Chapter 367: Too Bad
"...Where’s that staff?"
The words drifted past Raizen like clouds drifting past the dragon - present, visible, completely unprocessed. His mind was still anchored to the scanner in his hands, still running through the implications of intact files, transformed metal and a mission that had somehow, against every reasonable probability, succeeded. The relief was occupying every available channel in his brain, leaving no bandwidth for new input.
Elin waited. The dragon glided in its wide descending spiral, wings catching the night air in lazy alternating strokes. Ukai’s lights grew slowly in the distance.
"Pardon?" Raizen said.
Elin raised an eyebrow. The gesture was small but carried the specific energy of someone who had asked a straightforward question and received an unsatisfactory response.
"The staff," she said. "You didn’t get it?"
Raizen stared at her. The relief in his chest, warm and expansive a moment ago, began contracting around a knot of confusion that was forming rapidly in its centre.
"What are you talking about?"
"The staff. Eiden’s staff. The one he was supposed to present tomorrow at the Echelon meetings." Elin’s tone carried the patient clarity of someone explaining something they believed to be obvious. "Dark handle, weird energy signature that doesn’t match anything in the standard catalogues. That staff."
She knew about the staff. She knew about Eiden. She knew about the presentation. The specificity of her information was detailed enough that this wasn’t casual awareness - this was someone who had done research, gathered intelligence, and built a plan around a specific objective.
The same objective Eiden assumed Raizen had.
"Do you see any staff around?" Raizen asked. He gestured at himself - torn shirt, mud-stained trousers, a transformed scanner, two luminite blades, and absolutely nothing resembling a dark-handled weapon. "Does it look like I’m carrying a staff?"
Elin’s expression shifted from expectation to the early stages of something that looked a lot like disappointment. "Come on. You didn’t even take the head? You could have taken it – It’s already broken, you just-"
"Elin."
"-honestly, the handle is barely relevant, the resonance signature is entirely concentrated in the -"
"Elin." Raizen raised both hands, palms out, the universal gesture of surrender and interruption. "Woah, woah, woah. Calm down. I wasn’t after the staff."
The silence that followed was long and awkward. Elin looked at him with an expression that traveled through several stages in rapid succession - confusion, disbelief, recalculation.
"But that’s what you said!" she protested. The composure cracked just enough to let genuine frustration through, and on Elin - who treated most situations with the emotional investment of someone watching a mildly interesting cloud formation - frustration was startling. "On the balcony! You told Eiden you were after the staff, and he -"
"I never said -"
But the sentence died halfway through his mouth, because his memory had already finished the work his words were trying to do.
The balcony. The conversation with Eiden, the morning after the scouting mission. The grey pre-dawn light, the cold air, the chess-master expression on Eiden’s face. "Well, Raizen. I have to admit. You almost had me there."
And Raizen’s performance. The dramatic sigh. The carefully constructed lie – "I was just fulfilling Alteea’s orders, she wanted the staff, but you’re not backing down, so I’ll take the defeat. The act that had convinced Eiden the game was over. The act that had kept the real target - the files - hidden behind a false objective that Eiden accepted because it made sense and because Raizen sold it like his life depended on it.
The act that, apparently, had also convinced Elin.
She’d been listening, somehow. That morning, or some other time - through the walls, from a branch, from the back of a dragon hovering silently above the porch. She’d heard Raizen tell Eiden he was after the staff, and she’d believed it. And when Raizen told Eiden he was "defeated" - when the performance reached its final act and the curtain came down - Elin had read it as a tactical retreat, not a genuine surrender. She thought the defeat was the lie and the staff was still the target.
She’d come to Ukai for the staff. And she’d been waiting for Raizen to make his move, so she could make hers.
Except Raizen’s move had never been about the staff. And Elin had spent the entire night - the dragon patrol, the Nyx kill at the Academy, the rescue from the aircraft - operating on a misunderstanding that Raizen had accidentally created by being too good at lying to someone else.
"Oh," Raizen said.
"Oh?" Elin repeated. The word came out flat.
"I... the staff was never the real target. It was... Something else.
"Something else!? What can be more important than a superweapon-"
"Research documents. That’s what Alteea sent us for." Raizen interrupted her, holding up the scanner. "This is the mission. The whole mission. The staff was a decoy - I made Eiden think I wanted it so he wouldn’t look at what I was actually after."
Elin stared at the scanner. Then at Raizen. Then at the scanner again. Her mouth opened, closed, and opened once more, the sequence of someone processing a piece of information that required the demolition and reconstruction of several hours’ worth of assumptions.
Then her shoulders dropped.
"Eh." The sound was the verbal equivalent of a deflating balloon - all the anticipation and purpose and readiness leaving her body in one syllable. "Too bad."
She turned forward on the dragon’s neck, slumping slightly, her chin resting on her hands, her elbows on the neck ridges. The dark red hair fell across her face and she didn’t push it back.
"I wish I could have taken a closer look at it," she said. The words were quiet, directed more at the dragon’s scales than at Raizen. Genuine disappointment, not performed, not dramatized. Elin had wanted to see the staff, and wanting things was something she rarely let people witness.
They descended in silence for a while. The dragon spiraled lower, Ukai growing beneath them, the individual platforms and bridges becoming visible through the canopy. The cloud glow painted everything in its even white, and the night was quiet in the way nights are quiet when the loudest thing that was going to happen has already happened.
Raizen watched the back of Elin’s head. The slumped shoulders. The hair hanging loose. The casual disappointment of someone who’d wanted something simple and specific and hadn’t gotten it.
"But what’s so interesting about that staff?" he asked. "Why does everyone seem to be after it?"
Elin didn’t move. Didn’t turn. For a moment Raizen thought she hadn’t heard him, or had chosen not to respond, the way she chose not to respond to things she considered beneath her attention.
Then her head lifted. Slowly, the red hair sliding off her face, her chin rising from her hands. She turned - not all the way, just enough to look at him over her shoulder, one eye visible through the strands of hair that the wind hadn’t finished rearranging.
"Huh?" The sound was genuine surprise. "Don’t tell me you don’t know."
Raizen shook his head.
Elin’s visible eye changed. The casual amusement, the easy warmth, the permanent undercurrent of someone who found the world entertaining - all of it dimmed.
"Well... It -".
