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Chapter Text

When red light fills his gaze, Torse’s jaw clenches so hard that it feels like his teeth are in danger of cracking.

(Ridiculous, a tiny part of him says, to think that he would ever be strong enough to damage himself)

He comes to in the rusty sandstone of Ramansu power station, the gelatinous green of mind-swapping fungus casting odd bounce-lights from the armoured bellies of the Legio Rex. Despite the strange lighting, Ramansu feels like home.

(History backfills itself in the sudden red void. Home should have been long hallways with plush carpets and disappointed echoes, six brothers and a father who was never satisfied. Instead he rebels, disowns himself rather than loses himself, escapes and remakes himself in the image of a warrior. For a while there was freedom under the Queen’s Smog, the starless skies of Eisengeist where he and his new, armoured brothers stood tall and proud. For too long that armour hid the damage the Queen’s Smog was doing, and by the time he knew to rebel again, he had lost his new brothers to Widow’s Breath and the march of Empire and the schemes of Lord Mordecestershire. He took his chance by stepping onto an old ship, into an old crew, turning his back on Mordecestershire and fighting to allow the Zephyr through the biangle and into a new land and a new life. Imagine his surprise to see his brother, his older brother in both senses, frivolous and scattered and more-than-half a stranger, but speaking in his defence nonetheless. Torsewell Gotch hasn’t been welcome home in years, Wealwell Gotch welcomes him aboard the Zephyr with a pirouette and a solid clap on his armoured back.)

The allowance of time is not given to him, even as his mind reels and wheels and ticks over his own history. There is an army of raptors to fight and a necrotic Imperasaurus to depose. 

It is… close is not quite the correct word. Torse feels numb to the danger in many ways, even as teeth shear through the grey fabric and metal of his Imperial Uniform. He knows somehow that there is more waiting for him on the other side of this battle, somewhere deeper in the Temple. Knows that despite the odds they will be triumphant.

When it is over, the discovery of the beetle-guardians elicits no real surprise. Perhaps he is just exhausted, perhaps he is simply not sky-eyed enough. They bring him comfort all the same. 

Marya is the one to come up to him, tinkerer’s hands pressing under his jaw. 

“Your gas mask, it is cracked,” she says, pointing out a split in the rubber next to the filter. “You have not been switcherood? Or filled with hair?”

“No, to both,” he replies, grimacing in the privacy of tinted glass. “I told you I wasn’t using Widow’s Breath.” 

“Alright Torse, just checking.” It is playful, in a way. They don’t believe that his strength comes from honest work, especially when he refuses to show his face to them, but it is true whether or not they doubt.

He wishes they would stop doubting him. He has had enough doubt to last a lifetime and he had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that he had left it behind in Gath.

But they have given him the chance to prove himself, these Wind Riders, and he’s not about to let them down.

*

There is an automaton frozen in the centre of the room, surrounded by gore. For a moment Torse thinks they’ve walked in on a fight still in-progress, his heart lurching even in the oppressive quiet of the room as a radio warbles from further inside, but the only movement is a soft wave of dust that wafts from the opened door. 

The banker that the automaton is holding is obviously dead, two months in tropical heat causing the flesh to sag over the bones and the metal plates of his killer. It is a good thing that Wealwell is not here, Torse reflects, or there would be an even bigger mess to clear up. 

The dead man is held in a sturdy, one-handed grip that has crushed his neck, spats dangling a few inches off the floor. He has thrust a shortsword right through the automaton’s chest, probably damaging some vital gear or engine, but seems to have merely extended his own demise when the automaton failed to let go. 

The rest of the automaton is in a perfect pugilist’s stance, digitigrade legs planted firmly apart, an interlocking carapace twisted like a brazen torso, and an undecorated metal fist drawn back in the act of a frozen punch. 

Torse draws closer despite himself. Unlike his own cast iron diving suit and the coarse grey of his gas mask, the metal here is a warmer shade of brass, though tarnished to dullness and almost obscured under a flaking layer of blood. Viscera covers the automaton from head to toe, though the closest thing to a sharp edge on the thing is a pair of metal sheets, flared down from the waist like a tailcoat to protect the pistons at the back of the thighs from direct strikes.

The face, hollow-eyed and entirely expressionless, is surprisingly detailed. In a brighter, golder metal is detailed a nose — chin and lips and a handlebar moustache stacking underneath it. The rest of the head is far plainer, perhaps an abstract suggestion of cheekbones and a brow ridge, a surgical split down the centre of the scalp and flared wings that allow each half of the skull to be hinged up for access.

Torse discovers this for himself, ignoring the warnings of the crew to investigate closer. The metal man is perhaps a mite shorter than him, though there is plenty of give in those taut legs, and he can see a keyhole at the back of the skull. He jangles the ring of keys they found as a hopeful suggestion, but none of them lift up and he is forced to try each one manually. It is only when he’s exhausted all of his options that he realises it wasn’t locked to begin with, and he is able to lift up the left plate with a rusty squeal that makes Little One whimper.

Inside is a riot of cogs and springs, delicate machinery kept from the dust and the fighting, easily breakable. He clicks it back down hastily before he can damage it with his curiosity. He has damaged too many things already by being curious.

“What’ve you got, Torse?” Montgomery asks, evidently bereft of biological mysteries to investigate.

“It is… frozen somehow, damaged. I believe if we removed the sword it might begin to work again, but I do not know whose side it was on — Comfrey’s or the Eyeless Hand.”

“Well, let’s find all we can before we wake him. I believe it would be prudent.”

“Prudent, yes.” 

Even so, Torse is reluctant to leave. 

Marya trickles in through the door at the back of the pack, and her breath hitches when she sees the broken machine. 

She lunges forward, to repair, Van’s gauntlet misfires, to restrain, and everything very nearly goes wrong all at once.

Thank Gotch for Montgomery.

He is able to calm Marya down, and over the babble of apologies and counter-apologies, Marya declares that the robot was speaking to her. Torse almost wants to ask what it sounded like, but that thought is a frivolous one in the face of prophecies and curses.

Now when they look at the automata they do so with a new wariness. Creaking metal signifies that Olethra is moving up behind him, and he moves out of her way as the MechLeod squats down so it is visor to visor with the automata.

“There’s, well it’s all Straka energy, that red light. But there’s a bit in its chest that’s Zoodian, and a bit in its head I think, not just its face.”

Torse feels like he knows exactly what she’s talking about. A violent, dangerous creature with a golden heart and a golden mind. It’s almost poetic.

Van and Montgomery take a moment to step outside, the rest of them hover around Marya as she haltingly, hurtingly, unearths a deep secret — Ludmila.

Torse is not suited to this talk of protégées and wishful thinking, nor is he suited to talk of curses and stories. He is only a practical man, and so he is grateful when Olethra flags down one of the beetle-guardians for answers.

“What is that?” She asks, and Torse can hear the edge of horror in her voice. He feels a flicker of shame rise at the thought that she was once just as scared of him.

The guardian clicks into place, scraping a curl of moss off its collar as its head turns. 

“Max.”

“…okay, what is Max?”

“Max, associate of professor MacLeod.”

There is a chorus of relieved understanding. Comfrey was here, Comfrey was not driven out of this place by something quite so terrifying as an automaton, only as terrifying as human violence. The picture begins to emerge, a familiar one, of unpaid debts and a powerful House coming to reclaim on their investment.

“If this was an associate of the professor, then perhaps we should try to wake him.”

Marya gasps, delightedly. 

“Torse, that is the most whimsical idea you’ve ever had. Everybody! Torse just got his sense of adventure!”

Torse can’t quite help the smile that twitches into place. It also seems to please the beetle-guardians, who seem incredibly eager to up his clearance levels with every faltering confession that yes, he is or once was something of a financier.

They announce that there is one of the House of Fehujar still alive, and turn to make introductions.

The automaton will have to wait, but at least they have a plan now. 

Chapter Text

Ramansu contains many, many secrets. It is a power station and an office and a prison block all at once. 

The beetle-guardians take them down to a holding cell, where a feisty little woman scraps at them through the bars of her cage. They learn more about the House of Fehujar from her, and as she works her way through her abandonment, step by logical step, Torse feels something in his chest twist with sympathy.

It is a terrible thing, to find no comfort in camaraderie. It is a terrible thing, to be a replaceable cog.

He finds himself talking to her. He does not kneel down, does not bend, but speaks frankly. 

“I was once as you are, a foot soldier for a greater power. I thought if I could only prove myself I would find my loyalty repaid, and instead I found my loyalty being twisted to ends I could not condone. 

“It is no easy thing, to give up your brothers even if they belittle you. But if you join us you will find something better than brotherhood — a crew.”

He runs out of words to say after that. Olethra appears to be wiping a tear from her eye. Montgomery is squinting at nothing as though he is trying to rearrange Torse’s words into a blurb. It would be tempting to say he is trying to persuade this woman, girl, to join them because that is what the crew wants. But he also finds he wants her to join for herself, for her to experience the bounty that comes from being a part of the Zephyr. 

Even deeper than that, he doesn’t want to be a fluke, a whim of circumstance. The goodness of this crew must be some consistent variable in a chaotic and uncaring world.

Freyja offers to die for him. Torse assures her that it is not necessary, but if she insists then he won’t stop her.

*

They reconvene in the hall, Freyja swallowing down her discomfort as she sees her dead comrades. For a moment, Torse thinks her resolve is going to waver, but she straightens her back and thumps her shield into her ribs in a guard position and speaks.

“This demon must have been protecting something; there were ways to get around it deeper into the Temple.”

Torse hears the unspoken part: the automaton wasn’t preventing them from rescuing her. 

Montgomery is tight-lipped about something, maybe having found an unsavoury thing worse than corpses. Torse will not push, he is not suited to those kinds of conversations. But they also have new findings.

Montgomery has uncovered a map, something strange and wondrous that makes even Torse’s iron constitution lift in curiosity and delight. They also find something far worse, a room full of paraphernalia of the Eyeless Hand

Wincing in disgust, Torse realises that there is also an eyeful hand there, some abomination that tugs at his sinuses. There are also reams of correspondence, much of it petty requests for information from lords with too much money to throw around, but also strange locked tomes that are cracked open with force and no small amount of squeamishness.

A vast book, decorated with clockwork and tarnished much like the automaton outside — blood rust — is opened to their eyes.

“A gift in principle to those faithful and stouthearted servants of the Eyeless Hand. A missive and bequeathment from Her Majesty, the Queen of Zern.”

It is full of maps, instructions, bizarre diagrams that scramble Torse’s senses more than the braided tides that they are somehow riding on. As people pick up loose pages and scraps of knowledge, Torse flicks right to the back of the book, looking for a concluding statement that might elucidate what came before.

He finds another missive.

“You are faithful indeed, and as such I wish to facilitate further communication. I present to you a servant of my own, who will guide you in your quest. If you wish to speak to me directly, then merely have this servant gaze upon its own likeness and I will be made aware.”

Torse swallows compulsively. This is a room full of seized material gifted to the Eyeless Hand, all suffused with the red energy of Straka, of Zern. If they sent a servant along with their book, then it stands to reason that the two should be here together as well. There is only one thing they have seen that looks like it fits the description.

A golden heart, a golden mind, but all within a red warrior.

*

Torse cannot sit on this discovery. It is dangerous, and a stroke of timing and luck that they did not awaken the automaton first. But this revelation creates more argument than he had anticipated. 

This warrior was a servant of the Queen of Zern. This warrior was an associate of Comfrey MacLeod. This warrior was sent to help the Eyeless Hand. This warrior instead has been helping the professor.

It makes his head hurt, enough so that when they finally think to recall one of the beetle guardians he can only breath a sigh of relief.

“How did this automaton, how did… Max… come to work for Comfrey MacLeod?” 

The beetle-guardian gives a soft hum that sounds like a silo closing. “Max was brought here damaged, he was missing his primary motivator and his memory chip. The professor repaired him, replaced the components with ones of her own design. Ever since, Max has acted as a financial advisor and helper.”

“A financial advisor?” Daisuke asks, incredulous as they look out at all the body parts spread across the room.

“Hmmm, he is very good at sums.”

Torse closes his eyes so he doesn’t sigh audibly. It makes a sort of sense. The Eyeless Hand are powerful and occult, but they seem to have more than their share of rich idiots. If the Queen of Zern was smart, and it’s becoming distressingly likely that she is, she could do worse than send them a financial advisor.

“So this primary motivator, this heart?” Marya asks, “that is what has been damaged now?”

“Yes.”

“Can I fix it?”

The guardian moves suddenly, claps a warning hand on her shoulder before she can move.

“You must not remove his heart. Machines of his kind can run with hearts or without them, but without his heart he lacks… discernment.”

There is so much death in such a small room, Torse can’t imagine how much worse it could have been if the automaton’s heart had been damaged enough for it to have turned on the professor and her crew before they were able to flee.

“And what about his mind?” Montgomery asks. 

“His mind should not be damaged now,” the guardian says. “The mind is for memories, the heart is for feelings. The professor has tinkered with his mind before to no ill effects. Max could be… fretful. He would become—”

“Wound up?” Olethra asks with a suppressed smile that Torse thinks is unbecoming of the subject matter.

“Hmmm indeed. He would often ask the professor to remove it for a few hours of dreamless disanimation.”

Torse swallows down the residual bile that the thought brings. His outlook on life had been tinkered with enough by propaganda and greed, he cannot imagine letting someone else actively hold his memories.

Then again, how many sleepless nights had he spent wishing there was a way to turn his brain off? Perhaps there’s something to be said for it.

“So we are agreed then? We will try to wake up Max without removing his heart.”

“I think so,” Van says. She seems eager to distract from her own revelations. Torse can sympathise.

The first thing they do is remove the dead banker. Torse has some inclination to walk Freyja into another part of the building, but then Van calls upon him to help pry Max’s grip from the man’s neck. It takes a considerable effort, even with the two of them, and the banker drops out when both of them have their hands otherwise engaged, hitting the ground like so much wet canvas.

The sword stays in the chest.

Without the corpse in the way, they can see that the sword has pierced through a rectangular sheet of metal at the centre of the torso, again in the slightly brighter metal that makes up the face. Torse doesn’t need to ask Olethra to guess that the panel and the face are both additions by Comfrey, one for safety and one for aesthetics or some other purpose. 

There are six pins shaped like cogs at each corner of the panel and down the sides, buckled by the thrust of the sword. Behind this is the fabled heart.

“Let’s step back for a moment, just in case it is only the sword jamming the works.”

He hears the MechLeod and Van click into place, ready to react, as he grasps the hilt of the sword and pulls it free with a shriek of rending metal.

Nothing happens, though the adrenaline still rushes through him and he has to shake it out. This is a job for Marya, as are the cog pins that he cannot seem to unscrew.

She takes her place in front of Max, spinning the pins apart. “Thanks for loosening them for me, Torse,” she sings.

He offers her a grunt of acknowledgment, glad she seems returned to herself after her emotional breakdown earlier. Whenever he had been angry as a child, the feeling had lingered for hours, and when he’d been upset it had lingered for days. The speed at which the Wind Riders bounce between emotions is dizzying.

The pins come off, the panel comes off, the heart is laid bare.

It is spherical, layered with strips of gold and valves plugged into wires. It almost seems to hum as the light bounces off of it.

It is also an easy fix, Marya declares, rocking the bright gold in its corroded housing while taking care not to detach anything. The sword was shunted to one side by the plate, so there is only one section bent out of shape, preventing the heart from rotating fully.

She reaches in, begins to pry up the twisted metal, and uncovers handwriting.

Comfrey’s handwriting.

Marya mutters it aloud as she works.

A gift freely given.

He smiles a little. It fits with his picture of Comfrey MacLeod, brushes off the dust of stories read as a child. Torse wonders what it would be like to have enough kindness to spread it so liberally, to friends and allies and even enemies, so much kindness that it can reshape the world to fit it.

“There, all better,” Marya announces, giving the heart a pattering tap with her fingers. “How do we know when it—”

There is a sudden thrum and Marya lurches away as the heart begins to spin, faster and faster like a gyroscope, somehow not tangling a single wire.

Van and Olethra are still prepared to strike, to kill, as a virulent crimson light begins to glow in the eye sockets.

Torse unsheathes his blades, just to be safe, as the automaton draws itself up and out of its boxing stance with what sounds like a deep breath.

The light flickers once, like a blink, and then it turns to survey them.

“Who are you?” Olethra asks, even though they know.

The automaton hesitates, and then a modulated, slightly stuffy voice comes out.

“I am… Max. Am I given to understand that you have repaired me?”

“We have,” Marya says, shrugging off recognition like a loose shawl, “we are friends of Comfrey MacLeod.”

“Ah, the professor, yes.” There is a long pause that waits to be filled in vain.

“Do you know who we are?” Olethra asks eventually, and the automaton shakes its head. It is a peculiar, somewhat harried motion. Torse expected it to move a little more smoothly, but perhaps it is still trying to organise its systems after months of rust. Someone ought to deal with that.

They introduce themselves, and their names at least the automaton seems semi-familiar with. It is not until they reach Olethra that it offers its own input.

“Olethra, Comfrey’s granddaughter. She said you would come.”

“She—she said that?”

“Indeed, she told me to wait for you, I… I have not kept you waiting, have I?”

“No, no, we just got here,” Olethra soothes as its shoulders come up in a defensive hunch. 

“Then thank you, I believe you have saved my life.”

Torse takes a moment to watch how Max moves, how the brass plates overlap each other and how the inner workings of his chest catch and turn. He is a truly superb piece of clockwork, every part fine-tuned to the next with enough latent strength to survive this violent brawl with nothing more than a few scratches. The welded-on face is incongruous, a little ridiculous, but he’s not going to bring that up. 

Marya holds up the broken panel, and that bit definitely needs replacing, but for now she’s happy to let Max reattach it. Or try to. The pins are really fiddly.

Torse watches him struggle for a moment, actual palpable frustration visible as he drops one of the little cogs and it goes spinning off into a pile of tacky blood.

“This is unbecoming, I’m sorry, let me—”

Torse reaches down and grabs it. “Here you go. I had just as much trouble getting them off — Marya is more dexterous than I.”

“Then it seems I must ask for your help once again Miss Junková,” Max says. He raises a hand to run across his face, perhaps checking for damage there, and pauses at the play of red light over his fingers.

