42. Florence

Florence raked her hands through her hair, teasing out the tangles from sleeping. It was nice to finally have a certain level of cleanliness back in her routine. Her hair had been so knotted upon arriving to the Guild that she’d been afraid she’d have to cut it. Luckily, she saved her dark locks with about an hour of careful brushing.

Her morning routine still took some getting used to. All the clothes were in their proper place. There wasn’t a Rivet tearing through closets and coming in at all hours from odd jobs, leaving her soiled clothing lying about. Her room was neat and orderly, as she preferred it and as it had been her whole life before Arianna.

But now it seemed sterile.

She hadn’t found the courage to talk to her teacher. Former teacher? Teacher. Since the day of her transition. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but that she had no idea how.

Arianna wanted Florence to go back to her and apologize. She wanted the girl she’d known in Dortam. But Florence had changed, and she wasn’t going to hold herself back for the sake of someone who claimed to want what was best for her but couldn’t live up to those words in practice.

Ari was being the fool, Florence was being stubborn, and she wondered how much longer they could both go before something broke. She just desperately hoped that all that gave was the silence, and not her morals, or Arianna’s love for her. She pulled on some of her borrowed clothing and started the day.

The connections Florence had gained in Mercury Town and the convenient knowledge of two transporters in Ter.4’s Underground was proving more useful than she ever imagined for helping the resource-starved Alchemists. She’d spent most of her days with Derek, working on how to get them more ammunition so they could actually make a stockpile, rather than just using it regularly to fight off endwig.

In the hours she wasn’t there, she was helping the armorers see how they could stretch their supplies further. Sometimes, she ran into something that made her wish she was still on speaking terms with Ari—or something that made her wish for the Revo teachers she’d had in Dortam. But Florence was determined to power through it on her own, even if it meant some late nights of trial and error with her newfound magic.

“Good morning,” she greeted Derek. He occupied one corner of a laboratory he split with a girl named Nora. She was a late riser due to her midnight bursts of inspiration, and they usually had the desk to themselves.

He stared at her skeptically.

“What?” Florence wondered if she had only thought she brushed her hair and it was still a tangled mess.

“Did you know?”

“Know what?”

“You know what,” he pressured.

“Actually… I don’t.” She hadn’t the foggiest what had gotten him so twisted in knots.

“You really don’t know?” Derek eased off, sitting across from her.

“I don’t know what I don’t know?” Florence thought about the self-posed question and struggled to see if she’d said it right. “What am I to know?”

“Your friends stole the Rider’s glider we pulled from the wreckage of that airship crash.”

“I didn’t know you had the glider.” Out of everything to focus on, she picked the fact that the Alchemists had taken one of the gliders? “Where did they go?”

Florence folded her fingers together, gripping them tightly. They’d left her behind. It was all for what she said. Maybe she’d been right, maybe she’d been justified, maybe she still was, but none of that expunged the pain at the thought of being left alone.

“Well, with a Dragon glider, they could’ve gone anywhere far and fast.” Derek leaned back in his chair, terribly amused by the situation since he lacked all emotional investment. “But the morning watch says they charted a course skyward for Nova.”

“Impossible. Arianna would never go to Nova.” Florence couldn’t believe it.

“Think what you will… But that happens in the dawn, and now, the Vicar tells me that we must increase our preparations. We must remain diligent, she says, because one ‘never knows when the resources we need could come’.”

Florence knew for all the help she’d been, the Vicar wasn’t talking about her. It’d take a greater force to sway the tides in the favor of the fledgling rebels. A force that might be mustered by a Wraith, and a Dragon.

“We should get to work then,” Florence resolved with a small smile. “There’s much to be done—just in case we have the opportunity to overthrow a King.”

“Just in case?” Derek grinned. The man clearly believed she knew more than she did. But all Florence had was her intuition. Then again, when it came to Arianna, her intuition was rarely off.

“Just in case.” She gave him a small wink and looked over all there was to be done.