That unfortunate feeling lingered as Motus was led out of the arena once he was on steadier legs. He stared at Sieg’s back as the older boy maintained a brisk pace ahead of him; each step seemed to reveal Sieg’s discontent. Every bit of his body language told Motus he would rather be left alone, but the golden-eyed boy felt the urge to apologize—clearly, the situation was as unexpected for Sieg as it was for him.

  “I’m s-sorr—” Motus started, faltering over the words in his haste.

  “No,” Sieg cut him off succinctly, ending any chance of further conversation.

  Dejected, Motus looked down, keeping his eyes fixed on his shoes. They stayed like that for nearly fifteen minutes, walking out of the arena’s section of the—well, Motus hesitated to call it a base; it felt more like a small city—haven. They entered a place that looked much more like a camping trail: tall, dark-barked trees with golden leaves surrounded a woodland clearing. The clearing was large—it almost seemed as if someone had taken the arena, halved its size, and added trees. The sight of the clear boundary formed by the treeline made a cold sweat break out on Motus’s brow; it almost looked like a boxing ring. Had Sieg taken him all the way out here to beat him up? Anxiety welled up inside him, and just when he thought he couldn’t bear the silence any longer, Sieg stopped walking.

  The white-haired boy suddenly spun around and looked at Motus with an air of authority, his steel blue eyes cold and calculating—chilly like a dark winter morning. When he spoke, his words carried a confidence that surprised Motus, and his lack of malice was so unexpected that it left Motus momentarily rendered flatfooted.

  “Describe your gift to me.”

  “Oh, uhm, well it—”

  “Two deep breaths and try again; I can’t do this unless you give me something to work with. You’re fast, I know that. Now tell me how fast, and how you do it? At first I thought it was lightning, but seeing as a single bolt from Last Hope knocked you flat, I’m not so sure.”

  Motus floundered, struck dumb by both the questions and their suddenness; eventually, after gaping like a landlocked fish, he managed to mutter out an answer that sounded pathetic even to him once it reached his ears.

  “I don’t know.” He rushed to continue seeing the tensing of Sieg’s brow. “I really don’t! I only just figured out what my gift is, and how it feels to try and get it to listen to me.”

  That got Sieg to change his tune, his shoulders relaxed slightly, and his jaw unclenched.

  “Oh.”

  That single word was all Sieg said, as if it explained everything, and no further explanation was needed. Motus shuffled nervously on the spot as Sieg worked through his thoughts. Several minutes later, the umbrella-wielding boy nodded to himself; the action was so slight that it was nearly imperceptible, but apparently, he was satisfied with his plan.

  “Explain to me…” Sieg trailed off, his eyes flickering to the side as if hunting for the right words, “…what you meant by ‘try’ to get it to listen to you?”

  “Well, my gift feels sort of like a really stubborn horse?” At Sieg’s blank stare, Motus hurried to elaborate. “I just mean that it’s really sluggish if I try to force it to happen, but other times it happens way faster.”

  Sieg stayed quiet for a moment, arms crossed as he tapped his finger in contemplative silence. What exactly he was thinking about was lost on Motus; the boy was too scared to ask, not entirely convinced Sieg wouldn’t bite him for the question—he had a great deal in common with an angry dog. The long stretches of silence were no less unnerving for Motus even as they grew more frequent. Thankfully, Sieg spoke before his thoughts could begin their frustratingly familiar downward spiral.

  “Catch.”

  “Catch?”

  “Catch.”

  In a single fluid, practiced motion, Sieg reached a hand behind his back and drew a small but well-kept dagger; it left its sheath without so much as a sound. The metal caught the light briefly before it was thrown towards Motus, handle first. Surprising both himself and to a lesser extent, Sieg, Motus’s left hand snapped up and snagged the dagger by its leather-bound handle out of the air. His surprise ebbed away as he examined the naked blade; it wasn’t the gleaming black of The Commander’s dagger. This one’s blade was a far simpler silver. It caught the light in a way that spoke of being well-maintained, polished, and incredibly sharp.

  Concern about the sudden appearance of the weapon crept over Motus and settled like low-hanging fog; he adjusted how he held the knife until it felt comfortable in his grip and looked up to get a sense of Sieg’s approval—he found himself disappointed. Sieg merely shook his head, yet for as strong as the irritation in the boy’s eyes was, his next words were not about Motus’s poor dagger-wielding form.

  “I have a theory.” Sieg began, “I’ll test it and then use that to figure out how to make sure you don’t starve to death before something even gets a chance to eat you.”

  Sieg punctuated his explanation by drawing the javelin-like weapon—that Motus now knew to be an umbrella from hell—from his back. The dark leather of the handle creaked in the white-haired falem’s grip.

  “Er, Sieg, could we maybe talk a bit more about your theory first? B-before resorting to stabbing me, I mean.”

  By way of explanation, Sieg’s icy blue eyes glowed a sickly yellow, the color of spoiled amber. The silence that accompanied that glow, like a familiar companion, was haunting. A roiling darkness began to shift and bubble up around Sieg’s body, spilling from him to pool along the ground like a heavy, stubborn mist. Motus shifted uncomfortably to take a step back from the ‘mist’ as it poured around him, rising to his hips before settling around his ankles.