“Oh, I apologise, I appear to have misplaced my spectacles.”

Olethra barks out a disbelieving wheeze as this killing machine reaches down between two festering corpses and pulls out a comically small pair of wire-framed sunglasses, tinted a deep indigo that turns his red gaze into a calming burgundy glow as he affixes them onto the straight slope of his nose. 

Or rather, affixes them into a purposeful divot there, and Torse is struck by the realisation that the whole discoloured ensemble of facial features is a repurposed glasses-holder, welded on to a former blank slate.

Max takes their stares uneasily. “I have been informed that the colour of my eyes is unsettling to people. I do my best to mitigate it.”

“We appreciate it,” Montgomery says.

“But it’s unnecessary with us.” Van finishes.

“We fought a bunch of dinosaurs, we can handle a little mood lightin’,” Daisuke adds.

Max flusters over their kindness. This too, Torse finds unexpected. How had the guardians described him, fretful? Torse can see it. 

It makes something soft and protective unfurl in his chest. A warm glow that heats him from the inside like friction.

“Max, do you know where Comfrey is now?”

“Yes, she was going to the Ectic Research Station. They had to leave in a hurry. She said something about Katur and the Eyeless Hand. She made an investment in the broadcast, in you, so asked me to protect her investment by staying to guard the radio tower.”

Olethra disappears behind the MechLeod, probably to get emotional over her grandmother’s faith in her, again. Torse feels he should be more sympathetic, but he could probably set a watch by the emotional breaks Olethra takes. They ask Max a few more questions, but his knowledge appears to be limited to recent events. It is Torse who tries to ask him about the past.

“Max, where were you before you came to Confrey MacLeod?” He needs to know, needs to know that his whimsical decision to wake up this automaton, this former servant of the Queen of Zern, will not endanger his crew.

Max hums. “I do not know. Before Comfrey I was… nothing. She gave me my golden heart, and I have kept it safe ever since.”

Torse closes his eyes. Max doesn’t remember, which makes him less useful and an awful lot safer. Of the options it’s the one Torse would rather have.

“That’s alright,” he says instead, “you can make new memories with us.”

Max inclines his head, Torse imagines that the moustache is smiling.

“I would like that very much.”

Chapter Text

Later on the ship, aioli tartare consumed with relish and disgust, Torse tries to find time to introduce their new companions to Wealwell. And untie him from the mast.

He owes Wealwell an awful lot, despite how unaware his brother is of this fact. Without him, the Zephyr would never have flown again, he might never have found the courage to step away from Mordecestershire, he might never have met this crew. He doesn’t want his brother to feel left out.

Little One is self-explanatory as long as Torse doesn’t actually try to explain it. Montgomery appearing with a bizarre creature is incredibly on-brand, having to tangle with mind-swapped raptors trying to practice dinosaur eugenics is not. Wealwell seems impressed by his posture anyway.

Freyja is easy enough to explain. She was from a rival bank, and now she works for the Gotches. Well, more specifically himself. Freyja looks at Wealwell and makes what appears to be a damningly accurate internal assessment of his ferociousness, before zooming off to integrate herself into the crew by force, or to systematically punch the ship until she finds a flaw.

This leaves Max.

“Max is an associate of professor MacLeod,” Torse says, treading familiar territory. “He worked as a financial advisor and bodyguard.”

“How did you know I was a financial advisor?” Max asks, surprised. Internally Torse curses himself for slipping up within a single day, then remembers that of the two information repositories in Ramansu, only one was the incarnation of evil.

“The guardians at the temple mentioned it, what exactly were you advising on?”

“Prudent spending, wise investments, how to apply for funding streams with catchy phrases. There is often an equation for such things. The professor did not always listen, though I warned her not to double cross Fehujar, lest we find themselves in a fiduciary apocalypse.”

Wealwell, unexpectedly, barks out a laugh.

“My my, you sound just like Codswallop.”

Max draws up in instinctive offence.

“How dare you, sir, I speak in complete frankness—”

“He means the family financial advisor, Orobouros Codswallop, I believe,” Torse interjects, hoping desperately that this is, in fact, what Wealwell means.

Max waits for Wealwell’s enthusiastic, guileless nod before he relaxes again. “My apologies. I have been told I assume too much of people, but you are evidently a man of fine character and solid standing.”

“Wealwell’s statement did leave a lot of assumptions to be made.” Torse would rather that Wealwell is not allowed to comment on the topic of standing; he doesn’t want to scare Max away and if dinosaurs, authors, and talking rats haven’t managed it then the Biffmore curriculum might surpass them all for weirdness.

Forgiveness offered and accepted, they find themselves in a companionable silence as Wealwell saunters off to risk his life with Daisuke. Can’t get a bead on him indeed.

Torse decides that he has enough stress in his life without trying to babysit his older brother, and instead tunes into the conversation happening on the other side of the deck.

The Wind Riders are planning a heist. Or reverse heist. Or heisting a plan.

Dawderdale is still trying inadvisable things with Daisuke. Sometimes Torse feels like the only sane person on the ship. Or at least the only one not consumed with lust for an eighty year-old gunslinger pining after his ex-wife.

Torse looks up at a faint, metallic tink as Max pats the MechLeod and the machine gives him an aborted wave before powering down, Olethra not even inside of it. Perhaps not the only sane person on the ship.

“Did the Professor make this?” Max asks, “it is fine work.”

“She did, do you like it?” Olethra asks, weirdly shy.

“Oh, very much so. It is a superior piece of machinery, and anyone lucky enough to be the recipient of the Professor’s gifts is someone I am eager to know.” Olethra fairly wiggles in place.

“However,” Max says, and Torse braces himself for some bit of the Straka’s cruelty, or perhaps even a farewell, “the quality of this ship is exceedingly questionable.”

The crew erupts in outrage. 

“This is the Zephyr you’re talking about—”

“She is the finest ship to sail the skies—”

“There is not a thing wrong with her—”

Max shrugs his shoulders up to nonexistent ears to defend himself. 

“I am trying to be honest — there must be a reason the Professor is aboard the Mark II and despite my victory at Ramansu the House of Fehujar is a mighty foe who will tear you out of the skies.”

Freyja pipes up, picking a splinter out of her knuckles. Torse gets the sinking feeling that if Van sees this they will all be holystoning the deck soon, and moves to hide this sacrilege from the boatswain. “Ja, the House of Fehujar, they are the mightiest warriors in all of Zood. They are unstoppable. Their banking branches span the skies of Zood, and they will not be easy to defeat. What is your plan that you wish to do? I know much about Fehujar, and though my heart breaks, I am loyal to my new master and my new position as a… just associate, not junior associate, right?”

Torse flounders. He has not been involved in the family business since he was sixteen and ran away to join the Eisengeistian military. “Yes, an associate, senior associate even.”

“Excellent, my loyalty to you is already rewarded.”

Montgomery is leaning over to Max, who is muttering with very little subtlety that he is the mightiest warrior in all of Zood. “Look, we understand you’re trying your best, but we’re very fond of this ship. Could you try and adjust your tone a little?”

“I could modulate my voice if you require it.”

“No, no, I mean, did Comfrey ever teach you about the shit sandwich?”

“Why would you have a sandwich full of shit?”

This isn’t working, Max seems even more baffled than before.

Van throws her hat into the ring. “It’s a metaphor. You see you take the thing you want to say that’s upsetting, that’s the shit, and you sort of sandwich it in between two compliments so it comes off as being less rude.”

“This ship is legendary,” he starts, cautiously. Montgomery gives him an approving murmur. “It is entirely unfit for purpose.” This, once again, is met with an uproar and Max rushes to close the sandwich with, “I like the colour of the balloons.”

This has, technically, fulfilled the definition of a shit sandwich. The bread leaves something to be desired. Torse glances up at the balloons and wonders if the fact they match the colour of Max’s eyes is coincidental or intrinsic in his liking of them.

Freyja thankfully distracts them all with the origins of the House of Fehujar and it transpires that the easiest way to get the coordinates might involve Van’s favourite subject: pirates.

Torse tries very hard to keep his sigh internal.

Chapter Text

Torse wants to throw his hands up in the air.

Or at least, throw one hand into the air. 

He’s not a squeamish man, but the eyeful hand freaks him the fuck out, to put it mildly. He tried to cover it with a blanket, but Van won’t stop tapping at the damn thing and Montgomery appears to be hearing it make noises, and Torse grimaces as he works through the logic that the only way for this thing to make noise is for it to blink really, really emphatically. Or squish its eyeballed fingers together.

Tentacles was also not on his list of acceptable adventuring subjects, a list which has been expanding exponentially since he got here. Tentacles is a firm no on the graph and the fact that they are, apparently, extra-planar and invisible doesn’t help. Torse likes being able to fight people and occasionally dinosaurs, a space squid is right out.

While Torse is internally having a very calm conversation with himself, Max has sidled closer.

He watches them poke the hand for a bit, watching especially Van who seems extremely tightly strung.

“Why are you frightened?”

For a moment Torse wants to clamp his hand over his own mouth, then realises that the voice came from next to him.

Max is peering at Van like she’s a particularly riveting zoo animal, and Torse can’t place where the simile is coming from until he sees that Van’s gauntlet, the one that reacted so strongly when they first met Max, is flexing in place like a tiger’s claws. Even if Van doesn’t realise it she is still reacting to the Straka energy, the latent threat of Zern. And Max, for all his politeness, seems subconsciously certain that Van is no threat to him, or he wouldn’t risk baiting her like that.

But Torse is getting ahead of himself; a single day does not a pattern make.

Max is dangerous certainly, as Fehujar could attest, but he doesn’t appear particularly perceptive. If there is some dispassion in the way he regards Van then it is in the way of another grand beast who has learnt to trust in the strength of a glass barrier, rather than waste his energy. Torse finds it hard to imagine there’s any true, strategising malice to Max, even if he was contracted out to the Eyeless Hand.

Max cocks his head as Van mutters darkly at him about not being frightened and in fact being very brave. Van is one of the bravest people Torse knows. 

“You’re definitely frightened.” Max says.

“No, you’re frightened,” she counters.

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“I have never been frightened a day in my life!” Max announces, the blatant dishonesty of the boast enough to break the burgeoning tension. Torse privately throws his developing theory off the airship, since Max is clearly not above a bit of energy-wasting bluster.

Because sleeping dogs have been quite thoroughly poked, Van challenges Max to a spar and tries to tackle him to the floor without any warning. They tussle on the deck like puppies, and any warnings that Torse could have given die in his throat as Van begins a highly successful campaign of taking Max’s legs out from under him every time he goes to throw a punch. One of her kicks is so forceful that it hinges Max’s knee entirely the wrong way, and over the din of buckling metal Max barks out compliment after compliment.

If nothing else, it gets them to leave the eyeful hand alone for a few, precious hours of what passes for normalcy on this ship.

*

The next day, since they didn’t have enough problems to begin with, they voluntarily attach themselves to what seems to be a tracking mine.

As another airship leers out of the cloud cover with a bristling broadside and a veritable army of clockwork figures, Torse watches in disbelief as the crew pose up to make themselves look more intimidating, and then almost immediately break formation for Daisuke to shoot their captain in the shoulder.

Max, in the middle of striding forward to introduce himself to the other automata, almost stumbles in his haste to fix Daisuke with an incredulous, inorganic glare.

Goldbeard, of golden fame, looks down at the smoking hole where a ball and socket joint should be and throws his head back in a roaring laugh.

Torse is so out of his depth he might as well be in the Swirling Sea instead of above it.

It transpires that Goldbeard was thrown through the Biangle by a condor, instead of disappearing into the mists of time. This is of course a golden opportunity to ask where on Gath he hid his gold, and Wealwell certainly seems ready to snatch it, stalking across the deck with a levelled pistol. Torse is mostly sure he did not learn how to use firearms at Biffmore, and so is glad when he’s tackled back out of the fray for his own safety and that of everyone around him. The Wind Riders may shoot each other for fun on the regular but this is one aspect Torse wants nothing to do with. 

The crew of the Gullfaxi are determined to take them captive, which seems like a foreseen circumstance that Torse’s crew should have been prepared for. Daisuke’s love-tap notwithstanding.

It is when Olethra mentions her grandmother, and an entirely implausible familial connection, that the tone shifts wildly and instead of being taken captive they are suddenly welcomed aboard.

Torse watches in shock as a motley assemblage of clockwork crew members almost fall over themselves in eagerness to introduce their various discrepancies to the Wind Riders. There are clockwork sailors, a clockwork octopus, a clockwork dachshund.

Torse hears a mechanical sigh from behind him and turns to see Max standing with his hands on his hips.

He’s cleaned the viscera off of himself and polished his brass back to a glossy shine. It must have taken him all night, and Torse regrets leaving him to fend for himself after their brief camaraderie yesterday.

He smiles at Max, then remembers that no one can see that through his mask so nods his head. Max nods back, in the easy understanding of a gentleman for whom words are an indication that etiquette has failed, and takes his place beside Torse.

“I had hoped to find more automata like me,” he confesses, “but these are utterly dissimilar.”

Torse looks again and has to agree with that assessment. These pirates must be formidable, but their design is ramshackle and organic in its chaos. Goldbeard has a barrel for a belly. Max, by contrast, is a perfect piece of engineering designed for some purpose that Torse hasn’t yet grasped.

“They are quite different yes, more…”

“Breakable.”

“Now now, Max, be polite,” Van says as she prepares to swing across. “They’re good honest piratical folk and I won’t have your tone issues making issues.”

“That sentiment is utterly contradictory,” Max grouses as she disappears.

Torse can only shrug. “You get used to it.”

They are taken a long, circuitous route to the pirate’s hideout, with even more strange automata that babble and whir and and speak in a seesawing tone that sets Torse’s teeth slightly on edge. They’re fine, they’re so fine, but it’s all a bit silly, isn’t it?

They’re here on a serious mission and these automata are talking about making babies from watches and aioli from ostrich eggs. Max sticks out like a sore thumb with his practised stillness. It’s not that he’s not invited with them, it’s just that by the time Torse turns round to ask his opinion on something they’re already some distance from the ship, Max cutting a lonely and distant figure where he’s failed to move from his post. Torse half-considers going back for him, but he remembers sidelining himself from outings by choice, and won’t press where he’s not wanted. It does leave an odd, mirroring song of loneliness in his own chest.

Torse decides that in Max’s absence Van is being the least irritating of his crew members, so accompanies her to the scrapyard with a petticoated automaton called Alma.

He’s just starting to get into it, get lost in the magic of dragon-shaped flamethrowers and giant springs, when Alma cuts in with a pleasant buzz.

“It is very lovely to see a crew traveling with automata on it. The gentleman aboard your crew does not look like any automata I've seen here in Zood.”

It confirms what Max himself has said, and Van certainly doesn’t try to deny it. “He's not… I mean, we haven't been in Zood that long, quite frankly. He’s from Zern.”

Alma gasps, almost taking a step back from them even as Van rushes to reassure her

“But he's like a good guy from Zern? I think it's like, ‘An enemy of my enemy is my friend’ type situation.”

“He has a gold heart,” Torse feels compelled to interject. “Comfrey made it for him.”

“Literally and figuratively gold-hearted, I feel like.”

Alma relaxes, and Torse gets the impression that she would be smiling if she could. “Oh, that’s alright then. My heart is made of brass.”

As she taps it fondly, Torse feels the question rise up in him, one that he doesn’t yet feel secure asking Max.

“What happens if your heart is removed?”

Alma cocks her head. “I’d go to sleep, maybe forever if no one put it back, but I’d just go to sleep. It’s the same with those who have crystal hearts.”

“And is that the same for all automata?”

“Oh yes, but I don’t know about Zernians I’m afraid.”

“That’s alright, I was just curious.”

“No problem,” Alma replies easily, rolling away to return to her job.

Van comes up next to him as he stares after her. “So still no clue what would happen if he lost the heart, but at least it’s not an instant-death situation.”

Torse nods, still slightly discomforted for reasons he can’t articulate, and allows himself to become distracted by a giant boxing glove. He figures Max would like it.

Chapter Text

They are making their way towards the Ectic line, guided by Max’s internal Zoodian compass and the light of stratospheric regional branches.

Torse is still fuming from Montgomery’s improvised cry for help which involved a lot of wailing and a truly defamatory assessment of Torse’s sense of adventure. He wishes he’d given Freyja the chance because she might have gone for something a little more believable and less insulting. They should have let the assistant director make the calls instead of relying on a serial exaggerator.

(This is an unfair thought, and when Torse peels back the layers of his own internal monologue he finds his father, burning paperbacks in the fireplace.)

He’s on the deck leaning over the railing as night draws in, trying to avoid a second round of garlic aioli and his own bad mood, when he hears a voice from behind.

“I do not think that that pirate was Olethra’s grandfather.”

“No, but it got us the information we needed.”

“Still, Daisuke didn’t seem happy.”

Unbidden, Torse’s mind casts back to the letter he found in Ramansu, familiar handwriting made foreign with time. It has been a decade since his grandfather died, longer since he last saw him.

Torse I worry for, he is a seventh son as I was, and utterly unlike his father. Though his principles and moral backbone have driven him out of the Gotch home, I can only hope they are not taken by some other scavenging body. He may be rough around the edges, but he possesses a kind heart, and that is perhaps more valuable than the spark of adventure I once tried to instil in him.

Torse sighs, he hopes that his grandfather was not disappointed with him, in the end. Hopes that he never found who he was working for or at least knew that Torse had been, at the end of the day, an ignorant child when he made that particular decision.

“Is there something on your mind? I don’t mean to pry.”

Torse turns and sees Max still next to him.

“I’m just thinking about family, and the burden of legacy. Nothing new.”

“Hmm, I have heard family can be inconvenient. But then again, sometimes family shows up in unexpected ways — take Miss Olethra for example.”

Torse is tempted to say that Olethra is an exception rather than an example, but bites his tongue. 

“Do you have family?” he asks instead.

Max tilts his head backwards, a habit that Torse is becoming familiar with. “I do not remember, I am not sure such things are given to my kind. If I have a kind.”

“You seem to have trouble remembering a lot of things,” he says, rather than comment on the latter sentence which is unspeakably sad. “Did you receive a knock to your memory core?”

“I do not believe so,” Max says, “and either way it is locked shut. Comfrey had the key so we will not know until we find Comfrey.”

