There was silence for a few precious seconds as Maeryn’s comrades digested her words. “Blight,” Terrance swore venomously. “And it’s not like we can just leave her behind, either. She’s literally your pilot and mechanic.” He blithely ignored Dan’s glare, shaking his head as he thought furiously. “Follow me, I’ve got a place we can go. We need to figure out what to do next.”

  “What’s there to figure out?” Dan demanded, his fists clenched even as he and Maeryn began following Terrance through the alleys again. “She was arrested, right? Meaning she’ll be in some holding cell, right? Don’t tell me that Cloudreach has a lot of those.”

  “No,” the Zephyrian agreed softly. “There’s only one place she’ll be. The problem is getting her out.”

  “If those guards are waiting for us back at the inn, then it might not be a bad idea to go for her now,” Maeryn mused, ideas flying through her head. “Fewer guards, less protection, and it’s still the dead of night.”

  “You’re not wrong. The trick is making sure that your airship isn’t impounded between now and morning.” Terrance made a sharp right turn, ducking into another alleyway, and the others followed. “The way I see it, we’ve got a choice between force and guile. We can break her out right now and try to make a break for it. Or you can give me the research we stole, and try to play innocent in the morning.”

  Maeryn and Dan fell silent at that, thinking over the implications. Terrance didn’t say anything more as he guided them through a maze of twists and turns, until finally they arrived at what appeared to be a dead end.

  Terrance grazed his hand along the left wall, and grunted softly as he found whatever he was looking for. He pushed against it for a moment, then stepped backwards, and the wall opened up, revealing itself to be a pressure-release hidden door. “Ladies and gentlemen, my little hideaway.”

  He gestured them inside, and Maeryn’s eyes widened as she stepped through the opening. The hideaway was a small, dimly lit room, filled with a surprising array of supplies and makeshift furniture, though the nice-looking bed in the corner revealed that Terrance had some standards for sleeping at least. It was clear that Terrance had put a lot of effort into creating this secret haven.

  “Now then,” Terrance said with a grim smile, dramatically twirling and sitting on a nearby unlabeled crate. “Let’s figure out how we’re going to get Frankie back and get out of this mess. Personally, I’m inclined to just break her out and get out of this sky-forsaken place. I’m never coming back, so I don’t care if I break a few things on my way out.”

  “We can’t predict whether we’ll need to come back here,” Dan cautioned, his voice tight with concern as he paced back and forth, obviously deep in thought. “It does no good to collapse a tunnel that we might need later. If there’s a way we can peacefully get her, without implicating us in anything, I think we should do that.”

  Terrance chuckled bitterly, resting his chin on one hand. “It won’t matter if they can’t prove anything. Sipund will blame it on you regardless, and Dreen will take you in for questioning to follow procedure, and then your only option will be making a deal with Lorn that you will absolutely regret later.”

  “But if we resort to force, then that gives people like Sipund an excuse to start attacking Geovans!” Dan protested, ceasing his pacing to gesture inarticulately at his Zephyrian counterpart. “We’re trying to prevent a war, not cause one!”

  Terrance folded his arms, narrowing his eyes at the alchemist. “Unless the Mist and mana problems are resolved, war is inevitable, isn’t it? You lot are the ones with the best shot I’ve seen at maybe managing to fix it. Getting your wings clipped here won’t prevent a war, it’ll guarantee it.”

  Maeryn said nothing as she leaned against the wall, listening to the two of them argue. They each made excellent points. No matter what they chose, there would be consequences that they would have to live with. Try as she might, she couldn’t visualize a solution that didn’t involve making an enemy of Cloudreach or putting themselves at the Council of Winds’ dubious mercy.

  “If only there was a way to convince the guards that the Council of Winds had ordered her release,” Maeryn groaned.

  Both Dan and Terrance froze, the alchemist stopping an impassioned rant that Maeryn had only been half-listening to mid-word. They glanced at Maeryn, then at each other.

  “Illusion or suggestion?” the Zephyrian boy queried, confusing Maeryn greatly.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Dan folded his arms, clearly thinking quickly. “I don’t have the ingredients on me for a good enough illusion. Short term suggestion, though… I could give you five minutes.”

  “That’s plenty. I’ll get to work.”

  Maeryn blinked, looking between the two of them with more and more confusion as they continued their planning without saying a single abyssal thing that she could make sense of. “Is anyone going to fill me in?” she finally demanded.