  “Sieg, I don’t think…”

  Motus trailed off as the world grew darker, a darkness that the moon’s light did nothing to pierce. Sound began to dull and distort, and soon all noise around him was muffled to near muteness. Color was slowly stripped from his vision, leaving the world around him in dreary, disheartening shades of gray. Before long, the only color that remained was the light cast by the twin glowing pools of sickly yellow that were Sieg’s eyes. The shadows seemed unnatural somehow; they danced in light that did not exist, stretched further than could be possible, almost as if reaching for something—for him.

  A fear the likes of which Motus had not felt in many days, not since that thing, the beofre, began to claw away at his mind. In that fear, in the primal terror borne of the darkness around them, he saw… something. Something was lurking behind Sieg, slinking just out of sight and comprehension behind the older boy. It lived in his shadow, and the longer Motus watched in frozen horror, the more that thing looked at him—the more it saw him. It stared back at him with Sieg’s eyes, looming over his shoulder in the dark, watching, stalking. When Sieg spoke next, his voice was strange, wrong. The thing spoke using Sieg’s voice, or perhaps Sieg spoke using its voice; either way, the words scraped against Motus’s mind like rusted nails. It sent him scampering backwards even as Sieg’s words continued to ring out around the forest, as if bouncing from the trees.

  “Are you gonna run, Motus?”

  Sieg took a single step forward, and Motus swore the thing looking at him from behind Sieg’s eyes looked hungry. That single step set Motus’s pulse racing. Paralyzed by fear, he was rooted in place; his heart beating faster, far faster than it had any right to. That was when he felt it, the chill creeping up his arms. It bit into his bones, ghosting along the limbs like long, lanky fingers, as if death had caressed him.

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  It culminated in familiar heat that bordered on painful, blooming in his chest. The gray world around him flickered blue at its corners—his blood all but roaring in his ears. Motus’s breath came out in ragged pants as panic gripped him like the jaws of a vicious beast; Sieg spoke once more, but Motus’s gift was slowing his voice, what should have been a simple—if horrific—statement dragged out until the warbling tone sounded positively demonic to the boy.

  “Fight me, Motus.”

  His words were punctuated by the umbrella fanning out its metal shards, each hanging in the air, tethered by jags of electricity. As the lightning that jumped between the shards of metal illuminated the supernatural darkness and lit its colored twin in Motus’s eyes, the boy watched the energy dance. Faced with that weapon once again, sparking and spitting like a rabid animal, Motus turned and ran. He rocketed into the forest, a blurred streak of color and harsh wind, trailed by glowing energy that hung in the air a moment after him. One moment, Sieg was staring down at the newest arrival; the next, Motus was gone, leaving the older boy blinking at suddenly empty air and a quickly fading trail of electric-blue energy.

  “Well…shit.”

  It was nearly an hour later when Sieg finally managed to track Motus down. He had gone much farther than Sieg would have thought possible in such a short time. Motus was nestled in the crook of a well-aged, dark-barked tree, tucked into the far corner of the cave-like nook formed by the gnarled hollow of the old tree’s trunk. The forest around them smelt faintly of recent rainfall, and the ground was still slick with the remnants of water, and Motus was nearly soaked to the bone, yet he seemed not to notice. The raven-haired boy was hunched over, knees drawn tight against his chest.

  ‘Need to get him out of here before the rain starts up again, Commander would have a cow if he somehow managed to get himself sick.’ Sieg thought.

  He moved to close the gap between them before he noticed something that made him pause mid-stride. Motus’s back and shoulders shook—which was not strange in itself, given the state of his clothing and the rain—but the movement was odd, jerky, and rapid. The action was completed far too quickly and almost seemed to meld into the next rolling shudder that rocked through the boy. And if Sieg focused his eyes, he could see the barest hint of that hanging wisp-like trail that seemed to follow behind Motus in the wake of his gift, ghosting from him in the small shuddering movement of his shoulders and back.

  Frustration bubbled up in Sieg’s chest as he took in the sight of what he believed to be Motus shivering. Likely cold, drenched as he was, and of his own choice, it irritated Sieg severely, but he would deal with it—he always did. Sieg hesitated for just a moment, approaching Motus with all the caution one would afford a spooked deer, afraid he’d scamper off deeper into the forest, before announcing his presence with a clearing of his throat. Motus’s head snapped up to him before he could even complete the action. He turned to face Sieg, a blur, eyes wide and frantic. His pupils were blown so wide and dark with fear that his eyes were nearly black, yet Sieg could make out the bright electric light cast by his iris even as it flickered and sputtered. Eyes glimmering with the shine of tears, both those unshed and the stained tracks that trailed down his cheeks in lines of liquid sorrow. Motus’s gift was still active, and if the gurgling noise he could hear from where he stood was any indication, it likely had been for some time—perhaps for as long as he had been gone.