Torse frowns. “I don’t believe it is locked shut, Max. I took a peek when you were disanimated and I was able to open it.”

Max’s hands fly to the back of his head, find the wing on his left side and pry it up with a click. “Concerning,” he says, very mildly but the way he shuts the wing extremely firmly belies his nervousness. “Perhaps we forgot to lock it after last time; I don’t like to dream.” His hands move to the other side and Torse feels it as he stills unnaturally.

“This side is already open,” Max intones, “is this the side you looked at?”

Torse can feel his gut sinking into his boots. “It is not. I opened the left side and shut it again without touching anything, believe me when I say I have never touched the right.”

Max levels him with a long, burgundy stare. “Do you promise?”

“I promise,” Torse says, hand on his heart. 

Max wrings his hands and then seems to notice the motion and shoves them behind his back. “The left side is important, it is where my balance is held, my equations, my purpose. The right side is for other things — remembering faces, remembering friends. I don’t like the thought of it being tampered with.”

Comfrey tampered with it regularly, Torse is given to believe, but Comfrey was a genius and Max’s memory core must be in part her own invention, so perhaps she has some right to it. Even so, it slides cold in his gullet.

“Perhaps I can take a look, just a quick one, and see if there is something stuck in there.” Like a mouse nest in an engine, he doesn’t say.

Max hesitates. 

“Here, you can hold my wrist as I do it, and if there’s anything you don’t like you can pull me out, alright?”

“Alright,” Max says, turning and kneeling so Torse has better access. They are moving very fast, perhaps too fast. This is an act of trust beyond what Torse has demonstrably earned. Though then again he’s known the other Wind Riders for only a few days and they all seem happy in their mutual life-risking. When in Zood… 

Torse takes a deep breath as warm metal snakes around his forearm, palpable through his gauntlets. Probably he shouldn’t be doing this in gauntlets.

“One moment, let me take off my gloves so I don’t knock anything.”

He takes off his gloves and then, in the safety of Max’s turned back, takes off his mask as well.

The lights brighten, swirl around his eyes as he adjusts to the starstruck night. He hadn’t realised how desperately he needed fresh air until the cool breeze curls across his sweaty face, licking across old scars and burns in an interrupted, half-felt caress. He looks back at Max, the trusting slope of his shoulders as he sits on his shins, metal coattails supporting him as he leans back. He is going to earn his trust properly, he thinks, no shortcuts.

Torse puts his arm back within Max’s grasp, and his breath hitches as he feels his wrist encircled, a mild static buzz raising the hairs on his forearms.

“Alright, let me take a look at you. Remember, if you don’t like it?”

“I break your wrist,” Max says which, isn’t exactly what they’d agreed but he’s allowed to be nervous. The tiny frisson of fear is enough to steady Torse’s nerves entirely.

He moves his hand to the right side, runs his fingers along the wing where it parts into two and feels the give of an unlatched door. He pushes it up, uses his other hand to pull it away from the mechanism inside so it sticks up from the top of Max’s head like the cover of a pocket watch.

Even without sufficient experience or light, it is pretty obvious what he is looking at. There is a bright gold housing among all the autumnal brass, and nestled inside that is a rectangular chip about half the size of a playing card.

The memory chip seems newer than the housing that encases it, fresh scratches from its installation in the soft Zoodian gold. Perhaps it is merely polished from frequent handling.

“The chip looks alright,” he says for Max’s benefit, “no dents or anything. But I’m not an expert. Would you like me to remove it and check behind for any fractures?”

“If you are careful. But don’t expect me to talk back until it’s inside again, I won’t be able to remember your questions long enough to answer them.”

“Very well, here goes.” He reaches in and pries the golden chip out, as carefully as removing a yolk from a boiled egg. He feels Max’s hand tighten on his wrist, making sure he doesn’t go anywhere, and then the glow of his eyes fades until it is almost indistinguishable from the starlight. Unlike the tableau in Ramansu however, there is still the whir and hum of his heart and as Torse moves Max makes minor, unthinking adjustments to his balance.

He turns the memory chip over in his hand. The back side of it is lightly and sparsely etched with geometric lines, tiny symbols clustered in the bottom corner. Torse imagines that they can be read like a phonograph to replay the memories.

He wishes the light were a little better so he could read them, but he is the one who offered to do this in the dead of night so he must bear the consequences. Running the pad of his thumb over the chip reveals no hidden scratches, though the edge is surprisingly sharp.

The pain reminds Torse that he is meant to be doing a job and a job alone, not extending this period of disanimation for idle musings.

He goes to put the chip back and pauses.

Deeper in the mind, behind the recess for the golden memory chip, is a dark scar through the brass cogs. It’s as if something was gouged into it, and the cog directly above is dented in a way that makes Torse think of leverage. He doesn’t need Marya to know what it looks like when someone opens a can with a screwdriver.

The real question is what was removed, and when it happened.

The answer might not be one he likes.

Whatever was here before, it has either been missing for a long time or deliberately excised by Comfrey, with the faint green of corrosion suggesting that this is nothing new. Perhaps it was instructions from the Queen of Zern, encoded loyalty to the Eyeless Hand, a fond memory of Lord Mordecestershire.

Torse firms his mouth, steels his resolve. It is only the second day, he is still exhausted and in pain from where the Imperasaur tried to mince him — thank Gotch it was so old as to be missing some of its teeth — and Max has been nothing but helpful so far. 

If Marya, Van, or indeed the other Wind Riders are to be held as examples, then bringing up past injuries only makes the present hurt too. It doesn’t solve anything. Ludmila and the Chapman Curse, lost loves and bitter exchanges, what can be gained by reliving them when they are far too late to fix and change?

If Torse did have a solution on hand, if he was a genius like Marya or the Professor, if he were as compassionate as Olethra or Monty, if he even had an ounce of Van’s pig-headed caretaking, then perhaps he would mention it.

But Torse is not any of those things, he just happens to be here.

He slots the memory chip back into place, sees the deck in front of Max brighten and feels the hand on his wrist flex. 

“All good?” he asks before Max can.

“All good,” Max confirms, so Torse lets the matter drop and takes himself to bed before Max can turn and see his face.

Chapter Text

His period of rest does not last long because Montgomery’s acting skills are deeply subpar to his writing.

A longblimp pulls up to them, packed to the gills with a crew that, like the Gullfaxi, look very whimsical and are in fact extremely dangerous.

Torse had his doubts before that Freyja would ever be considered not ferocious enough to be a banker. As he looks at these bearded, intensely burly warriors with huge briefcases that look like crackers in their meaty hands, he starts to see the root of her self-worth issues.

Torse would have thought that since they are coming to collect an asset in Monty, that they should keep Monty here and tackle all comers. Instead, Monty leaps onto the enemy ship in a rattle of buckskin and lines up his huge hunting rifle. 

Torse despairs of the Wind Riders. Their strategy really is to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

Torse feels disoriented from his minuscule nap, and can feel the edge of a headache from not getting enough sleep, and so he manages to stand there uselessly while Daisuke ziplines across from the Zephyr, sticks up a bank like a still from his youth, and gets a bludgeon to the back of the head for his troubles.

In fact, Torse is so out of sorts that when he hears Van’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion to throw one of the flying penny farthings into the propellor he thinks nothing of it.

That is, of course, before the screaming starts.

Torse turns to see Max impassively shoving a banker between the blades of the propellor, even as the man kicks and begs. The burgundy light of his eyes is not nearly so comforting now and red spatters across his torso and face.

Even from the across the deck he hears Wealwell throw up. 

“Go to sleep,” Max says, more of an order than anything else. Can the automata actually die or is all death just sleep to them, waiting for a new heart? 

“You’re meat,” is what he says next as he snatches another bike from the sky, and Torse is pretty sure that even Little One gags. It is brutally apparent just how much Max was holding back when he sparred with Van.

Marya is shouting something from the cabin, something about murder, and Torse might have to agree that Max seems built for the purpose of killing rival financiers.

The ships collide, jolting Torse from his thoughts as a shard of ice falls from the friodynamic balloon and slashes right through his diving suit into his shoulder blade. 

It fills Torse with rage, that they would dare try and sink the Zephyr, and he takes a running leap from the deck onto the balloon of the longblimp. He draws his swords and focuses all of that anger onto ripping the balloon into shreds. It’s almost meditative.

Below him, the boxing glove creates a bizarre temporary bridge for a dinosaur, and Monty seems to have been born to ride him like some Pilby pulp-novel protagonist as Little One scoops Daisuke up into him mouth and retreats back across. 

He sees Rolfgar Halvorson chase him across the boxing arm, but before he can get up to help he’s beset by a couple of bankers. They hit hard, axes and short swords that slice into his flesh and bruise him beneath his armour. His vision is limited behind his mask but he can see their wild eyes and beyond them the slope of the rising Zephyr.

For a moment Torse is on another ship in another world, standing beside Lord Mordecestershire in his Eisengeistian uniform with its grey gas mask and brass epaulettes, just another cog in the imperial machine. Then, as now, he looked across the deck to see one of his only tolerable brothers, the heroes of his bedtime stories who had made the Gotch household bearable. But now there is also Max, Max who is positively dripping with blood but who cups his hands to his immovable mouth to shout across to him.

“Torse, back over here, I have been informed we're going to make a hot exit.”

Then he turns and levels the harpoon gun at Torse, and for a moment Torse thinks this is it, that this is what comes of bringing someone saturated with Straka energy onto the ship.

But then the harpoon is in the Viking banker and Max is yanking them off the balloon and off of Torse out into open air. The rest of the crew seem pretty perturbed, and Max is arguing against them with words like “boxing match” and “wing suits are cheating” that don’t make very much sense in the context of, what Marya is all too eager to repeat, is murder. But he hasn’t broken his gaze with Torse, waiting for him to get back safely.

Torse is absolutely enamoured.

He’s so enamoured that he almost misses Rolfgar shouting from below him, somehow back on the ship and simultaneously furious and terrified. The bank lurches away, and Torse scrambles forward for the line he hopes desperately is still there from the start of the battle.

He jumps, and his hands catch on the line with a friction that for anyone else would be some nasty rope burn as he hurtles towards the Zephyr. Van peers over the edge and helps winch him up even as the bank begins to peel away.

“Did we get the coordinates?” he pants as he hauls himself over the edge.

“Oh yes, Max got them for us. The boy is not okay, but I think he’s a keeper.”

Torse looks across to Max, steaming with the heat of battle and with the blood actively sizzling on his broad shoulders so that it smells like cooking steak, and thinks that it might be the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen.

The crew give one last push, and the Bank of Fehujar falls from the sky to be swallowed up by the Swirling Sea.

Chapter Text

Now that Torse has had his internal revelations about just how impressive Max is as a warrior, he can’t seem to take his attention away. This conundrum is exacerbated by two things: the first is that Max still smells like charred meat and Torse is ravenously hungry, and the second is that his overworked inner systems contain several large cooling fans.

Max is moving arthritically around the deck trying not to draw attention to the fact that he sounds like one of the wind motivator engines and looks just as bloody. Torse is trying to ignore how much the smell of what is essentially a grill is making him salivate.

He needs Pappy to hurry up and cook those beans of his or he’ll do something inadvisable like break into the aioli fridge. He’s so hungry he almost does it and damn the Chapmans’ wrath, but he remembers at the last minute that the eyeful hand is still in there. So he retains his appetite and the unfortunate cannibalism implications.

The whine of distressed fans gets louder and the smell, impossibly, intensifies, and Torse has to swallow as Max ducks into the room with him.

“Torse? Have I done something wrong?”

“Not at all,” Torse says, mouth going from wet to dry in an instant as the metal form takes up the entire doorway. “You were magnificent.”

He… didn’t mean for that last bit to slip out.

“Oh, my mistake, I thought you might have been avoiding me.”

It is an odd thing to watch as Max preens at the compliment, wasting his precious remaining energy to polish a bit of brain matter off of his moustache, even while his words remain meek. There is a fascinating disparity between the way he acts and talks, like he’s been told the steps of being humble but hasn’t internalised it at all. Even though it is by its very nature a performance, Torse finds it refreshingly honest and easy to see through. Max is good at what he does, being demure about it is the real waste of energy.

“I’m not avoiding you, not because of anything you’ve done wrong anyway. I just found the smell of the blood a little much, thought I should check the filter of my mask.”

“Oh, I could help you change it!” Max offers, instead of going to clean the blood off of himself.

Torse stutters, stalls. He doesn’t even know what expression he might be making and certainly doesn’t want to take the mask off to find out. His mask is important to him, acting as a precious barrier between him and the whole frivolous world. Between him and his father’s eyes accusing him in the mirror.

“I don’t, I’m sorry Max but I don’t like people looking at my face. Even I don’t like looking at my face.” He tries for a self-deprecating laugh and it comes out a little strangled.

It’s monstrously unfair. Torse was wrist-deep in Max’s brain only last night. He could at the very least show the same trust in return.

Max shrugs off his concern in the same effortless way he shrugged a banker into open air. “I can respect that, I imagine I was much the same.”

“I’m sorry, you imagine?”

“Torse,” Max says, laying a bloody hand on his shoulder and somehow managing to pick the side with the rip, “I might be wrong but I don’t think my face was part of my original model. If this mask is your face, then it’s your face, and a very handsome one too.”

If Torse was an automaton then surely he’d be making the same amount of noise as Max right now. His heart feels like a child let loose with castanets. Max’s hand is very warm and the blood is seeping through his shirt. Torse has never been disgusted by bloodshed, so all he can really concentrate on is the warmth.

“We really need to hose you off,” he says, instead of something like a thank you or do you like your face or you think I’m handsome?

“Mmm yes, Van did not look pleased when I touched the doorknob. And the inner corridor is painted white so I have been avoiding it.”

Torse regains his courage and gives a returning pat to Max’s shoulder, leaving swipe marks across the metal. “Good job, let’s get you cleaned up.”

Later, freshly washed with the Zephyr’s seemingly infinite supply of fresh water, (collected condensation from the friodynamic balloons? He’ll have to ask Van,) Max makes an offhand comment that he later wishes he’d paid more attention to.

“I have been reading Monty’s books, to try and understand your history. Why are you not in them?”

“Oh, I only joined this crew a week ago. I believe my grandfather Cadswitch is mentioned a few times.”

Torse knows that Cadswitch is in there. It was why he himself stopped reading the books, lest the character of his grandfather overwrite his memories of the real man.

“Hmm, then they are, as Pappy says, missing a trick. You would make a good protagonist.”

“Thank you, but Montgomery is the author and so I defer to him.”

It is much later, finally allowed to sample the source of the tantalising smell of bacon grease, that it comes to a head.

They have opened the briefcase that was achieved through so much sensible violence, and are parsing through the scraps of paper when Monty holds up a fragment of Comfrey’s handwriting.

“All right, it seems to be… it's like a ledger, but the coordinates are all the different places of my books.”

Torse, satisfied at last with a full stomach, is engaged in idle musing about whether such an observation is a proof of pride or dedication in one’s work when Max pipes up.

“The good ones or all of them?”

The table experiences a rare moment of quiet, save for the low sound of Ghost Dog licking beans off the floor.

“Max…” Van starts, hoping to avoid disaster.

“Ohoho,” Marya chortles, far too eager to see more bloodshed.

“Now I’m sure you don’t mean that,” Monty starts, with a dangerous gleam in his eye. Monty is easygoing and incredibly gentle, but he also knows that he is good at what he does. Torse doubts that a man who has spent years fighting against politicians will lie down and take an insult like that.

“I do,” says Max, either unaware or uncaring of the danger. “I find your later works derivative and lacking the mastery of your first two.”

Maybe it’s the crowded atmosphere of sixteen crew all crammed into the kitchen, maybe it’s the fight from earlier, maybe it’s just good, old-fashioned fun, but Monty leaps forward to try and tackle Max’s legs.

It’s only been two days and already the crew have figured out that the only language Max is really proficient in is violence.

Max gives what might be a yell, but it disappears under the roar of his fans being pushed to their absolute limit as he’s once again thrown into combat. The crew are all cheering and Monty has wrapped around him like a particularly amorous cuttlefish, finding the particular angle where Max struggles to move his arms and keeping him there.

“Why is everyone cheering?” Max asks plaintively as Monty moves to strangle him. “Stop, I already had a match. You'll have to kill me. I'll never give up. You'll literally have to kill me. You will literally have to kill me.”

“Oh no you don’t get out of it that easily, you have to apologise first,” Monty chuckles, like a man half his age. Max struggles futilely against him.

“I like the first four books and then the middle ones are acceptable and it just falls off from there. Kill me!”

Torse idly draws a sword to poke at the pair.

“Come now Max, it’s bad form to insult a man’s work at the dinner table.”

“It’s not fair,” Max whines along with his engines, “Marya called me a murderer earlier and no one wrestled her.”

“You looked like you were having fun,” Marya shrugs, “and it was definitely murder.”

“Van suggested it!” Max pleads, trying to roll over with limbs that are growing steadily more uncooperative. “And besides, it wasn’t murder because it wasn’t premeditated. I assessed the situation on arrival and provided an efficient, above-the-board solution to the problem at hand, showing initiative and drive that should benefit this company in its future endeavours.”

Max’s voice is becoming slurred even as his speech gets more technical. Torse finds it incredibly endearing that even without an ounce of energy to his name, Max is dedicated to grand and ineffective bluffing.

“That is correct,” Freyja pipes up, startling Torse as she appears behind his elbow. “You performed a scoping endeavour and returned to present a clear risk-mitigation manoeuvre, as we say in the banking world.”

“Exactly, you get it.”

“We bankers have to stick together,” she says with a shrug, “especially since you have killed my previous direct report.”

“I did not mean to do that, was that murder?”

“I do not think it was murder.”

This honestly baffling exchange continues right up until Max makes another unwise comment about the popularity of Monty’s penmanship, and whatever else he might have said is lost in the dog-pile of crew members banding together to defend Monty’s authorly honour.

Torse uses the chaos to serve himself a second helping of beans.

When Max is truly, thoroughly out of power, Monty leans down to him with a grin that is still gentle and still a little bit devious. He has to lean between Marya, using an ineffective headlock and threatening to tarnish him, and Van, loosely gripping his ankles, while Daisuke offers low suggestions for how exactly Max’s head and body should be parted.

“See, Max, travel with us for long enough, we'll do that for you someday.”