  Terrance gave her that damnable smirk that he was so fond of. “Oh, it’s simple, really. It’s pretty obvious that Sipund is going to demand Frankie be brought to the Council first thing in the morning. He’ll want to interrogate her.”

  “So he’s going to send someone to go fetch her from her holding cell,” Dan picked up the thread where Terrance left off, the Zephyrian nodding along as if it were the obvious next step. “That’s where we come in. I’m going to cook up a quick Potion of Suggestion. It won’t do much - it just makes the drinker’s words more believable for a few minutes. You couldn’t use it to convince someone the sky is falling, but it’s really good at confirming other people’s preexisting thoughts and biases. If the guards are expecting Sipund to send a guard to pick her up - and they will be - then someone can pose as that guard.”

  “That’ll be me,” Terrance rejoined the explanation with audible relish in his voice. “I’ll take Frankie from the cell, and then I can get her to the airfield, no problem.”

  “While we’re doing that, you need to meet with the Council of Winds first thing in the morning to put up appearances. You’ll ask why Frankie was arrested, they’ll accuse you of stealing the research. You’ll deny everything, admit defeat on getting the research, and leave. If they refuse to let Frankie go, say that you’ll return to Geova to find another engineer or something.”

  “And then we can all just take off with no one the wiser. When someone notices that Frankie’s missing, they’ll look for a nonexistent guard who took her. And if you ever have to come back, all you have to do is act confused and say that Frankie was waiting for you on the airship and that you thought they released her.” Terrance spread his arms widely as if he had just finished performing a masterful sleight of hand. “And ta-da! One escape with virtually no consequences!”

  Maeryn’s jaw dropped. “I… you… How under the sky did you two come up with that, together, with almost no words between you?! You haven’t even known each other for more than a day!”

  Dan and Terrance glanced at each other and grinned as if they’d been friends for years, only heightening the incredulous disbelief that Maeryn was experiencing. It should be impossible to just click like that, right?

  Dan looked back at Maeryn and shrugged, which explained nothing! “Just took a bit to figure out each other’s wavelength, really. Once you provided the seed of the solution, though, everything fell into place.”

  “Certainly helps that we’re guys, though. We speak the same language,” Terrance added flippantly. That made no sense at all to Maeryn - they were all speaking the same language - but Dan nodded sagely, as if Terrance had spoken some universal truth.

  Was there yet another language, besides grunt-speak, that boys were born knowing? No, that was ridiculous. There had to be some other explanation. And what under the sky did Dan mean by wavelength? What did the length of waves have to do with anything? They were nowhere near any bodies of water!

  “Besides, it’s a tale as old as time,” the Zephyrian continued, leaning back and looking far more relaxed than he ought to have been. “Rogues and alchemists have amazing synergy for a reason. It’s practically written in the stars.”

  When Maeryn incredulously looked at Dan, hoping for some kind of reasonable, grounded explanation, the alchemist merely shrugged. “He’s not wrong,” Dan admitted, his lips twitching into a wry smile. “As soon as we were on the same page of what we were doing, it was just a matter of details.”

  “But how? How did you get to that same page?” Maeryn pleaded. “I don’t get how you got there from the argument you were having before!”

  “I mean, it was fairly obvious?” Terrance suggested mischievously. “You suggested posing as the Council of Winds, but that’s way too ambitious. A guard, though…”

  “Which is why he asked about illusion or suggestion. They’re pretty notorious alchemical products, always in demand for one reason or another. And, well, we did show him that I’m an alchemist earlier,” Dan pointed out.

  “And once Dan said he could give me a Potion of Suggestion, it’s just a matter of picking the right moment. And prisoners are always at their most vulnerable during transport.”

  “Yep.” Dan nodded in complete agreement. “See? We just needed you to break the deadlock we had between us. Good job, Maeryn.”

  Maeryn’s face flushed as she stared disbelievingly at the two of them. “You two are impossible. That’s anything but obvious! Do you have some kind of male telepathy or something? Is that a thing?” She groaned loudly. “Just… just do what you need to do. I need to go lie down for a bit.”

  “Good plan. You need to be presentable in the morning for the Council of Winds,” Terrance agreed cheerfully, which grated obnoxiously on Maeryn’s nerves after that previous display. “Feel free to use my bed - I promise, it’s even more comfortable than it looks.”

  Much to Maeryn’s disgruntlement, Terrance was absolutely right: his bed was entirely too comfortable, soft yet supportive in all the right places. Even so, her frustration ebbed away in moments as her body chose that moment to fill her in on how exhausted she actually was. Sleep overtook her in under a minute.