How to Train Your Channeler

[Oriena]

After a moment Sasha dragged her hand backwards through his hair, though she’d already caught the metallic edges of it by then. Whatever the fuck it was. She shoved his head down to get a better look, smacking away his own hands, though she supposed she could see why he was scrabbling at his skull so desperately now. Her expression darkened, a little frisson of fury that sat like a supernova in her chest when he told her it was for control. She half glanced over her shoulder, but chasing the fuckers down was pointless: these tunnels branched like rabbit warrens. And if the snake really did control it, what fuck happened if she got too far away?

Under usual circumstances she would have just hauled him to Nox and dumped him on the doorstep, much like Sasha had already done with her to Ezekiel. Make it someone else’s problem, whatever the consequences. But she knew Nox was busy. And flipping the bag of drugs back in Sasha’s face was really going to have no satisfaction to it if he was too busy writhing around screaming to even fucking notice. Or dead. That was equally inconvenient.

This time her glance was upwards, into the humming darkness above their heads. Nothing there to see, of course, but plenty for Oriena to feel. The hungryhungryhungry of their thoughts, for they’d already felt the power of him once, held back only by the will of their queen, who’d been more interested in forcing her way into Oriena’s mind at the time. The device must cut Sasha off from the power, or at least make it too difficult to access through the pain. And it looked like something out of a movie – cutting edge tech maybe, else very very old. She still had fragments of memory from the earlier possessions; the tools the ijiraq had tried to infuse in her for the task she had promised them. And those had felt ancient.

Ori sat back on her ass, legs tangled around his. Her jaw was hard, her eyes the wrong side of crazy. She jammed the side of her arm against his mouth, didn’t care if he bit – kind of the point, to shut him up. But his eyes were glazed. She didn’t think he’d hear a word. “Remember what I said before, about showing you what was wrong with me?” Her grin was deranged, because it was a terrible idea. But the confrontation had been building for weeks, more and more inevitable with every single nosebleed. And now was as good a time as any. She’d never planned on going quietly.

It happened fast. The moment she pulled on her own power. Her throat clogged with blood, and her eyes rolled upwards. Ori herself slumped inwards, a complete dead weight.

Minutes passed like that. Occasionally she trembled. Twitched.

And finally she shuddered a breath.

Her eyes weren’t right when she opened them; they were afraid. For a moment she was entirely disorientated, and reached to push away from the body she was collapsed against. She dragged a hand across her own face, smeared away the remnants of blood. Her pulse was racing, adjusting. Let-us,Let-us,Let-us was a hoarse and brittle whisper in the back of her mind, like a wind across scorched earth.

Blinking, Ori reached to cup the back of Sasha’s head – just enough to hold him still. Her grip was firm. Her eyes still slightly unfocused as the power flowed in. The lattice of it was more delicate than anything she usually attempted, but it felt weirdly like something known. Or known once, anyway. The same way she learned to shield – or the theory of severing. Her memory was already slipping just like it had that time too, leaving something closer to an imprint.

After a moment, there was a shiver of release. The arms of the device contracted their sting. It tumbled to the floor.