Max’s head can only really loll backwards to make eye contact.

“Is this a binding contract?”

“It absolutely is,” Monty confirms as he reaches down to pick up Max’s limp hand for a hearty shake. When he replaces it, he makes sure to place it neatly on Max’s torn chest panel, and Torse swears that amongst the machinery he hears a purr.

Torse feels like this should be a moment for them to connect, like there is some great bubble waiting to pop and propel them into something more. But by the time everyone has charged outside to raise the roof with Ghost Dog’s unfortunate flatulence, Max seems to be sleeping peacefully on the kitchen floor, eyes dimmed almost to nothing.

Torse swallows down his curiosity and tucks a pair of oven gloves under his head, and hears the gentlest hum of a question from Max.

“It’s alright, you’re welcome to sleep here. I’m glad you’ve found joy among my companions.”

“I have, haven’t I?” Max says, the light lilt of his voice lending to surprise. “Is this what you have also found here? Joy?”

Torse wonders for a moment. He thinks he feels content, deep behind his breastbone spreading warmth, but joy is supposed to be larger isn’t it?

“I think it doesn’t come easily to me, but I am happy here.”

Max hums again, and the vibration is enough to send his hand sliding off his chest. It knocks gently into Torse’s ankle and twitches in what Torse dares to believe is deliberate comfort.

“I feel as though I am not built for joy, and yet it seems all I have ever known, travelling here with you.”

Torse can only smile invisibly down at him, replacing his hand on his chest as Max’s eyes dim once more. And then he retreats into his room to shove his own head under the densest pillow he can find to block out the sound of Ghost Dog farting.

Chapter Text

A part of Torse is deeply afraid that what he has with Max will not last. He wants to learn to spar with him, to figure out exactly what the limits of Max’s energy are so he can protect him in battle, to hear of all the things that make Max who he is.

But at the same moment he knows that this state of affairs is awfully temporary, and as he opens his eyes the next morning to the sooty red glow of Zern above them he feels a sinking feeling in his chest.

He cannot hear all the things that make Max who he is, because Max himself doesn’t know.

He cannot ask Max either, not outright, firstly because it seems cruel to taunt him with more things he can’t understand and secondly because, as much as Torse likes him, he is still very dangerous.

Torse lives in dread of Mordecestershire, the possibility that he will turn up and produce some fantastic bit of blackmail that will force Torse back to his side, even if the thought is unreasonable. Torse lives in dread that there is a less unreasonable thought: the Eyeless Hand might be able to turn Max back to their side.

The missing key troubles him. He wishes it was safe in his belt with all the others, or at the very least with distant, enigmatic Professor MacLeod. But Fehujar stripped Ramansu of all it was worth and it would be all too easy for a little key to get lost or sold to a higher bidder.

There is no good way to ask, “hey, is there a possibility that, at a word from a man who ruined my life, you might destroy everything I hold dear?”

Torse sighs heavily into his pillow and gets up. The great lure of Zood was in finding a place where he could be safe from every cause he’s abandoned. It’s telling that even with clear skies and not a hint of Widow’s Breath he still wears his mask, even with love and trust he sews up his own diving suit in the dark, predawn light.

There is a knock at his door, too loud, and Torse scrambles to put his mask back on, sinking the needle deep into his forefinger with a hiss.

“Torse? Are you alright?”

Torse pauses his mad scramble. “Yes Max, just made a mistake, that’s all.”

He hears no sound of footsteps moving away and realises that Max is waiting to be invited in. He glances down at the crumpled grey fabric in his lap, around his spartan room with its rack of swords and not much else, and squares his shoulders.

“Come in, Max, you’re welcome.”

Max slinks in, furtively shutting the door behind him. He has the oven gloves held in a tight grip.

“I wanted to return these to you,” he says, which is a bald-faced lie. Max knows they belong in the kitchen.

Torse takes a shaky breath. “Come in, sit down. What’s the matter?”

Max scoffs. “Nothing is ever the matter with me.” It is the hollowest boast he’s ever made.

Even so, he sits down beside Torse. Through his sleep shirt, Torse can feel the chill of the metal and then the softer warmth of Max’s core. Max’s shoulders are almost comically large, more like pauldrons, and even though they’re smooth and rounded Torse can press against them without fear of slipping.

“I told you I do not like to dream,” Max begins with an uncharacteristic hesitance, “but last night I dreamed and it was not terrible.”

“That’s, that is good Max. I’m sorry I didn’t think to ask last night whether you were comfortable sleeping.” Torse doesn’t think he could be persuaded to disanimate Max willingly.

“It was not terrible, but it was confusing. Do you know where home is? For you?” Max asks.

Torse bites his lip, returns his attention to the industry of patching up his diving suit with a neat, waterproof stitch.

“Theoretically yes. I know where I was born, grew up, spent most of my life. But I think people associate emotions with home, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt those. So no, I don’t know where home is.”

“All I remember is Ramansu,” Max says. “And I think that felt like home, but more like an echo of it, like it used to have all those associations and then it was empty except for me. It didn’t feel like home anymore.”

“Home can be people,” Torse says, because he’s heard it before and for some people it helps. Perhaps for some people it’s true.

“I thought home might be Professor MacLeod, which was why I was also trying to find her, and in trying to find her I realised something. I thought my compass was Zoodian,” Max confesses, “but over the last day I have started to find it leaving the ground, pointing instead into the sky.” He does not say the word, and Torse doesn’t dare correct him. “It is strange, I find myself constantly looking up, like the motion is engraved in my circuits as a necessity. But I always expect the sky to be blue, and instead it is red. I don’t know what to make of that.”

Torse’s guilt is going to kill him.

“Torse, I’m sorry to ask, but do you know where I come from? All of you seem to know so much and I am finding I know almost nothing about this world. I do not feel new, Torse, I feel unused. Like I’m not wearing out but I’m becoming brittle with neglect. I don’t want to snap, Torse, not here.”

And it could be a threat, just as much as a plea, but Torse feels much the same. Hasn’t his temper always been lurking around the pleasant conversations? Hasn’t he been keeping himself from Zood as much as he has been keeping Zood from himself? He spent years embroiled in the very heart of the implacable beast that is empire, and knew almost nothing of the shape it took in the world.

Torse puts his sewing to one side and looks at Max. He’s hidden his hands inside the oven gloves to stop himself wringing them, and Torse can’t help the fondness just as much as he can’t help the analysing. If Max keeps his hands there Torse will have a second’s advantage when it goes wrong.

If he does this right then it won’t go wrong.

Torse wriggles his left hand into the glove and intertwines his fingers with Max’s. The metal here is more porous, more scuffed and scarred from fights and cleaning and simple life. It means Torse gets a secure grip in seconds and the warmth inside the glove feels like privacy, like hiding under blankets with Wealwell and Johnwell and seeing who could be silent the longest.

Torse breaks the silence first.

“I don’t know where you are from, not for certain. But I know there’s not another automaton like you, not in Zood. You’re unique.”

“I’m lonely,” Max confesses, and Torse squeezes the metal hand until it hurts his own. He wonders if the oils of his skin will leave a mark, begin to tarnish the shiny brass.

“I’m here. And there’s a whole other world out there. If you are from Zern then we’ll explore it one day, if that’s what you want.”

For a moment there is the soft hiss of Max’s pistons working, pumping iridescent oil around his clockwork body even as he sits in unmoving meditation. For once it doesn’t feel like Torse has made a mistake.

“I would like that,” Max says at last. “And I would also like to spar, since I wish to prove that Monty’s win last night was a gift of happenstance.”

“I’m sure it was,” Torse agrees, extracting his hand and finishing his morning routine so that they can return to their normal business of simple respect and mutual friendship, rather than whatever prickling thing is brewing here.

When they are done they go out to the observation window and spar there, trading jabs and blows as the tightness in their chests eases and eases, lit by the red glow of an alien world. Max moves like an anatomist’s dream, symmetry and balance repeated through every layer of his being as he punches and swings. He doesn’t kick, keeping his steady footing as a priority, but he doesn’t need to when he can duck under Torse’s swords and punch from there. None of the rest of the crew can spar with Torse, since they are not sword-fighters. It’s a strange, old method of combat — maybe the only traditional thing he’s ever done — and even with rubber on the blades he hits hard and mercilessly. Torse has never been very good at friendly sparring and he drew blood more than he drew smiles, but Max can take it, and moreover wants to. He welcomes the scratches and the screeches of disparate metals moving together, as long as Torse is willing to sit with him later and buff those scratches back out. Torse would sit with him forever if he could.

When they are interrupted Torse feels loose and light enough that he doesn’t mind the jostling, the comparisons to Wealwell who has somehow wedged himself into a corner of the ceiling, or the excitable company.

But when he looks back at Max, he finds that he is still looking up at the sky. Not so much like a force of habit, like a curious glance, but with the nervous twitch of a rabbit seeing shadows on the ground and waiting for the falcon to stoop.

Max may be from Zern, but he seems afraid of it in a way that transcends memory. Torse quietly buckles an extra sword to his hip and makes sure to brush shoulders with Max as they step out into the swirling snow around the Ectic Station.

Chapter Text

The Ectic Station is grim and silent, and Torse winces when Max punches the door open with a squeal of rust. Someone had suggested that Torse himself try and open it with his keys, but everything was corroded shut and he certainly wasn’t going to sacrifice one of his blades to lock-breaking.

Max hurries inside like it might get him away from the threatening sky, and Torse swallows down a sharp wave of vertigo as he follows. It feels like this solid station should be moving as erratically as an ice flow, and yet his boots are firm and there is no sway of the waves.

Max and Freyja look completely unperturbed, sharing a look that can only be described as conspiratorial and a little bit mocking. Reason dictates that they are unmoved because they are the only ones not from Gath, and yet pride would dictate that they’re just better at standing their ground. Wealwell would be proud of them. Torse tries to clear his sinuses of the odd tinnitus which seems to have taken up residence.

Van is twitchy, which is not a good look on her. Her sunbeaten face looks pale in the light reflecting off the snow, its usual hearty roast turned to a sickly shade of drowning. Marya has constructed a glass bubble over her gauntlet and the dials are not nearly so angry as they were in the South Pole, but she turns to fix him with a startled, pleading stare.

“I’ll remember the what?”

“Pardon, Van?”

“I thought I heard you, didn’t you say something? It was muffled so…”

“Not I. What did you think was said?”

“Oh, nothing,” she lies ineffectively. Torse cares about Van deeply, wishes she could lean on him the way she might have once leant on the professor. But Torse is no scientist, no engineer, no steady star in a storm. He watches as she deflects Freyja’s attention by giving her thick, unwieldy mittens against the cold and fails to comment on the fact that Freyja is cashing them in as her property.

“Van I…” he trails off. What is there to say, when he has been silent for so many years?

“I don’t know what you are going through,” he says at last, in the stretching second before her attention is drawn away, “but if I could slay your nightmares I would.”

Van’s eyes soften, the crinkles around them easing enough to reveal the paler skin of tan lines.

“You’re sweet, Torse. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

She lifts her hand as if to give him a clap on the arm, then remembers the bubble and gives a quick laugh.

“Whoops, should try not to smash that.”

Torse bumps his shoulder against hers instead, padded by layers of cold-weather clothing, and they turn their attention to the hangar doors.

When they are pried open they reveal constellations of bullet holes, the stink of discharged dynamite, and there are clear signs that the Eyeless Hand were here in force.

Scuppered submersibles loom from the darkness, swarmed by parasitic footprints in unsuitable shoes. Torse has a childish urge to stomp his own heavy boots through them all, to muddy all the tracks to say I was here and you couldn’t stop me. But that would inconvenience Monty. More than that, Torse doesn’t want to walk where Mordecestershire walked, sleep where he slept and eat what he ate. Torse wishes he could stop following Mordecestershire for good.

It’s a murder scene just as much as Ramansu, but Ramansu had no deception to it. Ramansu had bodies and witnesses and motives and instigators, two of which are with them now hunting for a third, but the Ectic Station just has mausoleum-quietude and the dank smell of fear.

They will not find anything so pleasant as the beetle-guardians here.

Olethra in her MechLeod retreats to a corner and must hit some sort of frequency-tuned switch because all the lights come on. It makes the place a little less eerie but rather negates the stealth they were aiming for. Though, as Monty is quick to point out, the blizzard outside will hide them while they work. Torse points out, far more quietly, that the Eyeless Hand evidently didn’t walk through the blizzard to get here. Mordecestershire was bad enough when he could fly, if he can teleport now they have some serious trouble ahead. Monty points out exactly where Mordecestershire tried to kick a stone wall in his anger and it does make Torse feel a smidge better.

Torse goes to try his keys at the door, and turns back at a brief commotion to see they have seemingly recruited a yeti while his attention was elsewhere. It takes an embarrassing amount of time to discern Olethra under the bounteous layers of wool and he turns back to his task with a scoff. Max is hovering at his shoulder, Freyja on his other side with her mittened hands wrapped around her shortsword. It makes him feel secure, even if he doesn’t feel sky-eyed, and he makes a mental note to add Freyja to their sparring matches as he swings the door open.

Mortared stone casts rough shadows, a world apart from the clean metal and soft bounce lights in the rest of the station. Torse sees his vision fog as the room grows impossibly colder and his mask steams up, and the condensation reminds him immediately of the tower at Ramansu, where they found Max.

“Another of Comfrey’s offices?” he asks.

“Undoubtedly, she seems to work to a schematic.”

“It makes it so much easier when offices have the same building regulations,” Freyja adds. Torse supposes she would know, since the Fehujar offices are scattered across asteroids. Torse can’t imagine what the fire escape procedures must be like.

He stuffs down his wandering thoughts. “I am so unsuited to this,” he confesses to his companions. “Give me something to hit, I beg you.”

“We could help the others,” Max suggests, “and if I see something breakable I’ll let you know.”

It wasn’t quite what he meant, but Torse doesn’t actually want to invite trouble down on their heads with his antsy thinking. Fighting is a clear focus for him, but he wants to be more than just a muscled backup option for when things go sideways. He nods Max towards Marya, since they might be able to help each other with mechanical devices, and Freyja towards Pappy so her hawkish gaze can compliment his coyote stare. He himself turns to Monty, since there is still a part of him that can’t quite believe he is in the company of such a celebrated author. Monty’s stories were the axis upon which his young world turned, and even now Torse finds his turns of phrase bending towards poetry. If he can help him in any way he is grateful.

They find more reams of correspondence in this new office, each more damning than the last, and whatever frivolity they find fades as they read further and further. There are letters from Haunch Saxon before his murder that imply terrible things about what Comfrey has done, wittingly or otherwise, to Van and Marya. There are accusations from Monty that Comfrey was taking money from Mordecestershire and the Ministry of Deranged Science after his grandfather died. There are brutal suppositions about whether Comfrey is still the brave, brilliant explorer she once was, or whether she’s twisted herself into knots chasing an impossible dream.

The letter from Haunch is damning in so many ways, but one phrase sticks out to Torse — perhaps only because of the company he keeps.

“You playing fast and loose with our benevolent bankers has tipped us off to the Eyeless Hand and you know what happens if they find the temple before us.”

Was Haunch referring to Fehujar, or Max, or both? In not returning on her investments Comfrey had her assets seized, including the ledger that they have followed here, and Fehujar may well have turned their backs on Comfrey to work with the Eyeless Hand if Mordecestershire had asked. But to tip off the Eyeless Hand? Perhaps she tinkered with Max a little too much, set off something like Goldbeard’s tracking mine. Perhaps Max is not as confused as Torse supposes.

Torse glances over his shoulder to see Max holding entirely mundane objects to Marya one by one with the same simple ask of “Is this magical?” each time. Torse banishes the unworthy thought into the beyond.

There is also much research here — not of the Eyeless Hand but of Comfrey herself. Not of Straka but a nameless beast, Zood and Zern and the Zumhadi Beacons in Katur. It is easier to lose himself in these distant histories than eavesdrop on the rest of the crew having their uncomfortable reckoning with a woman who shaped their lives so thoroughly, in what they thought was for the better. There is far too much to hide from Max, but Torse thinks that perhaps he doesn’t want to hide this from Max. It’s his history, written in the language of clustered symbols and translated by Comfrey’s hand into telling woeful tales of the Straka, the Queen of Zern, the Empress of Rust and Ruin. A small part of him hopes that it will give Max pause if his allegiance is ever called into question, to know the cost and death toll wrought by his former master. He certainly knows it to be true of himself. No amount of blackmail could make him return to Mordecestershire.

It is not until he hears a clatter that he looks up to see Max has pressed himself back into a corner, venting steam in the freezing air as the paper he was holding flutters to the ground with careless ease.

“Max, talk it out. What are you feeling? Or you can bottle it up. That's what I'm doing.” Marya picks up the paper and sucks in a small gasp before turning it towards the others.

There are automata sketched on the paper, but they are nothing like Max.

They are elongated, with eyes that stretch down to their jaws without mouths or nostrils, sickle-clawed and robed and exuding malice. They are humanoid in the vaguest sense, which only makes them more disquieting, and posed with some air of regal uncaring that makes Torse think these were sketched from a statue or fresco. But who would make art in Zern?

“What are they?” Max asks in a whisper. “I feel… I feel afraid. What is happening to me?”

“Are you remembering something?” Van asks, moving closer. Her gauntlet’s gauges swing as she approaches, slipping briefly into the red as she takes the paper. She glances at it briefly, mouth tugging into a frown, then deliberately moves it out out of his sight.

“No, I remember nothing. But I know them, I’m sure of it.”

“Perhaps we could find—”

“No!” Max shouts, surprising himself. “You must not go looking for them, must not trust them. They are dangerous.”

They can’t get any further sense out of Max, not in a matter that seems wired into him stronger than any other instinct. For the first time Torse wonders if Max’s golden heart reveals things in dreams that his waking mind doesn’t know.

There are histories written here, of how the Corrodi Primarch — those monstrous creations — lurked on the edges of ancient Zern until they elevated the Queen to power, created something called the Naughtomata. There seems to be no beginning to the Corrodi Primarch, and now they appear to rule supreme with no end in sight or imagination.

Torse thinks that that would mark anyone indelibly.

