Ranna and Reylan work and talk in Reylan's lab (pre-independence)

[guardiansverse]

The Guardian was laid like a slab of meat on her brother's table. Everything reeked of chloroform.

Ranna kept watch by the door. The chances of random discovery were slim - it was mostly slaughterhouses on this side of the slums, and any human noise and refuse from Reylan's lab blended in perfectly well with its animal counterparts - but they were working on borrowed time. The search might have begun already. It was inevitable that they would have to leave this safe place of many years, very soon. Nothing lasted: she couldn't stand resenting that fact now of all times.

Reylan jabbed another needle into his subject's arm, pumped a little liquid into the vein, took the man's convulsing wrist in his hand to count the pulse, all without taking off his blindfold to look. He'd gotten very well practiced. "Listen to my voice," he murmured. "My voice, Stefan. Give me the memory again. The day you gained your Centre."

Their captive made a strangled keening sound, too high to come naturally from a human throat. Ranna half-turned to watch. He tried to twist, tried to pull his arm away, and could not even break Reylan's gentle, scientific touch.

Somehow she could never seem to enjoy this.

Reylan continued to speak in his low, susurrating voice, drawing his captive along the winding path of memory. Enticing, encouraging, steering the drugged mind as an expert oarsman. As he spoke, and the Guardian breathed thinly and writhed, he sketched small symbols of the sheet of paper resting on the man's chest. Signposts to memory, he called them, and was always trying to teach her, but Ranna hadn't had the time or room in her head for such learning for a while. His pen slowed and he gradually pulled back, slid the blindfold up into his matter dark curls, and ran an arm over his face.

Ranna moved away from the door, albeit with reluctance, and to his side. She followed his gaze across the symbols, fluttering with the man's breath. "Can you do it?" she asked quietly, so quiet that she thought only her twin could have heard her, under all the shrieks and clamour from the outside. "Can you touch his soul?"

"Perhaps I could if you didn't distract me, little sister." Reylan sounded calm and focused for someone who'd been at his particular task for thirty hours, elbows-deep in the bowels of someone's soul. "Some water, please? And a little of the sugar water for him. He's waning."

"I'm younger than you by thirty minutes," she snapped over her shoulder as she got him the cup. While he drank, she dribbled the contents of a vial into the captive's mouth, slapped his cheek a little to rouse him enough from his drugged haze to lick his lips and swallow. "Tell me you have it."

Reylan plucked the symbols-strewn paper, lifted it to the light with the faintest frown. For a moment he looked into another world, and she looked on waiting for a portent. "There is something," he said. "I can see the cracks in his Centre - not see, that is, it's more - a sympathetic pain, almost, just as Detrich writes - "

"Don't mention Detrich. It makes me sweat." Ranna shuddered. She glanced back to the door, wishing to lean all her paltry weight against it. The last person she wanted to have in mind was the Land's Own, who would almost certainly be searching for his captured Guardian even now.

The captive, too, stirred a little at the mention of the name. He sounded a clouded howl deep in his throat. "I'm sorry - I'm sorry - !"

Ranna winced,, wishing she'd stopped herself from doing so, but knowing it wouldn't matter. Reylan would know. Relyan knew her. And would forgive her, which was worse.

"See but not touch, again?" she asked.

"Not yet. I thought that a broken Guardian might be easier, but it's no different from the others."

"We're running out of time for yets. If we want to act this winter - "

"No one must act before we've done here. Even if we succeed, the lives we'll waste - "

"Sacrifice. We're all soldiers for independence, Reylan! How much longer?"

"Ranna, if devising a way for ordinary men to break the power of Guardians were easy, it'd be commonly done already."

His voice was soft, telling her for the hundredth time what she already knew. The man on the slab moaned low and long, as though the reminder of his fate somehow penetrated the clouds in his mind. Ranna joined her own snarl to the sound, both drowning in the cacophony of the slums.

Reylan knew her. He turned in his seat and held out his hands. Ranna came into them with a frustrated whimper. She leaned her face against her brother's shoulder and hissed her impatience into him, her rage and hatred, and let Reylan take them in as he did without ever wavering.

"What's another season?" he murmured into her hair. "What's another year, Ranna? We have so much to win. Freedom for our country and our souls. Hold fast and love our people. We'll be worthy of their trust."

The flow of his words, his voice, was a guiding light; Ranna breathed out and followed it. She sniffed once, rubbed her face against his stained shirt.

"Not too long," she muttered.

"Not too long."

"We all believe in you."

"I'll earn it. If not this one, then the next."

Ranna opened one eye. From the corner of it she could see the captured man's face. He had gone very still, a broken Guardian's stillness, the silent apathy of a soul whose innermost faith has shattered irreparably. The look of dead conviction rotting. Easing her back, Reylan followed her gaze and frowned. He waved her at the selection of vials and needles on the table by the door.

"It's getting harder to rouse him every round. Will you get me that vial - "

"Reylan," Ranna said quietly. "Just let him die."

Her twin blinked at her, large dark eyes owlish, blank. She said, "you said the next. This means you're good as done with him."

"I didn't say I was done," he protested, peevish. "We won't just get another broken Guardian, Ranna, you can't buy them in the market, not with all of Lord Willem's money."

"I know what you said and what you mean." She knew Reylan. "Enough. Just - enough."

"Are you asking mercy for a Hyemi loyalist?"

Ranna turned her eyes away, with a frown, but without denial. Her twin's brows drew down and his gentle mouth twisted. Sun's love, she couldn't look at it. "We agreed," Reylan said. "We agreed, Ranna."

"I know, but - "

"You do what you must for the resistance, and I'll keep up hope, I'll remind you of our people's lives. But here, I do what I must. Here, this is my war." He stabbed every word down with a wave of his syringe, his dark curls flying with the gesture. "You don't ask mercy from me. Not here. Not for them."

"Not for them." She couldn't look up, but she snapped it out. "For you, Reylan. Please. You'll hold every soul in Schervo in your hands someday. When you're Land's Own Guardian - "

"What - will I need to be pure? Go on and tell that to Festus Detrich!"

"Sun's sake, Reylan, do you want to be like Festus Detrich?!"

At last she met his eyes again, and she could see that her words had slapped him across the face. He was wide-eyed and white-lipped with fury and horror. She spoke quickly, "You remind me of the reasons for this war. I want to do the same for you - "

"No." His face stayed tight. He reached up and pulled the blindfold back on, set to sink right back in into the world of soul-visions, of symbols and portents that only he could see. "No, Ranna. Bring me the vial. Here, I get to hate the ones who've wronged us as much as you do."

He bent over the man on the slab, who groaned in an echoing hollow sound, as though from the depths of a pit, someplace low and damned.

Ranna bowed her head, and went to do as she was told.