs catching at their clothes and scratching exposed flesh, mud slipping underfoot. It was hard to push on and run when everything was so stiff and numb, but Logy forced himself to go on. If he stopped, Escha would too. The growls grew closer. It sounded like there were more of the monsters now, and Logy struggled to think of what he would do if the monsters split off in a pincer manoeuvre. Some monsters were smart. He didn’t know if these ones were. He really hoped that they weren’t. The thought helped him find a reserve of energy to run faster.
Then Escha stopped abruptly, sliding across the mud. Logy skidded to a halt beside her, transfixed by the sight of the stream. It was flood-swollen, thick with mud and debris, with water lapping the top of the banks. After that was the way station, a stoutly built hardwood structure with a gable roof. If they could find a way to cross the stream then they would be safe.
“That’s the way station?” Escha rasped.
Logy nodded, struggling for air himself. He looked around desperately for a bridge.
“One last push, Logy!” Escha urged. Before he could stop her, she stepped into the stream. She slipped and Logy plunged into the water to try and catch her. The water was bitterly cold, coming up to his knees and trying to pull him downstream, even as he reached out to steady Escha.
“Whoops!” she said, taking his hand to regain her balance.
There was a growl behind them.
“Don’t look back,” he told Escha, whose shoulders had tensed. “Just keep moving forward.”
“I just want to look,” Escha grumbled, but she didn’t look back. “Monsters don’t cross running water, so it’s safe.”
“Just focus on what’s ahead,” Logy said. They were maybe six paces from shore. Then maybe thirty or forty up the hill. Forty-six paces. That was achievable.
Climbing from the creek to the shore was harder than stepping in. The current didn’t want to let them go, pulling at his legs with greedy hands as he tried to lift one foot out of the water. He stumbled, catching himself on his hands before pushing himself upright and taking the last step. That done, he extended a hand to Escha to help guide her into shore. He could see the large, brown forms of the monsters still on the other side, snarling and growling as their prey escaped them but refusing to enter the stream. At least they were right about monsters not crossing streams.
Now that they were on the other side, everything seemed very hard. He wanted to just sit down where he was and sleep, but he couldn’t do that to Escha. She was visibly drooping now, face white with cold and lips purple-blue, and she was shaking so hard in the wind that he thought she might fall.
She didn’t. Instead, she turned to Logy. “Not far now. We can make it!”
It seemed like a long way from where Logy was standing. It was hard to see the way station. He forced himself to step up the hill, one foot in front of the other. He counted the steps to keep himself focused.
At fifteen steps, Escha staggered into him, almost sending them both to the ground. They continued on, leaning on each other for balance. At thirty-five steps, they had reached the five stairs that led to the landing and the front door of the way station.
At forty steps, they were at the door. Logy’s fingers were almost too clumsy to manipulate the key that Marion had issued them, and he nearly dropped the key as he tried to unlock the door. Finally, he managed to insert the key into the lock and turn it, pushing the door open and stumbling inside with Escha, before closing and locking the door behind them.
Escha leaned against the rough-hewn wooden panels of the door with a sigh of relief. She was still bitterly cold, but they were out of the wind and rain. Things were looking up.
The way station had been around for as long as Escha could remember. This far north, travellers and merchants could be caught out by the treacherous weather conditions and they had built shelters on the commonly used routes to stay safe and dry. When the ruins to the north were discovered, the little way stations had started to be used by researchers as well as travellers and merchants. The way station they were in consisted of one small room about six paces square with a fireplace in the corner and a pile of firewood in the corner. There were shelves for storing goods and packs, though they were quite mud-smeared and in desperate need of a wash.
Escha suspected that she would be able to tell when Logy was feeling better based on when he started cleaning them. She wondered if that was such a bad thing, really, as the shelves were quite dirty. The next person to use the shelter would thank them for it, she was sure.
First things first though: they needed to warm up.