The book he is holding might hold an explanation for Max’s reaction to Zern above them. “Many profound observatories does she have and secret ways of seeing frequencies of crystal and of steel.” Perhaps it is dangerous to be this close to true vex. But if anything is watching from above then either they must trust to the blizzard or accept it is too late to hide, and it will give no comfort either way.

Torse squares his shoulders. “Perhaps the Straka was set after you deliberately, Marya, took Ludmila deliberately. This Queen of Zern and her Corrodi Primarch seem to command it, and those with beasts of war do not let them slip without cause.”

“The Eyeless Hand seem interested in you, Van,” Monty adds, “and the Queen of Zern in Marya. Both of those energies that they’re associated with seem to oppose Zood, but they might not be aligned entirely with each other. I don’t know what that means for us though.”

“I do,” Torse growls, because now three people he cares about are looking around the station with new, uncharacteristic wariness. “It means I can finally hit something.”

“Not before I get us both into the hot tub,” Van says, taking his lifeline and wrapping it around herself like armour. He may not be able to slay her nightmares, but he can make sure that he can draw her out of them.

They find the name of the great beast, the great barrier, and their next port of call. The Beacons of Zumhadi must remain lit, and if the Eyeless Hand was here then it means they are looking for a way down to the temple through the deeps. But if they want to get there first they will need to find a craft, and Torse is once again so grateful that Freyja is with them as she turns their compass to a new heading, far from the oppressive eye of Zern.

They travel directly away, almost true vim, and as they head towards the new city of Oda, Torse keeps an eye on Max. And he notices that, even as Zern disappears from the horizon, Max doesn’t stop looking over his shoulder.

Chapter Text

They are in the midst of a festival.

The continent is green and rife with the sound and smells of abundant life, birds flinging themselves from the trees like the air itself will catch them, vines and flowers rioting through mossy streets. There are sunflower masks and animals long-extinct in Zood and plant-like people. Everyone is happy, everything is good.

But Mordecestershire is here.

Torse is suddenly, excruciatingly aware that he is still in his old Imperial uniform. The lifeless grey had seemed like a wonderful barrier against everything in Zood that was too bright, too loud, too much. It is perhaps the first time that he is acknowledging that the opposite can stick out just as much.

And if Mordecestershire is here?

Torse can almost see him now, standing in his peripheries as he points a gun at famed adventurers and old sky-sailors. An impersonal hand clapping onto his armoured shoulder and telling him to shoot Wealwell Gotch, assuring him that if he only aimed right then he couldn’t go running back to daddy with tall tales.

Torse doesn’t think Mordecestershire knew his first name, let alone his last that he’d been carefully burying for thirteen unlucky years. It was why he’d been surprised enough, when Torse had turned the gun on him instead to shout that that was his brother you sick bastard, to let him go.

Wealwell, wonderful and frivolous and truly undefinable, had known him at once. Wealwell who had decided that adventure called him to Goldbeard’s gold, and for that he needed the man who had shot him dead (allegedly) and that man had needed his granddaughter and she had needed her mech and the mech had encoded a message and the message called for the crew.

Wealwell had looked at him in an utterly anonymous uniform, flung his arms wide and never mind the wasp-fire, and called him to join them.

“Torsewell, you’ll never believe where we’re going!”

And Torse hadn’t, not until they were back in the sights of Lord Mordecestershire and he had been screaming defiance, knowing that to die free was far better than to live enslaved.

He had seen the wash of bright white light and thought that it must be another ship descending on them, unaware that he was backlit by the Biangle and unprepared for all that awaited them.

Oda, with its susurrus of life, is quite literally worlds apart from Smog-choked Eisengeist.

Which brings him back to the source of his fear — he is wearing an Imperial uniform while they hunt on the trail of an Imperial man, and he is far too obvious in the pursuit.

Worse, he cannot bear to give it up. The uniform stands for nothing he should believe in, and yet it has been the signal of his merit and competence for nearly half his life. It was the recipient of perhaps the first and only positive recognition he had in years, and without it he is right back to being a failure of a son and a failure of a brother.

And while he knows, he knows, that the anxious looks the crew level at him are entirely in concern for his own safety, he cannot help but think that they might also be newly wary of him.

He followed men like Mordecestershire for thirteen years, and he should never have let it become a habit that he needed to break.

He clears his throat. “Perhaps I will remain on the ship to keep guard. I feel unsuited to the festival spirit here.”

“We could disguise you,” Olethra suggests, “c’mon don’t be grumpy.”

“I am not grumpy,” he rumbles, trying not to sneer as Daisuke offers the bald cap. “I am trying to be prudent.”

“I mean, you might lure Mordecestershire out,” Monty says. “But that might be very dangerous for you.”

Torse is about to stand his ground, stay on the ship and keep his crew safe when he catches movement in his peripheries and the flash of bronze.

Max is no longer looking over his shoulder. Max is looking out into the green wonder of Oda and he is beautiful. He is so enraptured that he is forgoing his own flawless design to lean forward, unbalanced for the chance to see more.

Torse wants to hide on the ship, to be useful and out of the way while doing so.

But the way Max turns towards him, his own name rolling and warm in that brass throat, Torse knows that Max would keep him company if he stayed.

And why would Torse ever want to make him choose, when he can just as easily make him happy?

Hang Mordecestershire. Hang his uniform and his own dour outlook. If Max wants to see Oda then see Oda he shall, and it would be Torse’s privilege to accompany him.

Torse steps off the ship prepared for the worst, for a bolt from the blue, blue sky to strike him down for daring to show his face here. Instead there are games, dances, an over-abundance of everything and before he knows it his uniform is half-covered in flower garlands. Don’t these people know the danger they are in? The threat he represents?

He turns to express his concern to the crew, but they are already scattered to the games and dances. Courtney is receiving polite applause as he strides down the gangplank after Monty, who has quickly found the most approachable festival official and is negotiating for a submersible. Even stoic Marya is cooing over tiny dogs with walnut shells for bodies, and Max picks up four in one scoop to peer at them closer. Their little tongues lave at his moustache and chin and Torse could swear he hears Max giggle.

It’s such a refreshing difference from his fear in the face of the Corrodi that Torse will not spoil it. They are all adults, all hardened adventurers. The danger doesn’t mean they have to ignore the wonder.

Still, Torse would rather not be ambushed and he ambles over to a clothing store full of masks, keeping a sharp eye on the only pterosaur he can see just in case it shakes off chalk dust and reveals itself to be Archie. Most of the masks are huge plant-based lions with sunflower manes, but there are shaggy mammoth capes and many that look like oversized root vegetables among simpler harvest crowns of wheat and cornflowers.

A sun-lion mask would suit Max, he thinks. The proud part of Torse thinks he’d rather have a wolf, or an owl, something deadly and serene.

“How about this one?” Max asks, holding up something that’s neither a lion nor a wolf. Torse hadn’t realised he was also looking.

The thylacine mask has a long, friendly snout and round ears made of large, crumpled petals. It is made of what look like layered pine kernels in the colour of Max’s body, with sticky stripes of lacquer the colour of Torse’s mask.

“And look, it will fit over your face.”

Torse feels his resolve crumble. It will fit perfectly over his gas mask, even though this might be the one place he doesn’t need it, and Max is still taking his comfort into account.

He takes the mask and fastens it over the metal and rubber, takes in the shape of the world through softened edges and breathes deeply. He feels the black lacquer stick his fingers together, and impulsively wipes them onto Max to give him a fine set of whiskers on either side of his moustache.

“There, our very own Celestial Lion.”

“I could give you a mask too…” the shop’s keeper begins with an indulgent crinkle.

“No need, I will wear these marks with pride.”

It’s a truly awful unintentional pun and Torse colours like a beet to hear it. He hadn’t thought there was any space for frivolity and yet it is so, so easy with Max, who will not expect him to maintain it forever.

They meet Rufus Radish who brings them by gondola to an engine orchard, and who knows his history almost as well as Torse was forced to learn Gath’s. It seems there was a time when there was free travel between Zood and Zern, when the Biangles swallowed whole cities instead of errant knights and solo professors. He is also the first to talk of the great war between Zern and Zood, and the building of the Temple of Katur which put up a barrier and brought the senseless waste to an end. Perhaps Rufus would watch his words more closely if he realised Max’s origins as the crew of the Gullfaxi had, but his blind welcome washes over them all and Max seems unperturbed in this easier atmosphere. There is simply so much bounty here that it is hard to imagine war in its midst.

There is also no Widow’s Breath here — it isn’t allowed — and Torse wonders if that is why Wealwell is looking so chipper and healthy, if that is why even through the filter of his mask his lungs feel lighter.

Even later, sprinting away from a friendship ritual with a very confused Max trailing after him, he feels the lightness in his lungs.

“You ran away from a friendship ritual?” Marya asks, standing in front of the newly-cleaned engine as Torse pants. Wealwell is busy coiffing his hair where his hard work made it fall awry, and Torse is briefly jealous of his toned muscles — maybe he should ditch the diving suit.

“It might have been awkward, I also ran away from the friendship ritual,” Max says, loyally.

“You both, separately, made the decision to abandon the friendship ritual?”

“Your ability to read the tone of a room is absolutely inconceivably bad,” Van adds, peering at him even as she ostensibly addresses Max. Torse realises she is looking at the mask and fights the urge to remove it. Wealwell bravely abandons him to his fate.

“Look, Daisuke is an incredible man, but we don’t need a friendship ritual,” Torse tries. “Maybe he should do one with Wealwell instead.”

“Pappy would shoot Wealwell,” Marya laughs.

“So fast,” Van adds. “He wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“So you agree that the friendship ritual is more necessary for them?”

“Look Torse,” Van says as she punches his shoulder with her gauntlet. “Friendships can be reaffirmed yaknow? It doesn’t have to be a one-and-done deal.”

“I don’t see why not,” Torse argues. He and Max don’t need any kind of friendship ritual to get on.

“Because, Torse,” Van says, leaning over his smarting shoulder and smiling her wisdom into the crook of his neck as she looks down the sight lines of his muzzle towards Max, “friendships, like engines, are most beautiful when they are grown and cared for.”

There is a sharp crack as Marya uses Max’s flexing bicep to open a mussel, and Torse feels a smile crack across his own face in return.

“No shortcuts?”

“Not a single one,” she affirms.

Torse allows his smile to grow sly. “Then you agree the friendship ritual is unnecessary.”

Van punches him again, and that is when reality comes crashing back in with his bloodied, terrified crew mates.

There is only one name they speak and it is enough to chase his joy far far away: Mordecestershire.

Chapter Text

Monty and Olethra pile onto the ship, staggering and angry and scared.

They are dripping with blood, haemorrhaging out of their mouths and noses too fast and too slow where it has mixed with saliva and mucus. Olethra’s eye is bloodshot, her eyelid ripped, and Monty smells like char and electricity in a way that is nowhere near as appealing as it was on Max.

Monty’s age is apparent for the first time as he sinks into an exhausted slump, while Olethra is ready to hurtle back out of the ship to face her fears from the safety of the MechLeod.

Mordecestershire has been here the whole time, the old man from Tabira city, and they have been entirely unprepared for the depths of his anger.

He recognised Monty, recognised Olethra. Torse wants to blame himself but the plain truth is that none of them have been careful enough, not before or after Tabira. Haunch’s murder should have kept them looking over their shoulder this whole time, looking for the shadow of Archie in the sky, but they have been too busy playing at being heroes and being lulled into expecting fallible storybook villains.

They will have to move fast, move their timeline into overdrive and get to Katur before the Eyeless Hand, who will surely be assembling in force now. Mordecestershire has ripped the name of the nameless god from Olethra’s mind and could have done it to any one of them except Van. If he’d found Van first they might never have seen her again.

This time he deliberately makes sure to keep Max apart from the rest of them, sending him with Freyja to help Rufus build the submersible while the rest of them investigate his apartments. If Mordecestershire can snatch a name from a dying mind then he might well be able to un-fix whatever Comfrey did to free Max, and Torse refuses to see him as scared as he was in the Ectic Station. Torse refuses to lose his friend to a man like Mordecestershire.

They should, by all logic, be able to beat the Eyeless Hand to Katur as they snatch the budding submersible for themselves, and bless Rufus for his easy understanding, but Torse fears that the Eyeless Hand do not run on logic. They gain semi-formal permission to rifle through Mordecestershire’s rooms in search of clues, all pretence of a booze cruise long lost under the crushing pressure of the world being in danger. Even the day that it will take to grow, grow, an entire submersible seems unfathomably long.

The apartments are like a black rot on this beautiful city, filthy and stomach-turning. There are manacles fixed to the wall, depraved ramblings and foolish requests for information. There are names in ledgers that Torse recognises from Eisengeist, and financial transactions in an unfamiliar, careful hand that Torse fears might be Max’s.

There is a vast amount of money being transferred here, enough that Torse is grinding his teeth on Monty’s behalf, on Marya’s. How many mice could be saved with a fraction of this fool’s errand, how much of Scrapsylvania could have been made safe and stable? All of it is being thrown gladly to a man who would end it all just to revel in a moment of chaos.

When the beacons are dimmed, and the door is destroyed, that is when the nameless god shall appear.

What exactly the nameless god will be doing appears to be anyone’s guess, and from the correspondence Zern is certainly not forthcoming. He feels like he’s putting together a picture that Mordecestershire was too egotistical to look closely at: the Eyeless Hand are being used for the menial grunt work of a Queen working to a very different purpose. The Eyeless Hand is working towards the end of the world, but maybe only one of them, and if Zood is destroyed and Gath is unreachable then that leaves Zern to reign supreme — there is no need for them to wage war, cross a barrier, or even appear in person when there are dangerous fools like Mordecestershire willing to do all the hard work.

It is no clearer how exactly Zood will end when the nameless god is released, but as Torse feels a prickle of damp, salty air wash over him he has the irrational and sudden dread that he is about to find out.

He can smell fear in the air, a terror that has been named once and will be again, chanted in a hundred voices. But Van’s eyes are tight and sympathetic where she looks at something only she can feel, and Marya is almost vibrating with excitement.

“Van, you are the best bouncer I have ever met, and I think they are in need of safety and protection.”

Van nods, squares her shoulders like she does in fact stand at the door between worlds, and instead of blocking the way she reaches out to ask how she can help.

The world buckles, flexes, for a moment Torse feels something twist in his chest and his vision washes red as his crew talks about nets and the sky and Celestial Seas. He feels unmoored and crushed all at once, like he’s floating loose as his arteries squeeze to capillaries and his bones grind to flour. His head aches, teeth pound, he feels the corners of his mouth split and realises he is grinning into a silent scream.

He cannot move, cannot breathe and there is gold in front and black behind. There is brass bursting at the seams and metal melding with flesh and porcelain tears on a young woman’s, old woman’s face.

“Give us the name,” say a thousand storm-wrecked voices, and Torse buckles and stumbles as they push past him to Van, wrap around her like a winding sheet and Van…

Van, sky sailor against the mould, does not sink but soars.

All at once the pressure lifts. He almost sees the mercury slide of the last Biangle as something named, knowable, vast and untamed and free moves away from them and into the sky.

He draws in a shuddering breath, staggers a little as he reaches for Van.

She turns to him and he could swear her eyelids nictate. The knife is in her hand and it makes his flesh crawl. He does not understand what is happening but he is looking at a weapon that could pin a god, an elder animal from a time before memory was passed down. He doesn’t want it anywhere near his friends.

“You want me to hold that for you?” he asks, because he’s an idiot.

“Rather you than me,” Van says, passing it off as her voice scrapes over the raw wound of whatever she just witnessed.

The knife is objectively beautiful, with a crystal spine and an engraved hilt, but it is also needlessly serrated and despite being buried in the wood of the table it is wickedly keen. It is a knife to cause destruction and a knife to cause pain. He doesn’t want to look at it for longer than he has to, so he discards one of his own knives to hide it in a sheath on his waist.

It hangs there like a severed head against his thigh, teeth waiting to nip and infect. He feels his eye twitch and a bead of sweat roll down his temple. He takes his own knife back and walks away from his crew so he can stab it into Mordecestershire’s pillow without judgement.

“Torse.”

He jumps like a scalded cat, rips the knife out of the pillow like he’s going to get in trouble, and whips to face Monty.

“Sorry I…” he reaches up to scrub his eyes and realises simultaneously that he is still wearing his mask and still holding the knife, which is terrible weapon etiquette. “What was that?”

“Something trapped, something scared and in pain.” Month holds out his hand, his mouth grim. “Give me the knife.”

Torse reaches towards his belt but Monty clicks his tongue. “Your own will do, I’m just going to borrow it.”

Monty, gentle soul, takes Torse’s knife and rips the mattress to shreds.

Torse can only stand there, blankly amazed as Monty furiously works his way through the fabric and padding down to the slats beneath. He does it all in near-silence, save for small grunts of exertion as the knife dulls, and when he is done stands in his own snowdrift of wadded cotton and straw.

He hands the knife back with a remedial smile.

“That felt good.”

Torse clicks around a dry swallow as he takes the knife back. He’s not feeling conflicted, not in the slightest, but he does feel ill.

Monty takes in his tender stance and his eyes soften. He sits on the edge of the bed frame and pats the carnage. “Come, sit, tell me what’s wrong.”

Torse does not want to sit on Mordecestershire’s bed. He doesn’t want to be in Mordecestershire’s house. He doesn’t want to be in Mordecestershire’s life.

But then again, none of those things are really Mordecestershire’s any more. They belong to the Wind Riders and the Queen of Zern.

He sits, watches the white fuzz take to the air at the motion and drift down like a dandelion clock.

Monty looks so tired, here out of his element but determined to make it his own. Torse wants to reach out and comfort him but his hands are shaking and he wishes he could hide them behind his back, in an oven glove, anywhere but in this tender gaze.

“Torse,” Monty says again, “I know we’ve made light of it in the past but I would not judge you. It is an awful burden to be dependent on something but it is not your fault.”

Torse is utterly baffled, and not in the pleasant way where he knows he’s safe. This feels like Monty is working up to something and he wishes he wouldn’t.

“You don’t need to gild your words with me, what is it you’re trying to ask?”

Monty gestures in lieu of speaking and Torse feels his gaze magnetise to canister after canister of Widow’s Breath. He feels his palms sweat, his breathing quicken, and Monty lays a hand between his shoulder blades.

“If you need it, truly need it, then you may take it and we’ll do our best to wean you off slowly, or make it less toxic, or—”

“I’m not using fucking Widow’s Breath,” Torse snarls. He feels immediately, irreparably awful for snapping.

