Nearly a whole month passed during which Esryn did everything asked of him and Kavo and Hawk did their best to avoid each other despite sharing a room. It sometimes went so far that Hawk wouldn’t even return to the cabin at night. No one was entirely sure where he went elsewhere; all they knew was that he didn’t sleep on those nights, because the next day clouds of exhaustion would show deep in his eyes.
And Kavo took it upon himself to stare desperately at those clouds every chance he got. He missed the glint of Hawk’s eyes; he missed their golden glimmer, their amber sheen. He longed for the smouldering look that they had sent him once. Once and only once, he thought to himself wryly.
Atop Kavo’s shoulder, Rafael fiddled with the beads around his so-called owner’s neck while Kavo wound through the maze below deck. He’d been told to give some sort of weird blueprints to Torian, but it was mind-numbingly hard to find him behind all the equipment. Still, it was the only duty Kavo had been given outside of, “Watch Esryn and make sure he doesn’t try to murder everyone,” as if the man had a back-up crew hiding in the floorboards. Really, he wished that they could have trusted his judgment. Esryn was a good, just man.
Kavo finally gave up on finding Torian through sheer dumb luck, and he shouted, “Torian, are you down here?”
Torian’s dark head peeked out from behind what Kavo guessed to be some sort of water heater.
“Did you bring those papers?” he asked. As always, Torian didn’t seem one to make idle chit-chat, but his tone had finally grown less hateful and much friendlier. Still, the only person Kavo had ever seen him simply talk to was Aizel; it made sense, seeing as they’d apparently known each other forever. After all, the person Kavo wanted to talk to the most was Esryn, who he’d known since their boyhood days in school.
“Yeah,” Kavo said eventually, handing over the papers in question.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
They stood in awkward silence for a moment longer, not sure how to properly end the conversation. Luckily enough for them, they didn’t have to, because Rafael decided that it hadn’t been recently enough that he’d acted out of line.
The beads around Kavo’s neck suddenly came off, clasped tightly in Rafael’s tiny hands. With a mischievous laugh, Rafael skittered off.
“Raf! You get back here, you stupid— you ass!” Groaning, Kavo sprinted after him, completely forgetting that he’d even been speaking to anyone. Those beads were important to him; they were the ones Helaku had given him.
Kavo raced after the monkey, winding through the maze without thought as he tried to keep up. Metal whizzed past him. A small voice in the back of his mind told him that perhaps he should pay attention to where he was running, but he didn’t care; he was only thinking of the gift from Helaku, that memoir that had made him remember why life was worth living.
At long last, Rafael paused at the top of a set of stairs. Kavo stopped, too, at the bottom to catch his breath. Mindlessly running after him might only end in losing the beads for good once they were back on the weather deck; Rafael could be tricky and sneaky when he wanted to be, and Kavo was sensing that he quite wanted to be that day.
Eventually, Kavo was sure he had gathered the necessary strength. He took a deep, steadying breath for preparation. Then he vaulted himself forward, over the stairs, and latched onto Rafael.
The two of them tumbled over the landing and fell off a low ledge, Rafael screeching and shrieking the whole way until they landed on a cold cement floor. Kavo clutched Rafael tightly to his chest.
“You little twat, give me those.”
Whining pathetically, Rafael released the beads. Kavo snatched them up and then let Rafael go; the monkey scampered away back the way they had come.
Kavo, on the other hand, looked up.
“Whoa,” he breathed. He’d read of these places, but he hadn’t even thought that this airship was old enough to have one; his own hadn’t been, and he knew Esryn’s hadn’t either. He hadn’t imagined that something as simple as an aged observatory would look so beautiful. He could stay out there all day.
The sun had never seemed so bright.
And then, from afar, Kavo saw another airship. It seemed it was time to fight again.
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