“Now we just need a fire,” she said. “I think my matches are in my bag …”
“They’re probably going to be soaking wet,” Logy said, voicing Escha’s fears. He extracted a red crystal from his pocket. The blitzes for his gauntlet were usually faintly luminescent from the energy stored inside them, and had straight sides. This one, however, was dull and clouded. It had a twenty degree bend a third of the way down the crystal. She could tell by the carmine light inside the crystal that fire energy was trapped inside, and from the way it looked there wasn’t much energy in it. It would ignite, but it was useless as an offensive weapon. It was, as far as she could tell, a very expensive match.
“I made this with a cauldron,” Logy said ruefully under her bemused regard. “I’m still not very good at it.”
“Oh, no, now that’s not true,” Escha protested. “You couldn’t do that at all before!”
Logy blushed, which was a very interesting thing to watch, and he didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed the crystal into his gauntlet as far as he could, and then he struck it with the heel of his hand to force it in further. The crystal broke with a faint, high-pitched crack, and Logy’s hand was wreathed with a faint glow of red energy. He reached forward, touched the tinder at the base of the fireplace, and pulled his hand away.
Escha held her breath.
There was a thin plume of smoke before the tinder ignited. As Escha watched, the flame reached high enough to lick at the kindling, which started to burn.
“Phew,” Escha exclaimed. Logy echoed her. “Now we just need to eat something and get into dry clothes to warm up.” She pulled her backpack off and noted, with some alarm, that the top had not been secured. She upended her bag, spilling the contents across the wooden floorboards. Her blanket landed first with a sodden thud, squelching in a very disheartening way as her alchemy notebook landed on top followed by five sweet tarts, each still protected in their waterproof wrappings. She released a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding when she saw that the oilskin she wrapped her notebook with was still firmly secured around its edges. It would have been terrible to lose several years of alchemical research to a rainstorm, of all things!
Escha picked up two sweet tarts and handed one to Logy. His hand was warm from the energy that he had channelled, his fingerless glove pleasant against her fingertips as they brushed the fabric.
“It should help,” she said to Logy’s bemused expression. She put one hand near the fire to warm her fingers enough so that she could unwrap the wrapping.
“Sweets, Escha?” Logy asked, eyebrows raised.
“They’re good for hypothermia!” Escha protested. “Also the homunculi like making them. Eat up!” She bit into her own tart and closed her eyes in pleasure as the sweet taste of apple, powdery icing sugar, and flaky pastry filled her mouth. The homunculi couldn’t make an apple tart taste like it did when it had just come out of the oven, but a cold apple tart was still delicious. And, she reminded herself, they were good for her as well! She wolfed down a second tart, licking her fingers clean of the icing sugar and apple filling, and considered a third. Maybe later, she thought. I really should share it with Logy. Even if he didn’t appreciate a good apple tart as much as she did, it was just good manners.
The fire was burning the kindling properly at this point, and Escha joined Logy in pulling out logs from the wood pile to stoke the fire. She watched the fire for a moment, warming her frozen fingers over the flames. She was transfixed by the flicker of the flame, the crackle and pop as the wood was consumed by the fire.
“We could just dry our clothes while we wear them?” she suggested.
“Is everything in your backpack wet, or just your blanket?”
“Probably everything that I didn’t wrap up separately,” Escha said. She sighed. “I thought I had secured it properly after I took out the dehydrating powder, but I wasn’t able to use my fingers very well.”
“It’s all right,” Logy said. He turned his head and looked down at her, frowning thoughtfully. “I could lend you one of my shirts to sleep in tonight. It’d be long enough to come down to your knees.” He cleared his throat nervously. “That is, if you would like to borrow it?”
“O-of course!” Escha squeaked. She knew that she was blushing, and was comforted by the fact that Logy too was blushing. She took a breath to try and steady herself. “It’s only sensible.”
“I thought so too,” Logy said stiffly, pulling off his backpack and rifling through its contents. From what she could tell, Logy’s bag was packed neatly still, despite the days of travel, with each of the items nestled neatly inside one another. Escha hadn’t packed like that — she never did — but she also thought that if she tried she’d never find anything at all. Her methods worked for her as well as Logy’s worked for him.