He rips away from Monty’s reassurance to click the door closed, and then he paces back and forth until the stuffing eddies around him and he feels like he’s back in the Ectic Station, except here he feels hot and blazing with embarrassed fury.

“Is that really what you all still think of me, after all this time? I’ve been nothing but honest with you all and you insist that I must be lying.”

“I’m sorry Torse, we never thought you were lying.” Monty is keeping his words soft, his hands loose and open. Torse feels like perhaps he himself is the elder beast that the Odans have invited in, except he does not feel bountiful and gracious, he feels ragged and ruinous, like he is the one saturated with Straka energy.

“Omitting then. And I understand it, I really do. Mordecestershire was liberal with it, all my fellow soldiers were reliant on it to the point they couldn’t breath fresh air, and my fucking father peddled the stuff like it was going out of style. It made Wealwell sick just to have it in the house, I wasn’t about to find out what it would do in my lungs.”

Monty hangs his head in the face of Torse’s anger. “I am sorry,” he repeats, “I made assumptions.”

“You want the truth Monty?” Torse hisses, and he wishes he would stop. Just stop. “You want the bit that they cut out of children’s books because it’s too damn horrible? Widow’s Breath is a poison but the Queen’s Smog is the disease, it’s the Smog that smothers babies in their sleep if their parents leave the windows open and it’s the Smog that stops your blood clotting so you bleed and bleed and bleed. In a knife fight, in a surgical room, on the birthing bed.” Torse’s hands are clenched and he feels his voice shake like a carriage over cobbles.

“Widow’s Breath is the terrible cure to something that’s killing us anyway. For a little while it can coat your throat with hair to filter out the particles, run your blood sluggish so it can clot, force you to sweat out the poison. It’s only if you dare leave Eisengeist that it becomes a killer, when it interacts with the wind in sails and the breeze through forests. One day they’ll sell Widow’s Breath in Bellenuit too, and when that day comes people will make the same choice I have. One way or another you’ll never look your fellow in the eyes again, whether it’s through a diving suit or a gas mask.”

Monty is staring at him like Torse is a stranger, like Torse is some entirely new species from every other person with blood and plants and crystals patterning their skin.

“If it gets to Bellenuit.”

“What?” Torse snaps. He doesn’t know when he stopped caring about his volume.

“If it gets to Bellenuit, then they’ll sell Widow’s Breath. But they don’t yet, Torse, there’s still time. I’m sorry it took this long to listen to you.”

Monty opens his arms and Torse finds that he is weeping. It hurts, because everything hurts, but Torse has never used Widow’s Breath and the hurt is the sharp clean pain of energy released. Like letting the air from a friodynamic balloon.

He collapses onto his shins between Monty’s knees, presses his head into his soft stomach and mewls for all the things he has lost and discarded, all the things that have been stolen from him.

Torse cries for the first time in years, while Monty soothes him with lullabies that Torse has heard only pale reflections of, in the years when Samwell tried to parent them the best he could.

There are things that he keeps to himself even now. His father is an awful man, cruel and proud and stupid enough to think himself clever. But he is also an investor, and once upon a time he had the chance to invest in miracles that could change the world.

When Torse looks into the mirror he sees the downy curve of his mother’s cheek, softened from its natural sharpness by daguerreotype and pregnancy. When Torse looks into the mirror he sees a boy who killed before he took his first breath. When Torse looks into the mirror he sees the cold, steely eyes of a man who had a cure within his reach and chose to hold his profits close instead.

Monty’s arms are strong, all-encompassing like a bedtime story.

Torse would do anything to get a happy ending, but he’s not sure they happen for people like him.

All around them the night ticks on uncaring. And perhaps that is the greatest comfort of all.

Chapter Text

When Torse eventually pulls away his eyes feel gritty and he desperately needs to find a cold flannel and a dark room.

There is a hesitant knock at the door, to which Monty lets him untangle himself and nod before answering it.

Van stands on the threshold, gives him a twice-over that can’t tell her very much at all, and then slams her gauntlet much more forcibly on the doorframe. Mordecestershire will not be getting his deposit back on the room.

“Alright kid, that’s enough wanton destruction; go collect your bankers before they cause an incident.”

“An incident?” Torse asks. It comes out nasal and choked but Van probably heard his breakdown through the wall and doesn’t blink.

“They are probably about to have a tone issue with the lovely Rufus and it’s not happening under my watch. Also make sure Wealwell isn’t selling the engine for parts.”

“Roger that, Van.”

He shuffles out of the room to find it empty of anyone else and takes the opportunity to go back to the ship first.

There’s a double wedding going on when he arrives between their security officers and the chain-smoking knights, and he ducks down the first stairwell he finds before he can be dragged into making a best man speech for these women he hardly knows. Wealwell has propped himself in the corridor with a perfect split so Torse can walk underneath him unbothered. He appears to be picking gold flecks out of the barnacles and adding them to a set of letter scales he’s shoved into a port hole. He’s not weighing them against anything else at the moment, just transferring them grain by grain so the scales remain perfectly balanced as well.

He retreats to the privacy of his room, undresses and douses himself in the iciest water from the balloons until he feels miserable for an entirely different reason. He rinses out his gas mask where it had fogged up with his tears, and because otherwise he’ll be left with a salty rime on the lenses, and busies himself with arranging the diving suits they took from the Ectic Station so he can repair them later. He looks over them for a long, long time, and eventually he lays his old grey diving suit to one side in favour of a new, ochre-coloured one. The ring of brass sits heavily on his collarbones but the weight is grounding, and he can still buckle his cuirass and greaves on over the top. There are no mirrors in his room, but he imagines he looks quite different.

Then he replaces the mask and goes to find his bankers before they start competing to see who can punch one of the engine trees to splinters.

*

Olethra is being strange with him, a little more than usual anyway. She had complimented his upgraded look, but she keeps vacillating between agreeing that her grandmother might have been up to no good and defending her staunchly.

Torse doesn’t know what to think. The daguerreotypes of Comfrey shaking hands with the Ministry of Deranged Science make him feel sick, especially the rows of faceless soldiers that stand behind them, but he can’t quite reconcile it with the letters stalling Mordecestershire that she sent long after she arrived to Zood.

Worse is the private worry that she might have arrived in Zood before his grandfather’s death and had neglected, or worse forgotten, to inform him that his dreams had come true.

Hypocrisy makes for a poor bedfellow. He can hardly judge Comfrey for using Mordecestershire as a means to an end when he himself had worked with the man. The crew’s anger over her deception curdles in his intestines.

Now they are all matching Torse, decked out in the loose ochre diving suits and with the great brass bell helmets, save for Max who was brass to begin with and doesn’t need to breathe. Torse spent hours in the run up to receiving the submarine making sure each one was waterproof and in good condition, since he knows that the freezing temperatures of the Ectic Station would have played havoc with any rubber seals. He also spent some time wrapping copper wiring around each of the breathing hoses to try and reduce the chance for snags and snares.

The last thing he did was tint the glass of his own helmet so he could remain unseen. There is little point wearing a gas mask inside a helmet, but he doesn’t want anyone to see his face and especially not Mordecestershire.

Max has never been to Katur, but stands behind Marya’s shoulder anyway as the submersible lowers and lowers. The ocean grows darker and siltier as it gets deeper, and there must be an errant current pushing the submersible because they drift off course despite their best efforts.

Torse glances out of the window and sucks in a shocked gasp as the headlights of the submersible sweep over an enormous statue, so large it could almost be topography, so large it itself might’ve been responsible for the changed currents. Perhaps when it stood it had a face that was tilted up into the light, or perhaps it fell when Katur sank and it has only ever known the ocean in darkness.

“Is that a zipper?” Daisuke asks suddenly and Torse snaps his gaze back to the statue.

It is a zipper, and the edge of a goggle, and Marya tilts the nose of the submersible up to get some height on the statue until they can all look down onto the weathered, impossibly carved face of Comfrey MacLeod.

Was she a guardian? Was she here somehow when the temple was built, or are the statues updated still? Van gets over her shock first only to point out another, her Uncle Rufus, and Max’s blustering discomfort around Marya exclaiming over his handsome features is the only normal thing left to them.

But if these are the guardians, then where is the temple?

The submersible lurches, all of them except Van losing their footing as the tail is clamped and wrenched upwards. Torse comes within a hair’s breadth of breaking his nose on the inside of his helmet as he slams forwards into Max, the clang of metal making his ears ring.

“Alright there goes the propulsion,” Van says as Torse scrambles to his feet to see robed cultists defying the pressure at the entrance to a glowing red portal. “Max, do not shove anyone into the fan this time; it’s not as strong as the wind motivator turbine.”

“Alright, alright,” Max grumbles as Torse lends him a hand up, “I won’t murder anyone.”

There is overlapping dissent from the crew.

“No you can definitely murder these guys,” Marya says as she tries to get power back to the propulsion system and fails. “If anything it’s encouraged.”

They don’t have time for more, Daisuke is up and out of the submersible like a rabbit and Torse dives out after him. He sees the gigantic crab at the same moment as Max who gives a low whistle of gears. “I’m going to wrestle that thing,” he promises, and Torse draws his sword in the silty seawater so he can start going for the joints.

He can hear yelling as Daisuke shoots a cultist thrice and blood oozes into the water, a dark blue against the red glow of the portal and the warmer shimmer of the Zumhadi beacons.

“The Eyeless Hand, the hand that cannot see, the nose that cannot hear, the eyes—”

“That is normal human biology,” Max shouts even as he tries to get a handhold on this crab. “Normal automaton anatomy too I believe.”

Daisuke is quick to back him up as this cultist splutters and Torse almost wants to laugh. Rich idiots remain rich idiots. He can imagine this conversation happening in a mahogany-panelled dining room almost more vividly than the reality of it occurring at the bottom of the ocean.

Max is punching the crab in the head, brass fists moving sluggishly even with all that weight behind them.

“Monty!” He calls as the biologist swims away as fast as possible, not the best of signs. “Do crabs blink? I’m punching it in the eye and it’s not blinking, is that strange?”

“Max, you’re wrestling a crab the size of a café, what do you want from me?”

“Is “the eyes that cannot blink” part of this cultist deal or is this normal crab behaviour?”

“I’ll discuss it later!”

There is one cultist that Monty is gunning for, and Torse watches in horror as they rip open their own chest to reveal a maw of keratinous teeth.

He swims up as quickly as he can, cursing his heavy armour, to get beside Max as the rest of the crew pour out of the ship. Van is also punching, her gauntlet moving so slowly through the water, while Marya mutters sweet nothings to her blunderbuss and decorates the back of the crab’s throat with its own teeth.

“Monty do crabs usually have teeth?” Torse can’t help but call.

“I’m a little busy at the moment, we can discuss my marine biology degree when we are no longer being eaten by the marine biology!”

Torse rumbles a laugh, hears Max crow triumphantly as the crab finally catches up to the action and blinks. Then there is a lancing pain through his sternum and all his limbs go dead in the water.

Foolish foolish boy running away from home but home has its claws in you long corridors so long there is a shadow stretching from your father all the way over and it snuffs you out it snuffs you all out it snuffs the world out

From the corner of his rolling eyes he sees Max’s eyelights dim as he too falls still, and then he sees the shadow of Mordecestershire move upon the world and the first beacon goes out with a whimper.

Chapter Text

Torse is so furious and so scared. He cannot move and as soon as Max stopped swimming he started sinking. If Max doesn’t get up then none of them will be able to move him easily, even with the water acting as a great equaliser between them. His own hand spasms around the hilt of his sword and he watches it tumble into the darkness below.

This has all been a mistake, a terrible mistake. He thought Mordecestershire was merely a cruel and powerful bureaucrat, but this is a power altogether worse. Mordecestershire is committing arcane rituals at the bottom of the ocean, Torse has a big knife. It’s not exactly fair.

You come here only to die, only to die, only to die

He hears, as if in a daze, as if tucked securely into a bed with the blankets pulled high and the giggle of a story gone long past midnight: “Your mom only came here to die.”

Van Chapman, bravest woman in the world and the next world and beyond, does something and rips through the cultists like a typhoon. Torse feels the crushing pain release and sees a glow light up the water underneath him as Max powers back up.

“My mind is my own!” he roars as the crew chant his name, drawing his second sword and skewering this crab through the back of its neck like so much seafood.

Cultists pour from every dark corner. He sees one grapple Max even as the automaton tries to swim back up. Max utters an outraged shriek and then immediately backtracks to try and reassure them all.

“Got you right where I want you. Punching me in the face. This is hurting you so much more than it’s hurting me. This is not a good combat strategy for you.”

Torse is so fond and afraid that it hurts. He sees another cultist swim up and sees the shine of Max’s brass dull as a green corrosion spreads up the side of his chest.

He cannot see Mordecestershire but he swears he can hear him as his limbs once again betray him. Torse thought the wing suits and the teleporting and the trapped god were bad enough. If he can’t fight then what is he good for? It’s so dark and they are out of their depth in more ways than one.

“You dragged me to this hideous world!” Mordecestershire calls from his place atop the beacon, briefly and horrifyingly silhouetted in the warm light. It slicks off his robes like oil to leave them in even deeper darkness. “You dragged me away from power, glory, and service to my queen. But I found a new and even better queen to serve.”

“She's using you,” Olethra calls, obscured in a cloud of ink and engine oil. Has she sprung a leak or is this intentional? He doesn’t know, and can’t act on it either way.

“And don't I love it,” Mordecestershire leers. Van makes a soft sound of disgust that Torse entirely agrees with, and then a second beacon goes dark.

Torse feels utterly useless, he can’t even turn to see the source of the commotions and cacophonies, can’t even smile when Marya finally spatters Mordecestershire with bioluminescent algae and lights him up for them all to see. Mordecestershire looks furious as he tries to wipe it off, tries to reshape the darkness around him.

He does see, unwilling, as the cultists reach out horrible writing tentacles that surround and subsume Van. He thinks he can see her hair floating in the water and that should be impossible. He hears her yell as they start to drag her towards the portal, and that is the final straw.

There is no power on Gath that would allow him to let her be taken. They are no longer in Gath.

Torse starts to move towards her, molasses-slow as each kick takes monumental effort. He doesn’t care about revenge, but he can’t lose her. Not to this. Van’s fear of the ocean must not be proven right here, it would be the greatest injustice to reward her courage by giving the victory to these cowards.

He hears Max grouse furiously as more and more cultists swarm him, but he is definitely drawing their attention so that Monty and Marya and Daisuke can pick them off from their dark caverns. Probably a cold comfort as one starts breaking their chest-teeth on his arm with an awful grinding scrape. “This is the worst day of my life. Adventure is fake. Adventure is fake and I hate everyone.”

Torse couldn’t agree more.

Daisuke tries to hit Mordecestershire as he speeds past. His old limbs must be swamped by the fabric and his punch is too weak, too slow. Mordecestershire reaches the third beacon, spits something at the single cultist attending it, and then slits their throat as the beacon snuffs out. Torse feels the knife at his hip, the twin to the one Mordecestershire wields, hum a low, pleased sound that tickles against his femoral artery. They are out of chances.

Marya must cast her technological wizardry, because Max is no longer at the back of the pack but somewhere up at the front in the dark with Mordecestershire, who has finally managed to shed the bioluminescent algae. He sees Monty race down to help Van, sees Van whirl around in a cloud of phosphorescence which doesn’t seem to harm her as the other Eyeless Hand member trying to drag her loses the eyes in his head.

Max is trying to twist the knife off of Mordecestershire as his crew mates scream encouragement over the radio at him.

Torse doesn’t know which way to turn, who to help. He needs advice and he needs orders.

“Marya, what must we do? The tide has turned too far!”

“We’re not done yet Torse, go help Max and get that knife. While the lights are on there’s hope. And if they go out I might be able to make the engine work with Max’s heart to relight them.”

“That’s an awful option,” he cries as he scrambles closer. Mordecestershire is lit only by the glow of Max’s eyes and Max’s heart. “Surely there’s another way?”

“The way is to not let him put out the last beacon!” Marya yells as he comes level with Max at last.

But perhaps it is too late, because Torse sees Mordecestershire’s eyes light up in awful recognition. “Ah, our little departing gift from the Queen. I thought Comfrey MacLeod destroyed you along with our research, but perhaps you were not as secure in your purpose as we all thought.”

“Destroy me?” Max’s voice is muffled as tentacles snake in between his wiring where his pistons cannot crush them, holding him in place. “No, Comfrey MacLeod gave me my heart, she gave me my purpose.”

“Oh no, I think, like young Olethra, she’s made a tool out of your trust. Though in your case it must be easier than most. After all, you only need to switch out a few… spare parts!”

The knife burrows up to the hilt in Max’s chassis, in that old wound that first stopped Max’s heart, and Torse’s own heart stops in response.

But Max does not stop. Max screams, like the clear, ear splitting ring of a glass harmonica amplified like whale song through the darkening ocean. The light catches on a skein of gold and Torse realises that as Max’s heart spins the knife is gouging a strip of gold wire from it, curling out from under it and into the water like blood.

Mordecestershire grins like a barracuda, spits “This is what I think of poor investments,” and twists the knife.

It doesn’t complete the motion, because Max’s chest is far sturdier than muscle and bone, but it can still act as a lever. Torse hears something squeal and pop in Max’s chest as the knife slides into and behind his heart and shucks it out of its protective shell.

There is a muffled pop of a fuse shorting as it comes into contact with the water, and Max’s eyes flicker and die as Mordecestershire snarls into his face. Torse feels something build in his chest past the paralysis, past the grief and rage, something numb as the triple lights of Max’s eyes and Max’s heart snuff out and plunge the ocean floor into darkness.

The last beacon flickers, and Mordecestershire looks so smug that Torse feels his hope wither along with the light as it pulses and ebbs like an overheated bulb.

And then Max’s eyes snap back into focus. They have always been red, a deep and bloody crimson, but now they glow so brightly that the colour swings through scarlet into vermillion, like there is something molten inside of him.

His whole face twitches impossibly, like it is about to detach, to unmake itself from its crude welding, and his hand surges through the water to grab Mordecestershire by the collar and yank him closer. His other hand begins to crush the tentacles emanating from Mordecestershire’s chest and Torse sees that the reflected glow is in the exact shade of the portal.

