Jules kisses him… or tries to.
It’s clumsy and it kicks up a splash because he has to put hands on Lachlan’s shoulders to do it and the force of motion pushes them both down, but the clumsy kiss lands just shy of full on and Lachlan is briefly transported to a no man’s land ofwait, what the fuckuntil his brain helpfully reboots and informs him that his charge iskissinghim on the corner of his mouth.
And it hits like failure, like the core of how Carrigan really sees him made manifest, that he should have stayed distant, should not have let himself become more than furniture, a wall.
Lachlan treads harder to take the extra weight and cups Jules’ face to remove him.Jules lets him, breath shallow and rapid.His eyes kept a little of the moon above, they’re bright again, so beautiful.
‘Stop,’ he bids gently.
‘I already did.’
‘Yeah, you did.’Lachlan looks away.‘You did.’
Jules doesn’t apologise.
But he does swim back to shore.
And if Alistair noticed them missing, he never comments.
?
Mason Fenwick makes a catastrophic mistake the night the lightning hits.
Up until now, he and Lachlan have worked together almost flawlessly, no friction, no hesitation, no meaningful cracks in coordination.Setting aside his instinctive dislike of Fenwick, Lachlan is enough of a professional to recognise competence when he sees it, and Fenwick is competent.
Their fragile unity comes to an abrupt end that July.
During parties, Fenwick usually operates out of the Control Room alongside Rook, where his talent for surveillance and movement tracking is useful.It’s an effective arrangement when it works.
But on the night the lightning strikes the Estate, too many things go wrong at once, and Fenwick placing himself so centrally within the system becomes part of the disaster rather than protection against it.
A storm system of unprecedented scale settles over Varrow City.
Summer storms are already notorious for lightning, but this one carries a level of electromagnetic shear that borders on abnormal.The sky is splitting itself open above the Estate, thunder rolling hard enough to rattle glass.A geomagnetic event this severe hasn’t been seen in years.Lachlan treats it accordingly.He checks and rechecks generators, backup power, drainage systems, flood defences, surge protection.He makes sure every safeguard is reinforced, every vulnerable point accounted for.He just didn’t anticipate how badly the storm would fuck their communications.
Radios crackle with distortion.
Signals drop in and out.
Earpieces spit bursts of static directly into already strained nerves.
Timing falters.
Messages arrive half-heard or several seconds too late.
In a place like the Penhalyx Estate, where security depends almost entirely on precise coordination, those tiny failures begin stacking dangerously fast.
Mimi has been in a terrible mood all day.Irritable and frustrated for too many reasons to name, but he thinks it’s because she misses Mari furiously.He sees her talking into the radio, crying sometimes and lying about it.Come the evening, she’d worked herself into such exhausted misery that she finally passed out hard enough to sleep through the storm, but even so Lachlan worries it’ll wake her frightened and disoriented.Blaire settles in beside her without needing to be asked, understands why Lachlan’s uneasy.
‘I’ll stay all night,’ she promises quietly.
Lachlan hesitates at the doorway longer than he should.Mimi is sprawled across the bed with one fist still twisted in the blanket, lightning briefly illuminating her face every few seconds through the curtains.Something about leaving her tonight feels wrong in a way he can’t properly explain.He wishes he could stay, but there are hundreds of guests inside the Estate and the storm is interfering with comms.
The party is already becoming difficult to manage even though the people in the ballroom seem to love the drama of the lightning overhead, laughing and gasping whenever it strikes close.The Estate is well built, each wing crowned with a primary spire designed to draw lightning safely away from vulnerable structures like the ballroom’s glass dome, but the sheer frequency of the strikes is beginning to worry Lachlan.
The first outage disorienting.
Lachlan never realised how reliant he’s become this past month on checking in with Control, but when the lights go out after a massive hit and his radio is strangled by static, Lachlan’s guts tighten and he knows now which of the children he would prioritise if it came to it.