He pulled out two shirts and a pair of long loose trousers. He handed Escha one of the shirts and made a face.
“If you need the trousers…” and he trailed off, his gaze focusing somewhere near the wall behind Escha.
Escha didn’t need him to finish his sentence. She blushed brilliantly at the thought of Logy wearing only his singlet and his underwear. Did he wear boxers? She knew that Awin did, but the conversation had never come up with Logy. After all, no one in their research group had needed alchemy to synthesise their undergarments, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate to ask Logy about his underwear.
“No, thank you! You wear them,” she said, and turned around to give Logy privacy. She could hear the squeak of boots against the wet wooden floor as Logy turned around to give her the same privacy. She put down Logy’s shirt and forced her wet, sticky shoes off her feet. The leather clung to the saturated silk of her stockings, coming off in painfully slow inches. She eventually forced them off and put them to one side of Logy’s shirt.
Her shoes were joined shortly by the rest of her clothes, dumped into a pile of soaking wet fabric. Escha unfolded Logy’s shirt, amused to note that even now, after a few days of travel, Logy folded his clothes with neat, precise lines.It was really a singlet like the one he usually wore under his jacket, and it smelled faintly of him.
Escha told herself to stop smelling her coworker’s clothes and put them on. She was being strange.
She slipped on the singlet as quickly as possible, and adjusted the way it fit across her breasts and hips. It fell to an inch above her knee, and was longer than the dress she usually wore. Somehow, it was more embarrassing to be wearing Logy’s shirt. She folded her arms across her chest before unfolding them.
She picked up her dress and tights from the floor. She thought about opening the door to squeeze out the excess water from her clothes, but decided against it. The room was only now starting to warm up and she wouldn’t want any of that warmth to escape.
“I’m dressed,” she said.
“Me too,” Logy said after a moment.
Escha put her shoes closer to the fire to dry. The clothes really needed a clothes line and she turned to ask Logy to ask him where he thought the clothes line should go.
Logy was staring at the fire, the tips of his ears crimson, shoulders tense. In fact, the only thing that was not tight and tense about him was his hair, drying into fair dandelion fluff. She could see the burn scar on his arm, still a strange purple-blue from the cold, and she wondered whether that strange mottling was reflected on his chest as well. He’d said that it didn’t affect his movements, but would he tell her if it did? She thought that she would have noticed if it did.
Escha positioned her shoe with her bare foot, keeping her gaze firmly on her wet and wrinkly feet. She’d never been this anxious about looking at Logy in the past, before he went away, and she couldn’t help but imagine what Marion would say if she could see the two of them right now.
That thought was not particularly helpful. Logy had been back for two weeks, and there’d been a lot more paperwork for him to complete to make his transfer to the Colseit branch permanent. Escha had left him alone, even though she had desperately wanted to talk to him, because she thought that would be the kindest thing to do while Solle was being so mean about completing all the forms correctly. Marion had told her that she’d help the two of them out out, and Escha had thought that she might help Logy out with completing the transfer documents. It had come as a surprise when she had sent them out on an expedition instead.
Maybe Marion was matchmaking? She had been pretty insistent that they had to go on the expedition right now, and it would explain why Marion had blithely sent them on their way without Linca to accompany them.
Surely Marion wouldn’t do that, Escha thought. For one, how would she get Solle to approve the finances for the expedition?
“We should hang up our clothes,” she said, to distract herself from the thought that it wouldn’t be all that bad if Marion was matchmaking them. “We could put the string up here and here,” she pointed at the wall across and a little back from where they were standing, “and then we can leave everything to dry while we sleep.”
“Aren’t you cold?” Logy asked. “You could use my blanket while I get everything onto the line to dry.”
Escha paused, string half-pulled from the pouch at the front of her backpack. “This won’t take long, and besides, you were the one who was cold earlier. Colder than me, anyway! The quicker we do it together, the quicker we can warm up in the blanket.”