And then Max says something, quiet enough that only Torse is close enough to hear, and it does not sound like his voice. It comes through his voice box, but the cadence of the words reminds him oddly of Marya’s accent.

“And this is what I think of those who do not appreciate my gifts.”

Max grips the tentacles and begins to pull, like he’s trying to uproot them from Mordecestershire’s ribcage, and Mordecestershire begins to shout in pain. He’s frantically trying to drive the knife deeper, to cut some vital wire, but it’s stuck at the hilt and cannot progress.

Torse shakes off his paralysis at last, takes the opportunity to surge forward as fast as he can and try and wrestle the knife from Mordecestershire.

Mordecestershire bites at the water around him and one of the tentacles fastens around Torse’s wrists, crushing them together while Torse feels the press of toothed suckers through his suit. Max is still wrenching tentacles out of his chest but they keep growing back, pulsing in time with the portal, and seems too focused on his task to notice as Mordecestershire drags him closer, so close that Torse can see the white sheen of his ribs turning into bleached teeth as tentacles press up against the outside of his diving helmet with squelches and scrapes that make him break out in a cold sweat.

“You think I would not recognise you, Torsewell Gotch?” he hisses. “I have planned my revenge for decades, and your betrayal has warmed me through long nights in Zood, which will soon be no more.”

Torse struggles to free himself, to pull away and continue the fight on his own terms. He cannot seem to do it, cannot seem to separate himself from this hateful spectre. The only thing keeping him alive is Max’s single-minded intensity to cause pain, though deliriously Torse thinks that if he only adjusted the grip of his other hand he could crush Mordecestershire’s neck in an instant.

“You always were such a disappointment to your father, and all your rebellions have amounted to nothing. A week away from my care and you’re in pieces. There is no crew that could replace the love of the Imperial Republic, there is no love that can save them from me.” Mordecestershire writhes, and then he tears the knife out of Max’s chest to swipe at Torse with the crystal blade. Torse hears the hollow thunk of Max’s heart resettling even as a line of cold fire burns across his collarbone.

But Mordecestershire was clumsy. He swiped with the wrong edge of the blade or perhaps dulled it on Max, because though his shoulder sears with pain he does not feel the crushing pressure of a ripped suit.

But it was too close, Max’s eyes have flickered dark again, and Torse is afraid and sickened beyond all reason.

He turns his back on Mordecestershire, swims and runs and flails away as the fear grips him. He needs to hide, lick his wounds and resettle himself and never show his face ever again. He needs to rethink every poor life choice that led him here. He needs to get out. He needs to run.

Torse moves as far and fast as he can, his only reassurance being that Max is holding the line behind him. Torse moves like something is chasing him with luminous green claws and a hungry maw. There is a spurt of cold seawater on his face, but only the one so it must just be a temporary malfunction. It is not enough to make him stop running.

It’s only as he tries to race past Van that he stops, as she grabs his arm and wheels him around.

Torse’s breath is coming too fast, he feels nauseous, and he must be seeing things because there are more tentacles where Van’s arm should be, and the green glow is still chasing him and everything is wrong.

He tries to pull away, to keep going, but the tentacles are crushing his wrist again and he cannot think.

“Kid!” Van shouts, and where on Gath is her helmet? “Get back to the ship right now and get Monty.”

The ship is up in the sky, he thinks nonsensically, even as Van shoves him forward and he catches Monty’s horrified gaze. The ship is in the sky and Van’s helmet is off her head and Torse’s tube snakes over the coral and…

Oh…

Oh dear.

He was not hallucinating the green glow. He did not mistake the splash of seawater.

The end of his air hose has been cut with a knife sharp enough to pin a god, and there is an open canister of Widow’s Breath plugging the end.

His chest aches, his hands and feet burn, and he could swear he feels the tickle of hair in his throat.

He could swear he hears Max scream his name.

And then he faints away into the all-consuming blackness.

Chapter Text

Torse awakes feverishly to low light and someone clutching his hand. He is wet all over, some parts seeming crusted like saltwater and some tacky like sweat. His fingers burn like he’s held them too close to a fire, which is stupid because he let them get too close to fire years ago and he was sure he damaged the nerves there. His dreams were confused and angry things that he recalls in stutters and flashes.

They are continuing still, he realises as his chest burns and his throat rasps, a muffled shouting that sounds like it’s coming from worlds away.

“Please let me help, let me fix this!”

“No, absolutely not, he didn’t want—”

“I can help, please let me do this, I can—”

“You can help by getting back out there and making sure those cultists are all gone.”

“I can’t leave him!”

“Then stop trying to sacrifice yourself!”

Max and Marya, Torse manages to think. How odd that he mistook them for sounding similar just a moment ago. They sound angry, but at least they are alive.

Time drifts, Torse drifts. Water coats his throat and he can’t seem to stop coughing, but every time he tries to clear his airways more water seems to get in. Is he upside down? His head pounds.

He hears and feels as Van drifts past him. The smell of salt water is cleaner on her than it is on him, her skin rough and calloused as she rubs his shoulder in firm circles. Something slicks wet kisses against his neck and he wonders if it’s some new salve of Monty’s.

“East kid, Monty’s got you covered. I’m just gonna borrow your keys for a sec. Got to pay a visit to my old dad.”

It makes no sense, but dreams do not. He thinks he nods against the weight of the ocean above and feels the jingle of the keys being lifted away.

Monty tells him stories. He must do. Stories of whales with betta-fish tails that hunt krill in the depths and will guard the door, stories of crabs or perhaps lobsters with stolen minds.

Stolen minds, is Max still there?

“He’s fine,” Olethra says, and Torse finds his thoughts have left their mark on the world around him. “Or at least that’s what he claims. Stubborn mule.”

Torse suddenly finds himself being shaken.

“Torse you’re awake!”

“Did we win?” He tries to say. Instead what comes out is a retching cough. His throat burns like someone has rammed glass paper down it then added lemon juice. His pulse is kicking him firmly in the temple, distressingly out of time with his heart.

“Slowly Torse, slowly. Little breaths or we’ll have to waterboard you again.”

He peels open his eyes, preemptively squinting, only to find there’s a hessian cloth draped over his face. His face is sweaty and disgusting, like no one has touched it to clean him, and the gratitude feels like a sunrise.

They haven’t taken the opportunity. Haven’t poked and prodded while his mask is gone and he is unaware. Haven’t seen him unguarded and drawn their conclusions.

It’s in stark contrast to their words.

“Wa-waterboard?” He wheezes. He thinks he can feel it, but there are more precise points of pain like his throat has been lacerated, like someone’s gone fishing in his lungs with a barbed hook and managed to catch all his breath.

“I’ve been working against Widow’s Breath for a long time,” Monty intones, his hand a broad pressure point of warmth. “And what you told me revealed a lot of its finer points. You got a concentrated dose of it, and while the sweating and the blood thickening will resolve themselves in time I wasn’t about to risk a repeat incident like the one in Bellenuit.”

Diving suits. Hair. The Eisengeistian Brutes.

Torse squirms. It explains why his heart feels like it’s trying to pump a whole ship dry, why his extremities are cold and his skin feels clammy and chilled. It doesn’t explain the waterboarding.

“It was the reaction with oxygen, right?” Marya chimes from his other side. “We thought if we kept the hair away from the oxygen for long enough to remove it you’d be fine.”

“We did try aioli,” Van says, “but Bert was still on the ship and we were running out, so we used the ocean. Renewable resource innit?”

“Good for your health, the seaside,” Daisuke murmurs from some far corner.

Torse doesn’t think this qualifies as the seaside. But then he’s not even sure they’re still in the submersible. He thinks he can hear the sound of the wind motivator turbines, which haunt his dreams, and the familiar creak of the Zephyr. It brings homesick tears to his eyes.

“We were trying to keep your throat coated with seawater, but then we realised we were drowning you,” Olethra explains. “So we turned you upside down so we could keep pumping it up but you could still breathe, and Monty removed, like, so much hair.”

“It’s more like baleen really,”

“Oh yeah, Monty chatted to a whale,”

“Is everyone in my damn sickbay?” Torse feels a little stronger for having woken. He can feel the threat of pneumonia at the base of his lungs, and the nausea might be as much from accidentally drinking the seawater as it is from Widow’s Breath. But he is breathing.

“Pretty much,” Monty says with a shrug that Torse feels through the stabilising hand. “You gave us a good scare.”

“Then who is flying the ship?”

“Dawdle-dale, think she needs the practice if she’s ever going to be a get-off-the-ground Captain.”

Captain Dawderdale needs a raise, Torse thinks. It’s got to count for something against all this merciless bullying. Or is all Van’s bullying affectionate? It’s sometimes hard to tell.

He sees the light flicker and his gas mask is passed under the cloth to sit haphazardly on his face. When he tries to fasten it his hands shake too much to lift so Monty and Olethra help with the buckles. Olethra also manages to buckle a chunk of his hair into it but he really doesn’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for a crew that have accepted him so completely, just like they’ve accepted Freyja and...

“Where is Max?” He asks too fast, sitting up and setting off another coughing fit even as the hessian flutters to the ground. “He didn’t?”

He can remember, like the edge of a nightmare, Max threatening to save them all. And it was a threat.

“I said he’s fine, Torse,” Olethra says with an eye-roll. “Monty wouldn’t let him in the sickbay.”

“And why—”

Max slams the door open like an avenging god.

“Torse! You’re awake!”

There is a clamour as five people try to usher Max out in gentle-but-firm tones that border on a shout. Torse cringes at the noise and everyone turns to apologise, which is Max’s opportunity to shove himself further into the room.

“I’m so glad you’re back!”

Max holds something towards him, something pale and floppy like a cave catfish, and the crew collectively draws away from him.

“I brought you this. I thought it might help?”

He proffers it once more over the sound of Monty’s protests, and Torse recognises what it is with an accompanying lurch in his stomach.

The gift is Mordecestershire’s corpse. He has been pummelled into a bloodless pulp and white crabs gleefully swarm around his eyes and ears. The tentacles in his chest hang like ragged strands of black linen and someone, probably Freyja, has written a rude word on his forehead. There is a smell in the small room that strikes the same familiar chord as Mordecestershire’s apartments in Oda, and Torse realises that the smell is of stale calamari.

It’s disgusting. It’s vile. It’s the best present Torse has ever had.

He grins helplessly and realises at the same time that the swoop in his stomach is a terrible, ineffable attraction.

“Oh Gotch you like it?” Marya asks with a shudder as she pieces together his reaction from context-clues. “You two are made for each other.”

“I mean,” Van pipes up, “when I met Bert I did the same thing. Not whole corpses mind but definitely some bits and pieces. Love tokens. And to be fair to Max it was very fresh.”

“Two days ago,” Olethra stresses with a green grimace. “Two days ago it was fresh.”

“Does it help?” Max stresses. His gaze is back to a beseeching burgundy.

“Immensely,” Torse rasps.

“Good,” Monty says, “now get that thing off my ship.”

“Alright. I brought you another present, Torse.”

Torse is faced with the very real possibility that Max has an entire stockpile of dead Eyeless Hand members cluttering up the ship. He feels like he would be able to smell it if that were the case, but he has seemingly spent the last two days gargling salt water so perhaps his senses aren’t all there yet.

“I’ve never had sickbay presents before. What is it?”

Max shamelessly detaches the wing suit from its former owner and presents it to Torse like a cat with some unfortunate bird.

“I thought you said wing suits were cheating?” he says, instead of something humiliating like I love you.

“Torse, when it comes to your safety I would have every one of your blows strike true, every blade sent your way turned awry. I would have the very earth come up and aid you in your battles.”

Torse feels the attraction slide eagerly towards embarrassment. He is not worthy of this devotion.

“Besides, you already use multiple swords so insisting on the rules of gentleman fisting seems moot.”

Daisuke, who is a child at heart, snickers over the phrasing and Torse feels the hot flush of the spotlight fade away. He settles himself back on his elbows, rubbing his fingers over the worn canvas of the wing suit that had let Mordecestershire escape his just-desserts a week and decades ago. It’s striped like the friodynamic balloons, except instead of crimson-burgundy it’s a steely indigo colour that Torse finds himself very much in favour of. It’s a colour he could get used to wearing.

He looks up to thank Max properly and realises that Max is also wearing a new colour.

Green corrosion has tarnished his chest, blooming over the gold and brass like mould, and Torse also sees that the metal around his articulated waist has buckled slightly so that the plates stand proud from each other.

“Max,” he whispers, hushed against his will, “what on earth did that?”

“You wouldn’t have liked it Torse,” Monty says, “there were some even bigger tentacles there at the end.”

He shudders, then catches sight of Van and tries very hard to apologise sincerely even as his brain fails to fully solve this new equation.

“S’alright kid, truth be told I’m a little freaked out myself. I’ll get used to it.”

“Me too,” he vows clumsily, “I’ll get used to it with you.”

And then, because nothing can be done clumsily with his brother aboard, Wealwell cartwheels into the sickbay, kicking the door down for added effect. Torse was sure the door was already open, which means that Wealwell closed it while they were distracted to make a bigger entrance.

It’s getting crowded, he thinks with exasperated fondness as Wealwell executes a perfect hurdler’s form and vaults the corpse of Mordecestershire to fling himself dramatically over Torse.

Torse doesn’t even flinch as his brother barrels towards him. Even when he was a fragile eleven and Wealwell a rambunctious fourteen his brother knew how to balance his weight perfectly. Wealwell folds over him like a thoughtful origami and looks up at him with big wet eyes. “I have never been so upset in all my life,”

“I’m so—”

“The crew didn’t like my eggshell pasta.”

“What?”

“They were terribly rude.”

“… what.”

“I think they were quite reasonable all things considered,” Van says, folding her arms… arm and tentacle. “It was so dry.”

“It was full of calcium! You need strong bones if you want to stand like me.”

The expressions on the arrayed faces imply that they would dearly love to refute this, but they are faced with the unfortunate reality that Wealwell started pirouetting at the beginning of this conversation and hasn’t stopped.

The last straw for the door is Freyja, who tries to pocket the doorknob on her way in and pulls a great splintering panel out along with it.

“Master Torse!” she yells at the top of her tiny lungs. “I will cancel the funeral barge, I always knew you would triumph!”

She sprints back out to detain whatever spectacle she was planning, and Van notices the doorknob-shaped theft.

“Oi!”

There is a surge of movement out the door as Van tries to stop Freyja and Monty tries to stop Van and Olethra goes along for the ride.

There is a short moment where Daisuke and Wealwell lock eyes before the old gunslinger hightails it with as much suave confidence as a man can achieve when moving at top speed. Wealwell drops a kiss that smells of beeswax and hair product onto Torse’s filter and chases after him.

The resulting visiting party is quiet as the grave. Two thirds of it seem to be thinking of something to say.

“I’m so glad you’re all alright,” Torse begins before he loses the opportunity to chaos. “I’m sorry for failing, I thought—”

“Nope, no thoughts like that allowed in here,” Marya says. “We all got paralysed, and frightened, and a bit confused down there. Not just because of the world ending circumstances, but because that was what those cultists were trying to do.”

“You nearly died Torse,” Max rumbles. “I woke up and you were floating like you were already dead. I…” He stops like the thought is too painful to voice, and Torse’s heart gives an answering bob. He feels lightheaded and maybe he shouldn’t have sat up so fast.

He needs to distract from this, he can’t bear to see Max sad especially when he is alive, when he is more well than could be believed back at home, and when he feels so emotionally fragile.

“We nearly lost you a couple of times too, I thought,” Torse deflects, swallowing down bile that scratches behind his sternum. “Mordecestershire nearly had your heart.”

“Another win for the fiddly pins,” Marya jokes with her eyes held tight against raw and revealing honesty.

“You went dark for a moment, and you spoke in a voice that wasn’t yours — do you remember?”

“Yes, this one thing I do remember,” Max says. “I think perhaps it was the voice of my maker.”

Marya hums understandingly. “I thought I heard Ludmila’s voice down there too a couple of times, but Monty snapped me out of it.”

“Ludmila?”

“My protégé,” she smiles sadly. “I lost her years ago to the Straka, and am only now finding out she might not be lost at all.”

“Oh,” Max says softly. “I hope you find each other. Let me know if I can help in any way.”

“You’re alright you know? Don’t forget that.”

“I will not, I will not forget anything your crew have taught me.”

Marya smiles at him with all her grief tucked into frayed pockets, chucks Torse under his chin like a maiden aunt, and leaves to force Dawderdale back into unemployment.

Torse lies back down and holds up a beseeching hand, relieved when Max twines his cool fingers through his own.

“I will repeat: I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Me too,” Torse whispers as his blood crawls back to where it belongs. “I’ll not leave you, not ever, not of my own free will.”

“I won’t begrudge the company,” Max agrees, and Torse smiles once more against the lining of his mask.

He manoeuvres their hands so they rest on his chest and, though his heart has to beat harder against the added weight, Torse has never felt more alive.

Chapter Text

They discovered a heading, deep in Katur. Not from the final and most bizarre of Comfrey’s offices, but the ghostly whisperings of one Frank Chapman, deceased. They are making their way to Mount Charuk.

Van has been showing Torse the obsidian mirror while he’s been recuperating, because apparently a mountain is shockingly hard to find when the world is a tube, and he’s met a few of the old Chapmans. Uncle Rufus is apparently distressingly handsome to some of the crew so has been forbidden from appearing in public, but Frank and Nigel and Vanellope Chapman the elder are funny, if sparse, conversationalists. They’ve been careful to keep all other photographs away, since they don’t know exactly how it works. The two extremes of bad news would be them sucking a living person into servitude with the newly-nicknamed Jazzy Tazzy, or risking speaking to some vengeful spirit like Mordecestershire. Otherwise they might have used it to find Comfrey.

Mordecestershire’s mortal remains have been disposed of, over the side of the ship into an area teeming with handsomely arrayed vultures and one very confused scavenging meerkat. There might be another growth of fungus here but they have other concerns.

Torse has been staring at the sky.

He knows that, despite Mordecestershire’s death and the temporary disbandment of the Eyeless Hand, they did not win at Katur. They kept it from going out entirely but one Zumhadi beacon does not a barrier make.

