“We,” Tor said slowly, “are not welcome here.”
The evening sun slanted in through the windows of Hesperia, golden light unfiltered by the stained glass some of the west-facing buildings affected, putting up mockeries of revelation and sorrowful mystery to block out any chance of seeing the Reapers.
Worse, being seen by them.
But then again, you didn’t come to Hesperia to hide from the ugly truth.
Quite the opposite.
“Maitre-d’ welcomed you easy enough.” Nico smiled at the waiter as he set down a carafe of mint-and-lemon on the table between them.
“Not Hesperia. The world.”
Nico rubbed at her arms, feeling the atavistic ripple of fear rise up through her.
“So it’s not just me, after all.”
“Did they ever diagnose your affinities?”
“Maybe stone. Maybe wood. Too weak to make it worth the effort of diagnosis, and it doesn’t matter as long as you can engage the Artemis arms.” She looked out the window. “But then again, it’s not hard to see why, is it?” Hesperia butted up against a patch of grassland that would be verdant green in summer. Right now, it was the faded yellow of life-in-abeyance, waiting for the touch of spring rain. And beyond that…
The Waste.
Even active border personnel didn’t always see it; she hadn’t, since she’d been assigned to Mojito Mount for the duration of her two year stint, working the passive radar and scanning for bogies.
Some people did Wastewatch once in their lives. Some made it a yearly pilgrimage.
Tor, apparently, went when he got bored of life in Riviera. Admittedly, Hesperia made it almost comfortable, blocking off the worst side effects of the Waste from the mind and soul.
But still.
Some diners had telescopes at their tables, stubby reflector tubes that they trained westward, looking for the impossibly slow wingbeats of Reapers silhouetted against the evening sky; one of them had a camera trained through the scope
“Oh. That’s Cohn.”
“The artist? Yes, he comes here sometimes. It's where he took some of his best work.”
"I guess one day it's going to look like part of our lives too:"
"Like affinity? Entirely possible."
“If that's what you believe, why did you quit?”
“The artisan guild?”
“The artisan guild.”
“I didn’t like the way they did things.”
“I thought you promised me honesty in this discussion.”
“This is honesty.”
“But not transparency.”
“I didn’t promise that.” He smiled.
“You,” she sipped at her glass, “are a singularly exasperating man.”
“Transparency, then: I was there for the second Affinity Shock.”
“And they were involved?”
“Never said that. Official secrets act forbids me from doing so.”
“Then what can you tell me?”
“A lot of the high guildsmen believe in a benevolent creator. The Reapers belong to him. They were just… hijacked… by the summoning.”
“Which you disagree with.”
“Violently.”
“How violently?”
“Three broken limbs and two lawsuits.”
Prompts: Sundown, beach, bonfire.
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