“Ah,” Logy looked at her then, eyes wide. “I can sleep in front of the fire and you can have the blanket to yourself.”
“Don’t be silly,” Escha said, frowning. “We won’t be able to continue our expedition if you catch your death of cold.”
Logy looked like he was about to argue the point, his disquiet visible on his face. Escha could see the moment where he gave up, his lips twisting into a rueful smile, and shoulders slumping in resignation. “I suppose if I did that I’d wake up in the blanket anyway.”
“Yep,” Escha chirped, and handed him one of two hooks she extracted from her pack.. “Marion would be so mad if one of us got sick because we didn’t do what we had to to stay safe.”
“That’s true,” Logy agreed. “She might even order us to share a blanket next time.” He flipped the hook over and squinted at the clear, gel-like substance on the back. “What’s this?”
“It’s one of the things I made while you were gone,” Escha explained. “When you press it against something, it turns it into a kind of glue. It only lasts a day, and can’t hold a lot, but it should hold our wet clothes.”
“And the dehydrating powder, that was you too?”
Escha nodded.
“When we get back I’d like to look at these in the disassembler,” Logy said. Apparently alchemy — and the thought of new discoveries — could overcome even Logy’s embarrassment. Escha knew that alchemy was amazing, but it was nice to be reminded of that fact.
“Sure,” she said. “I made notes, but the more information the better, right?”
“Right.”
“So, Logy,” Escha said, as she fed one end of the string through a loop and pressed it against the wall. There was a slight hiss as the alchemical glue bound the loop to the wall, and Escha tested the bond with her finger. The hook was stuck firmly to the wall, and she tightened the slip-knot that was holding the string in the loop. “What was it like going back to Central City?”
“Do you want to go there?” Logy asked as he stuck his side against the wall. “I didn’t think you were interested.”
“I’d like to travel eventually, even if Central City is too big for me.” Escha tested the tension of the string with her finger. It was loose enough that they would be able to hang their clothes safely, and she nodded in satisfaction. “But when you talked about it before, you always sounded so unhappy about how alone you were. Was living in Central so bad this time?”
“No, it wasn’t,” Logy said. He picked up his trousers and draped them across the line, pulling them over further when it looked like they would fall. “I had my own atelier, and I was allowed to research anything I wanted, so long as I got results. I spent three months researching plants — I didn’t know there was so much to learn about the medicinal properties of plants. I read about a way to create rain, but it looked like it was just a rumour.”
Escha was draping her slip across the line as she listened to Logy’s recitation. It was interesting to hear about what it was like to be an alchemist at Central City, but that hadn’t been her question at all. She’d wanted to know if he had made friends, and it didn’t seem that he had. Logy had always been more introverted than Escha, even after four years of living in Colseit. She remembered the stiffly polite and unhappy person who had arrived at Colseit, and how wonderful it had been to see him come out of his shell. Surely people in Central would have appreciated him!
“Did you have many friends there?” she asked, more directly this time. She looked back at where she had hung her jacket and skirt, and made a face at the water pooling underneath on the wood. They’d have to be careful where they put their blanket to make sure they didn’t wake up wet.
“I wasn’t really there to make friends,” Logy said as he hung up his own jacket. “I was there to learn more about alchemy.”
Escha stared at him. “Why not?” she managed finally.
“I did try,” Logy said. “It just … didn’t work out. Central’s a different place to Colseit. Because I wasn’t staying, I didn’t have anything they wanted.”
That seemed a sad way to live. Escha wondered why anyone would want to live in Central City if friendships were dependent on getting something you wanted, rather than liking a person.
“So no friends … no girlfriends either?” Escha probed gently. She turned on her heel and collecting the remainder of her belongings to hang on the line.
“No, nothing like that.” Logy said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t do that. Not with you in Colseit.” He cleared his throat. “How about you?”
“No,” Escha said. She picked up her wet blanket and bundled it into her arms. “Nothing like that.”