The sky is a distressing bruised pink, the red of Zern bleeding through and staining it purple in some places and black in others. The weather has got hotter, and drier too as the clouds evaporate. Marya’s head is constantly on a swivel, looking for the Straka, and Monty mutters about it only being a matter of time before the Zernians start trying to push through. If they got Max through when the barrier was fully up, then it only makes sense.

Their main hope is that the Queen of Zern remains ignorant, that the sky of Zern is not similarly changed or that Jazzy Tazzy still has enough of a grip to prevent incursions.

Torse can’t imagine it’s comfortable, being the only barrier between a warlike world and its prey. He wonders how strongly the Zernians have begun to test that strength and resolve, and how bitter the efforts might make Jazzy Tazzy towards any rescuers.

Van seems to think it might be worth rescuing, with the unwavering agreement of Monty. It makes sense from a group who rescued a baby T-rex and have since had nothing but success. An extradimensional octopus and a dinosaur don’t have much in common, but then again neither do Torse and Daisuke. Friendship rituals have happened under weirder circumstances.

Torse sighs, resists the urge to cough. He feels like his throat is starting to scab up and if he’s not careful he’ll just make it bleed. He foresees a long and uncomfortable period of broth and soup stretching ahead of him, though the savoury porridge Bert is peddling is delicious. One of his more normal concoctions.

It is a relief to be up and walking again, back in uniform even if he would rather not be; the diving suit was too contaminated with Widow’s Breath to keep on the ship and the others are the wrong size. Van’s is apparently ripped to pieces on the sea floor somewhere.

Not entirely in uniform, he reflects wryly. He’s still got circulation problems and the high altitude is cold, so he’s in one of Monty’s old coats — a little moth-eaten from years in storage, but perfectly wearable. Marya’s silkworm civilisation has added little white patches to the dark pewter cloth, and Van has swaddled him in the softest, most faded navy-blue scarf she possesses.

Their coddling has been… nice. Torse does feel guilty now for the way they’d downplayed Olethra’s mutterings of her near-death, maybe actual-death, experience as dramatic license. Perhaps it was also because they were actively hunting Mordecestershire at the time and Torse was having entirely unwarranted breakdowns and distracting from her distress. Torse hurts every time he breathes, but Olethra must hurt every time she blinks. Did Monty even manage to stitch up her eyelid or was he too busy comforting Torse?

He will be a better friend to Olethra, he resolves, even if she is entirely too frivolous for his early mornings and late nights.

He is not allowed to work on looking for Mount Charuk, and so he stargazes what he can past the curve of Zern or prowls the lower decks.

Or more accurately, tries to bait Max into sparring with him.

Max would absolutely cave, Torse knows, and then they’d both get in trouble with Monty but at least he’d be doing something. Max, for this reason, has been avoiding him whenever they’re alone so that his fragile relationship with Monty doesn’t deteriorate when he punches Torse’s still-healing chest through a wall. It is a very responsible thing to do and Torse is about to wear a hole in the floor with pacing. He wants to get stronger, faster, and for that he needs to train.

He’d tried to get Freyja to duel him, but apparently “in matters of mandatory absence, the hierarchy denotes that the resource manager of humanity gives the orders.”

To disobey them was, apparently, punishable by death and the resource manager of humanity on the Zephyr is, apparently, Monty.

So Torse is belowdecks when a great commotion starts.

He had heard the buzz of another aircraft, he thinks with terrible retrospect as he tries to run down the gangway and has to immediately stop and catch his breath, but at the time thought it was tinnitus.

He hears the crew give their call sign, hears the shout of something back and then mingled gasps and the distinctive cocking of Monty’s hunting rifle. Torse needs to get his act together and get up there right now.

He pushes off the wall, realises he only has the one sword under his coat but has no time to get a second, and hauls himself up the stairway so he can see the deck.

Comfrey MacLeod, the woman they’ve chased across two worlds, is spinning in a circle with Olethra hefted in her arms like they’re both twenty years younger.

Torse heaves the most cautious sigh of relief he can and slumps back to watch them. It’s such a beautiful picture, Daisuke is blushing like a bride and Van is blustering and Monty is… Monty looks angry.

Comfrey seems to notice at the same time, putting Olethra down to clear her throat. She looks older than he remembers in the daguerreotypes. “Ah, so you brought everybody, Daisuke?”

“We sure did,” Olethra says, slinging a defensive arm around Monty. “He's writing a book about Wealwell.”

“Who?”

Torse feels this is his cue, hovering awkwardly in the stairwell. “My brother, Wealwell. He's solid.”

There is a gun pointed at Torse’s face and a high, whining ring in his ears as a shot is fired.

Quicker than blinking Wealwell shifts his stance so strongly that the ship itself tilts and the bullet lodges itself in the wooden flooring directly above his groin rather than in his head.

“Tilt it the other way next time!” He shouts, because his heart hasn’t yet caught up with his fear and he cannot show the terror he feels.

“Next time I’ll let you get shot by this weirdo,” Wealwell huffs.

“There won’t be a next time,” Monty calls firmly. “Comfrey stand down, Torse is with us.”

“Cadswitch’s prodigal grandson? Thought he joined the CIR.”

“I’ve also left the CIR so you can point that gun somewhere else.”

His pulse is starting to pound in his temples, but Comfrey shoulders her gun with an easy shrug and a grin. “Good to have you back, kid.”

Torse swallows and feels the stairway sway under him, he’s not sure he’s quite steady enough on his feet to try and take the next step. In every photo, in every film reel and bit of flyaway imagination, Comfrey is smiling. Larger than life, braver than the stars, when he saw her it was like looking at an old friend and saying of course you would be here.

For her first expression upon seeing him to be something as corrosive as disgust has rattled him. Anger or fear he could deal with, he thinks, but the disgust eats at his liver like acid.

He sees Comfrey shift the strap of her gun again and tenses, but it is only Max coming up onto the deck. The cultist’s spell has left a corroded green tinge up his side and chest that refuses to scrub out, and Torse’s own chest twinges in response. He should have been faster.

“Morning Max,” Comfrey says, jovial and dangerous. “How’s the heart?”

Max looks suddenly, painfully embarrassed. His hand comes up to cover the gap in his chassis and the revealing, private gleam of gold.

“Never better, professor!” he lies, too loudly to be believable. “Not a scratch on it!”

“Attaboy Max,” she shouts, throwing her arms open for a hug.

Max sinks down into it like a child finally finding their parent in a crowd, and Torse feels a surge of black jealousy. He should be happy for Max, his anger is unbecoming and unmoored, and he can’t tell whether he is jealous of Comfrey or Max himself — his own father certainly never held him like that.

Torse swallows down his emotions so hard that he tastes iron in the back of his throat. He does not wait for anyone to turn back his way, but instead sinks below the deck so he can perch on the steps with his head resting on the metal trim of the second-highest step.

From here the sound vibrates through the deck directly into his ear, even when he has his face muffled in Van’s scarf and Monty’s sleeves. He just curls tighter when Monty begins shouting.

He hears his own name a couple of times, and tries not to hear any more until he has to shuffle over so Monty can make his way belowdecks. He feels that calloused palm ruffle his hair and then another, far more cautious touch of cool metal to the back of his skull.

Max meets his eyes when he looks up. “Don’t worry Monty, I’ll take Torse back to his room.”

Monty crinkles his sad, furious eyes at them and disappears to find Marya. Max stoops down and Torse suddenly finds himself lifted off his feet, flailing briefly before managing to hook his arms around Max’s neck.

From here he can see the intricacies of whirring cogs and a tiny lever that jumps up and down like a pulse. He fees his own face flush and hopes desperately that it doesn’t extend to his ears. He’s never blushed in company before so he doesn’t know.

Max bends close to him, so close that Torse thinks for a mad moment that this is going to be his first kiss.

“Torse.”

“Yes Max?” he whispers back.

“I lied to Monty,” Max says incredibly distressed at this small deception. “Do you want to spar?”

Torse’s brain clicks over this once, twice, and then he finds himself abruptly laughing. This is better than a kiss, and certainly more useful.

“I do, Max, I do want to spar.”

“Excellent. First to three wins.”

And then they disappear into the depths of their beloved Zephyr as she follows her journey’s end towards Mount Charuk.

Chapter Text

“I’ve been working on something I call the Prime Disruption,” Comfrey announces over dinner, “where and when the energies of Zern and Zood become incompatible. Now through the befrumplement of time I was able to visit Zern before I created the temple of Katur, and that formed the basis of the theory. Of course by the time I came back, intentional travel to Zern was impossible, the one exception being the Calefactory Biangle.”

This whole business is making Torse’s head hurt. He is sitting across from Comfrey MacLeod, the famed professor who managed to trap the extradimensional power that is Jazzy Tazzy to create a barrier between fiery Zern and the green expanse of Zood.

She was the star of those books that gave him some of his only comfort growing up, she has travelled through time and moves with such freedom that it makes Torse feel dizzy, like looking over the edge of the Zephyr.

She also talks a mile a minute and explains nothing.

He shoots a glance towards Monty, and is glad to see a similar annoyance on his face. Marya was probably wise not to come and he wishes he’d stayed on the ship.

Max is also unusually quiet in the corner. At first he’d been absolutely elated, when they properly looked over the Zephyr Mark II after their impromptu sparring session, so pleased to see Onion and Sylvio alive that he’d let out a jubilant warble that Torse hadn’t heard before.

Onion and Sylvio had seemed similarly glad, deeply remorseful for having left him behind at Ramansu.

“Your sacrifice did not go unappreciated,” Sylvio had drawled, in a way Van had assured him was his normal, non-threatening tone of voice.

“We genuinely didn’t think we’d make it out of there,” Onion added, “and so the broadcast was to be our final stand. We had Fehujar swarming inside trying to take everything of value, and Max was the only one who could hold them off from the broadcast. I do not know how you survived there must have been twenty Fehujar, you absolute beast.”

Max was caught in an odd state between pensive and preening, evidently glad to be deemed the strongest among them, but troubled by something deeper in the sentence.

“Why did you not come back for me, when you knew that the danger had passed?”

It reminds Torse, in a sad, familiar way, of Freyja. It seems he has a habit of collecting orphans to higher causes.

Onion groans, “We haven’t stopped. You bet your brass I’m sorry for not turning around, I asked to, but there was so much else to fix that by the time we had room to breath we were miles away and a month had passed. We didn’t hear for you and…”

His eyes misted up abruptly and he pulled Max in for a hug that failed to move the automaton an inch. “I’m very glad you survived.”

“You have our heartiest apologies,” Sylvio added. “We kept the radio tuned to the frequency I gave you, but when it stayed silent we had no choice but to assume the worst.”

“Frequency?” Max asked, sounding very small.

Sylvio’s silvery brow furrowed. “Yes, I made sure to give you the emergency frequency, and a backup, in the certainty that you would triumph. I’ve been broadcasting our coordinates on it whenever we stopped in the hopes you might catch up or reply.”

Max’s shoulders hiked around his ears, and his steady stance seemed to waver. “I don’t remember that, I’m sorry.”

Onion clapped him on the back. “Don’t worry old boy, there was a lot going on. Just like that run-in with the Legio Rex back in the rainy season — thank Gotch Sylvio still had his old Treshian schoolbooks and you knew the conversion rate between a denarius and a credit. What was that thing you shouted at them, about vineyards having to be registered as a taxable business?”

Max’s silence was very, very telling.

Now he sits between Sylvio and Onion, companions he should be moving in sync with, the same way he tries to do with the unpredictable Wind Riders, in perfect silence as Comfrey recounts events and escapades that he was almost certainly a part of. With every dropped reference and hanging in-joke, he hunches further on himself, and Sylvio and Onion keep shooting each other worried looks behind his back.

Torse wishes they would stop. If they’re that worried, they should interrupt the conversation and call the professor out on it. She’s in her fourth uninterrupted stream of consciousness and shows no signs of slowing down.

“Of course the books given to the Eyeless Hand could only reveal so much,” Comfrey continues, still on a loose thread of her pet theorem. “What I was looking for was old history, preferably not propaganda, and that’s difficult to come by in Zern. They do have histories but they’re impossible to access now, so I had to rely on recollections.”

Torse feels his interest piqued despite himself. Max has no memories of Zern, and Torse had been under the impression that there were no more Zernians that had been sent through to Zood, or even how that would be possible with Jazzy Tazzy guarding the barrier. But if Straka had appeared in Gath, then perhaps that was the loop — Zern to Gath to Zood — and there were more like Max.

If there are more like Max, sent to Lord Mordecestershire and his ilk as helpers and gifts, then Torse has a long and laborious rescue mission awaiting him when he gets home. Espionage is not his strong suit, but he knows the ins and outs of the Confederated Imperial Republic and still wears the uniform, so he’s sure he could blend in. If he can ask Comfrey how she jailbroke Max from his programming then he might have a worthy cause for the first time in his life.

He tunes back in to the conversation to see that Comfrey has brought out props.

“The Zernian alphabet isn’t really a thing, instead they use shorthand symbols and engrave them at a microscopic scale to be scanned, much like a phonograph. There’s a lot of information packed in here, and it’s an imprecise method as there’s more nuance than I expected going in, but I was able to keep a log of daily events and then cross-check them with what had been set down. Wish I’d had you with me Vanellope, you were always good at ciphers, but I did eventually manage to crack a lot of it, and that gave me a pretty complete history of Zern. I actually had a breakthrough only last week.”

She’s flicking something with her nail, making a tinny little plink sound as she shuffles her papers and her microscope around. Taped down into the front cover of her glossary is a rectangle of thin brass sheets, half the size of a playing card and accordioned on delicate hinges to make a tiny metal booklet with a buckled edge.

Standing to get a better look, Torse tips his chair over backwards with a clatter, and so the silence picks up his aghast whisper as he says, “Those are Max’s memories.”

He hears the whir of Max’s internal systems, even as Olethra chokes on her meal and Daisuke murmurs hold on now like a prayer.

Comfrey meets his gaze steadily. “They’re the Zernian blueprint yes, it was a vital component of my research into the Eyeless Hand in those early days. It contains a comprehensive history of Zern from before the Prime Disruption and much information on the Queen.”

Monty leans over, physically drawing Comfrey’s attention so Torse can suck in a ragged breath. “The beetle-guardians at Ramansu said Max was missing his memory core, but you’ve had it this entire time?” 

“Oh spare me your moralising Montgomery, the Max you see here is better off without them. Before, he was a servant of the Queen of Zern and now he’s flying with Wind Riders, I’d call that an upgrade. Besides, at that point I hadn’t installed his heart so it was the only way to pause him — he’s a damn good fighter so the options were disanimation or destruction.”

It’s a testament to how wrong this entire situation is that Max has not twitched at the praise. Instead he’s slowly bending Sylvio’s fork into a curlicue, gaze vacant. Torse realises in this moment that there is no place setting in front of Max, just an empty expanse of tablecloth where he’s been skipped over. 

It’s a ridiculous thing to be angry about, but Torse has spent the last weeks being encouraged to ridiculous things.

“So you replaced the chip with his golden one, let’s pretend that’s fair and reasonable for a moment, but you continued to take it out night after night to, what? Study it? Decode it? Scry through his memories and interactions and violate his privacy for a history he could have told you if you’d given his memories back?”

Comfrey pushes back from the table. “I hardly think it’s appropriate for me to be lectured by a CIR goon on morals, what do you know about decency?”

Torse feels his face burn hot under his mask. He’d thought their first interaction had smoothed over his place amongst the Wind Riders. Their easy acceptance has softened him up for this unexpected blow.

“Torse is the most honourable man I know.”

The defence comes from Max. His voice is so quiet Torse almost can’t hear it over the blood rushing in his ears. The fork has bent so far it’s digging into the sliding plates of his knuckles and getting stuck there, but he’s still sat motionless like a hare before a hawk, like a soldier at a disciplinary meeting.

Comfrey scoffs again. “Max, dear, you’ve known him for a week and know the CIR not at all. They’re rotten to the core even with the epaulettes on.”

The fork snaps with a bright, sharp sound as Max stands up. “Forgive me, Professor MacLeod, but by my reckoning, I’ve only known you for two hours.”

Van is making a low, dangerous sound next to Torse like a growl. “Onion, Sylvio, how long would you say you travelled with Max?”

“We were mainly confined to Ramansu rather than travelling, but it must have been almost two years.”

“And Max, what of those two years do you remember?”

The whir of Max’s internal mechanisms is unsettlingly steady, intentionally so. “Bits and pieces. I remember trying to warn you off Fehujar. I remember disagreeing with you about your racking debts. I remember the chaos of you leaving, I remember Fehujar appearing over the horizon and you two dipping into the room to wish me luck and safe travels, I remember the Professor telling me to defend the broadcast with my life and to wait for Olethra MacLeod to find it. I remember you leaving.”

Onion has his head in his hands, Sylvio is twirling his moustache in a way that looks devious but might just be a stress response. 

“You said you had a breakthrough last week,” Monty says. “What exactly were you using to cross-reference?”

Comfrey looks at him and the open disdain in her face makes Torse curl his fists in his gauntlets. 

“Don’t play coy, Monty. You know exactly what I was using.”

She tugs her papers aside and there, underneath the original folded brass, is a golden memory chip crammed full of glyphs from a time spent in Zood.

“My research wasn’t complete and I couldn’t afford to pause it, nor could I guarantee that Max would survive Fehujar in a complete enough state to retrieve the information on the other side. This little chip is the key to unravelling the machinations of the Eyeless Hand and maintaining the temple of Katur.”

“But you didn’t maintain Katur,” Van says, “we did. Without your code, without Max’s memories, just with ourselves and a lot of luck. We did it without Max’s memories but we couldn’t have done it without Max.”

There’s a glimmer of light from the corner of Torse’s eye, and he realises that there is an iridescent liquid leaking from under Max’s spectacles. Torse didn’t realise he could cry.

“Excuse me,” Max says in the quietest, most broken little voice. And then he turns away from the table and slips outside like a ghost.

Van turns to look up at Torse, her tentacle writhing in distress against the table leg. “Go after our boy, Torse, make sure he’s alright.”

Torse nods, and then his eyes catch the gleam of the memory chips and he decides to do something reckless, something rowdy.

Torse uses his height to lean all the way over the table and snatches the glossary. He doesn’t care about the information inside, Comfrey can keep it, but he’s taking those chips.

Comfrey stands to retrieve it but the table erupts into shouting around her and Torse sweeps from the room in the chaos. He needs to find Max.