  With Motus now facing him properly, pressing his back against the wall to try and get further away from him, and make himself appear smaller, Sieg could see him, really see him. His chest rose and fell so rapidly, Sieg thought it a wonder he hadn’t passed out from lack of air. He had proven his theory correct. Motus’s gift could be jump-started with a healthy dose of fear, but it seemed it stripped him of the ability to simply “turn it off.” It made Sieg wonder just what history Motus had with fear; he could feel it as it poured off the younger boy in waves. This went beyond his gift; Sieg’s power did not last nearly this long, nor did it persist once he lost sight of his target. No, this fear was real. Something softened in Sieg’s icy gaze as he looked down at Motus. The fear he sensed from Motus was not new; it was a deep-set sort of fear, the kind that was entrenched in a person over the course of several years—Sieg could tell. Perhaps his gift had touched upon something repressed, or perhaps his words were poorly chosen with his gift active. Sieg had chosen a rather heavy-handed approach after all.

  “Motus.” He whispered, Sieg was many things, but calm and reassuring was not one of them—he tried anyway.

  “Take a deep breath.”

  Sieg supposed the breathy, phlegm-filled, shuddering gasp-sob that left Motus’s lips counted.

  “Another.” Sieg urged softly, and Motus complied.

  This pattern continued for several long minutes until Motus managed to get his breathing under control long enough to stop hyperventilating. Motus closed his eyes tightly and shook briefly as a single strong sob wracked his body before he seemed to calm. The shaking came less often, and before long, when Motus opened his eyes, they were once again a brilliant gold, the color muddled only slightly by tears and red-rimmed eyes.

  “Thank you,” Motus murmured, voice small.

  The grunt he received from Sieg in response was as much of an acknowledgment as Motus felt he was likely to get from him. Suddenly, his eyes widened as a realization occurred to him, and he hastily began to wipe at his face in hopes of drying his eyes and hiding the evidence that he had been crying. He was being ridiculous. Motus understood that even as he scrubbed at his face, Sieg had already seen him crying after all. Yet the commander had chosen Sieg to instruct him, to give him the knowledge to survive things and situations just as, if not more dangerous than the creature that had very nearly killed him before Wade appeared. With his heart slowing, the fear receded, and gnawing pangs of hunger rose to take its place and refused to be ignored.

  That growing hollow ache made Motus realize that he did not want to appear any weaker to Sieg than he already did: face a mess, eyes red and puffy, clothes drenched. Motus felt every bit the drenched cat.

  “Get to the mess hall, I’ll figure something out by morning for what we do next,” Sieg muttered under his breath, just high enough for Motus to make it out over the pattering of rain as it began anew outside of his little hideaway.

  “It’s okay, I’m alright—” Motus tried to say, only for the loud gurgle his stomach made in vehement disagreement to sound out like a bugle and interrupt his attempts at refusal.

  Heat colored his cheeks as his face burned in embarrassment. Motus looked up at Sieg, who stared back with an eyebrow slightly raised, as if to say, ‘Go on?’ Motus hung his head in defeat and asked for the direction back towards the arena, and at Sieg’s pointing, he trudged off in search of food.

  Walking into the dining hall was oddly familiar for Motus; it reminded him of learning what his gift was—and of Commander Enka throwing fireballs at him. The pain and discomfort of his stomach twisting in hunger were the same, not to mention the otherworldly beauty of the sleek silver and immaculately cut wooden fixtures remained unchanged. Something else was familiar about the dining hall; it was empty save for Motus himself.

  “Where is everyone?”

  The question was spoken just barely above a mutter, but Motus was nearly certain he would have been met with silence even if he had belted the words out. His thoughts flickered briefly to shoulder-length brown hair, kind eyes, and flaming red hair paired with a slight scowl.

  Where are Wade and Zemora?

  The thought was so sudden it almost distracted Motus from the smell of mouth-watering food that had been set down in a large pile in front of him. He very nearly thanked Jon before remembering what the boy was like and instead settled for gingerly nodding and digging into his food. The explosion of flavor that came with crunching into the purple-skinned fruit with seeds that glowed yellow was almost overwhelming. Motus wasn’t sure how any of it was seasoned; he wasn’t even really sure about what kind of fruit or vegetables they were—or what animal the meat came from, when he gave it some thought—but he did know it was immensely delicious. It was nearly sobering in a way, once the initial rush of flavor passed; it let him think back on the intrusive thought that had pushed its way to the forefront of the ever-present tide of his thoughts.

  “Where are Wade and Zemora? I haven’t seen Wade since he led me to the room and woke me up to see Commander Enka.” Though he didn’t vocalize it between bites of fruit, vegetables, and meat, Motus noted that he hadn’t seen Zemora since the truck. It hurt some to think that the two who had whisked him away from certain death and dropped him into a new life couldn’t be bothered to give him so much as a passing word, but Motus took a deep breath and did what he always did—he made excuses.

  They’re probably busy. I can’t imagine the Commander letting anyone rest. I mean, I haven’t had a chance to really relax since Wade found me.

  It made things far easier to digest than the alternative; another group of people—ones he had just met at that—wanted nothing to do with him. With his excuse, rationalization, he’d call it if ever he was asked, firmly in mind, Motus went back to shoveling food into his mouth with none of the decorum that was beaten into him as a child; this hunger wouldn’t allow for it.