There was a taut moment between them when their eyes met. Escha’s breath caught in her chest. Her lips parted. If we are going to kiss, she thought, surely it would be now. She’d been waiting for so long after all, and he’d just said that he had thought of her like that.
Logy took an end of the blanket from her arms.
“We should … uh, we should hang this up,” he said. He was right, and Escha swallowed her annoyance to help hang up her wet blanket. Once the blanket was hanging up on the line, Escha folded Logy’s blanket so that it was more of a cocoon. It would comfortably fit one. Two could fit if they were willing to get very close to one another. Logy stood back, his arms folded and a troubled expression on his face.
“Logy,” Escha said. “What are you worrying about?”
Logy had that stubborn set to his jaw that meant he was about to refuse to do something because he thought it was for their own good. “I just … don’t want to pressure you into anything. If you’re not okay with sharing like this I can sleep just here.”
“We’re just sharing a blanket,” Escha said firmly. “I’m okay. It’s you.”
“Oh,” Logy said. He crawled into the blanket cocoon. Once Escha was sure he wasn’t going to try and leave it again, Escha crawled in next to him. She had thought that it would be uncomfortable to share a blanket with someone else, even if it was Logy, but it really wasn’t. She fit into the spaces he left behind under the blanket as if she belonged there, lying on her side beside him. The floor was hard underneath, but the blanket was warm, and Escha could feel the coldness that had reached all the way inside her begin to thaw.
She reached out for Logy’s bare hand and said, “See? This isn’t so bad, is it?”
“No,” Logy mumbled. “It’s not so bad.”
He sounded half-asleep already, which wasn’t a surprise. Maybe this was why he hadn’t wanted to kiss her earlier. It had been a very busy day, and Escha was exhausted herself. She’d been cold for so long that being warm was exhausting of itself, and it was nice being safe and dry, with the sound of a storm raging outside.
Next time that happens, she promised herself, I’ll kiss him.
“Good night, Logy,” Escha mumbled.
If someone had told Logy that he would be sharing blankets with Escha, he would have laughed at them. Now, here he was, out in the field in the early hours of the morning, sharing a bed with her.
At some point during the night they’d gone from sleeping side by side, Escha loosely holding his hand, to Escha curled up in a ball with Logy nestled around her like a spoon. She was warm, from what Logy could tell, and relaxed. Last night she’d been stiff and cold, face white and pinched, as she encouraged him to keep going and not give up, but now she was warm and pink and soft, which were all things he was trying very hard not to think about. Especially the last part.
She was, after all, his partner in alchemy.
He tried to extract himself without waking her. The space was too cramped and he moved too quickly, his arm jostling her elbow. He froze. She stirred, hand going to her face to push her sleep-tangled hair away from her mouth, and making a sleepy groan in protest.
Logy swallowed.
“Good morning, Escha,” he said, trying to sound calm and collected. He thought he sounded stiff, but he usually did when he was embarrassed. Escha never seemed to comment on it, at least. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Escha yawned loudly and rolled over to face Logy, somehow not getting caught up in the blankets as she did so. She scrubbed at her face, eyes still half closed and unfocused, and yawned again. “It’s okay,” Escha said. “I’m used to getting up early.”
Logy recalled that Escha had been the last one to wake up in the mornings when the R & D division had gone on field trips, muttering sleepily over her morning porridge while Lucille dolloped enough honey into Escha’s bowl to make Logy’s teeth ache in sympathy. Perhaps things had changed since he’d gone back to Central, but he doubted that they had. He didn’t laugh, but it was a close thing.
“How are you feeling?” he said instead, once he was certain that he wasn’t going to laugh.
“Pretty good!” Escha said cheerfully. “What about you? Fingers and toes all okay?”
Logy wriggled all of them in turn. ‘They seem to move all right,” he said.
“That’s good!” Escha said. “It’d be hard to be an alchemist without all your fingers, I think.”
“I think so too,” Logy said. “Are yours okay?”
“Yep!” Escha said. “Last night was pretty bad, wasn’t it? We probably should have stopped before the storm hit and got shelter then.”
“We could have,” Logy said. “But we would have been in our tents in the storm, and I think this was better.”
“Much!” Escha’s expression was something between a pout and a scowl. “Sharing blankets with me isn’t something to get so worried about, you know!”
“I know, I know,” Logy said. “I was just … worried.”
“What about? There’s nothing to be worried about,” Escha said seriously. She took a breath and held it for a moment. “I - I thought you knew. I waited for you to come back … well, it was more I was hoping you’d come back. I know you never replied to my letters, and you should have, but I know you. I know that you never know what to say, and you get all polite and stiff, but it’s what you do that matters. You always come through. I thought to myself, ‘if anyone would keep their promises, it would be Logy’, and you did. You came back.”
Logy didn’t know what to say. He’d had crushes in Central City, which he had resolutely ignored until they went away, certain that the other person hadn’t reciprocated; he was too awkward, too quiet, too stiff, too devoted to his research. He’d received Escha’s letters and never known what to say in reply, and thought he’d ruined all his options with her. He hadn’t expected her to understand just why he hadn’t replied. He should have. Nothing was unfixable, and she had shown him that.
Escha, presumably taking his stunned silence to be negative, rattled on nervously. “And if you don’t like me, that’s fine. It is! We can go back to being work colleagues! I’m sorry for making this so awkward, we can pretend that this isn’t happening —”
“Escha!” Logy interrupted. She stopped, face flushed and eyes wide. “It’s okay. I do like you. Uh, I mean I always did like you, and I know I told you that a while ago, but …” He took a breath to steady himself. “I feel the same way as you. If that’s where you were going with uh … all of that.”
Escha stared at him for a moment before giggling helplessly, hiding her face in her hands as she did so and peeking through her fingers.
Logy frowned in consternation. “Uh,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said around giggling. “I was just really nervous. I haven’t told a boy I liked him in forever and I thought that you were being all stiff and awkward because you didn’t like me that way anymore and were trying to avoid telling me that.”
“Really?” Logy rubbed the back of his head. “I think in future we should just tell each other when we want to do things. It’s much easier in the long run.”
“Okay!” Escha said.
Logy appreciated that she didn’t point out he was the one that didn’t speak up about his problems and just passively resisted things he didn’t want to happen. She was more gracious than he really deserved, he suspected.
“So … what do we do now?”
Escha hummed thoughtfully. “I think we kiss?”
“I was thinking something a little more long term but … okay.”
He leaned forward on his elbow. Escha was really close, eyes wide and intent on him. She didn’t say anything, and didn’t move. That didn’t help the nervous quivering of his stomach, and he took a breath and closed his eyes to steady himself.
“Hmmm,” he heard Escha say, and he opened his eyes. “Logy, have you kissed anyone before?”
“No,” he confessed.
“And I suppose it’s something you can’t study.”
Logy laughed ruefully. “No, I imagine not.”
“Then … hold still and close your eyes,” Escha suggested. “I’ll try and see what feels right.”
“Well,” Logy said, closing his eyes obediently. “That’s steered us all right so far.”
“Shh,” Escha said.
Logy kept his eyes closed. The first thing he felt was Escha’s lips, butterfly-soft against his own, tentative at first and then firmer as she grew more confident. He’d expected it to be awkward, especially as their lips were chapped and dry, but it felt …nice, for a lack of a better word. He was sure that he could come up with a better word later to describe the way his nerves uncoiled as he kissed her, how it felt like he had found where he belonged, that he’d found someone who understood him better than he did himself.
At the moment he was more interested in the sensations: the sweet pressure that parted his lips open, the butterflies in his stomach, the pull of Escha’s teeth as they grazed his bottom lip. I wonder what happens if I do this…? he wondered as he mimicked Escha’s actions, his hand buried in the sleep-tangled mass of her hair. She made a happy noise in her throat and kissed him more enthusiastically.
Maybe there was something to Escha’s approach of trying something and seeing what felt right.
She broke the kiss first. Her lips were swollen and she licked them nervously.
Logy bit his lower lip. “So … I guess that worked out all right.”
“I think so,” Escha said. She smiled, bright as the sun. “We could try it again and see. It’s an experiment!”
“We should continue with our investigation,” Logy said reluctantly.
“You don’t want to do it any more than I do,” Escha pointed out. “It’s going to take most of the morning to get the blimp airborne again. We have time to talk about this.”
Logy conceded the point with a nod. While they were technically on company time, he didn’t think Marion would begrudge them spending some time for themselves. Not after last night, at least.
“So uh … “ Logy trailed off. “Does anything change now? Between us.”
“I don’t know,” Escha said. She giggled. “I feel less nervous though, getting all that out of the way! And a little silly.”
“Me too,” Logy confessed. “Do you think Marion knew? I always suspected.”
“You too? I thought it was just me!”
“She wasn’t very subtle, was she?”
Escha made a face. “We might have needed that. Imagine how long it would have taken us to work things out if we were back in the atelier!”
“I don’t like paperwork that much.”
“Are you sure? You seem to like it as much as you like cleaning the atelier.”
“I just like a clean atelier,” Logy protested.
“A really clean atelier. I could eat off the floors after you clean them!” Escha teased.
“I’m really not that bad!”
“You are,” Escha said fondly. “But that’s part of what I like about you.”
Logy felt himself blush under her gaze. “Thanks,” he said, and meant it. “But will this change us?”
“Logy, we don’t have to know that right away,” Escha said. “It’s okay to learn that as we go along. You don’t have to have the answer right now.”
“Right.”
She kissed him again, quicker this time but no less sweet for it. “It’s okay. Nothing is going to change in a bad way.” She stretched, striking a glancing blow on Logy’s chest as she did so. She winced in apology. “S-sorry.”
Logy thought it was quite adorable that she was so confident when talking about their relationship, but stuttered in embarrassment hitting him by accident. In a way that was the most comforting thing she could have done. Kissing her hadn’t changed how she acted around him. The relationship might change, but it wasn’t going to do it right away. He’d have time to adjust to it.
He was okay with that.
“It’s fine,” he said. “We are pretty cramped. But maybe we should get moving if we want to make it to the ruins. I don’t think Solle’s going to like our report if we wasted all this money and didn’t get there in the end.”
Escha huffed a little. “That’s not very romantic.”
“When we get in the air we can talk then. We’ll have heaps of time.”
“I know,” Escha said, but made no attempt to get out. That much was familiar. He could cajole her into coming out, but past experience showed that she would only come out if he led by example.
He climbed out, and hissed through his teeth at the cold air. Escha climbed out a few moments later. “Brr, that’s cold!” she announced. He saw her starting to reach up for her clothes and quickly turned around to give her some privacy as she changed, collecting his own clothes from the line as he did so. They were still a little damp to the touch, but they would warm up and dry as the day wore on. He left his jacket off though, dressing quickly in his trousers and singlet, and making a face as he pulled on damp socks and shoes.
That done, he folded his clothes from the previous night and tucked them into his bag, rolled up his blanket and waited. From the rustling and muttering, it sounded like Escha was having problems, and he tossed around the idea of whether to help her with it or not. He decided against it, and instead searched through his backpack for food for breakfast. He found two granola bars and was working his way through one when Escha announced she was done.
“Here,” he offered to her, turning around as he did so. Escha ate the bar while he rolled up her blanket and then removed the clothes line from the wall. He handed the loop of string to Escha, who smiled at him as she tucked it back into her bag. He smiled back. Things seemed a lot easier now that they had everything out in the open.
The fire was still smouldering when he went to examine it, and Logy extinguished it with some of the distilled water he was carrying in his bag.
“Ready?” he asked, shouldering his backpack. He adjusted the straps to make the bag rest more comfortably against his back.
Escha hitched her own backpack onto her shoulders, adjusting her straps as well. She nodded in satisfaction. “Ready.”
He opened the door, and they headed out.