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Isla swung her satchel around, opening it to reveal three new markers, partially exposed within their cloth wrap. “I am, but I came bearing gifts.”
Jonah laughed through his nose and leaned against the doorframe, musing, “More work for me? How nice.” Though she knew he enjoyed this. “I miss the pastries.”
“Next time, I promise. I heard the place I usually go to makes the best apple tart in the whole city.”
Jonah nodded, then dropped his head for a closer look. “When did you get these?”
“Last night. We found another tunnel in Ifera.” Isla pulled her map from the bag, pointing to the tunnel’s location in Deimos’s northern region and the small stars she’d marked as the marker’s locations.
Jonah’s mouth pulled tight. “Bak?”
“Yes,” Isla breathed, folding the map back up while Jonah looked on for her to elaborate. “They were taken care of…mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Now, there was the suspicion.
Isla closed the bag and sweetened her voice, throwing on an equally saccharine smile. “Mind if I come in?”
Jonah sighed. “Every time you have that look on your face, I get nervous.”
“Many do.”
He stepped to the side, opening a path for her. “You’re always welcome,Luna.”
Isla thanked him grandly and cleared the doorway.
Despite wanting to keep his businesshis business, she couldn’t stop her wandering eye. But there was no answer as to why he and Sol were fighting in the lines of shelves carved into the walls and support columns, the various testaments to innovation hanging from the ceiling, or beyond the mezzanine to more books and reading nooks.
“I haven't seen you or Kai in days,” Jonah said, drawing Isla’s attention as he slid on his shirt and started on its buttons, covering up the tattoos over his chest that he shared with Kai, Rhydian, and Ameera. Symbols of their bond, of the losses they’d suffered. “Since the Equinox.”
Isla’s features fell, and she turned away, moving to play with a model car on the cashier counter. Suddenly, she felt a headache coming on. “Well, we've been busy.”
“I’m sure.” Jonah’s tone wasn’t sarcastic or mocking. A tightening quiet settled between them before he said, “Kai seemed…offthat night. More so than you just tiring him out. Had he not been feeling well?”
Isla was grateful she’d been turned away from him for the widening of her eyes and hoped to the Goddess that he hadn’t noticed the fraction she’d tensed. “It was a long day.”
Schooling her features, she spun and caught the doubtful furrowing of his brows. Of course he’d noticed.
Unsure how deep Kai truly wanted to get into it with everyone else, especially without him there, Isla diverted, “He said he told you about the dagger.” Jonah nodded, though the look of skepticism didn’t waver much. She gripped her bag strap tightly. “Any theories?”
“One, for now.” He lifted his hand, gesturing to where the stairs down to his apartment lay. “Care to step into my office?”
* * *
Jonah’s apartment could have easily been described as a cave or the hoard of a book-loving dragon. Her eyes trailed over the space as she slipped off her shoes, leaving them by the stairs, feeling the cement floor cool beneath her feet. Her eyes adjusted to the light of a lamp perched on a small table by Jonah’s bed, the faint glow illuminating his made bed and an open, marked-up book on his mattress.
The study in the corner had been an organized flurry of books, papers, and machine odds and ends. It was there, spread out over a worn wooden desk, that sketches, maps, books, rubies, and little balls of wood inscribed with ancient symbols lay, and in the center of the hoard, a dagger and broken diadem. All the random shit they’d gathered t the mess these past months had been.
It was a perfect chronicle of all she’d experienced since she’d met Kai.
She couldn’t deny the pull she felt towards it all, now a little worse than before. She fought it, though, moving slowly in its direction.
“I left my sweater here?” Isla noted the woven blue material hanging over the back of a chair as she closed in.
“You’ve left three. The other two are beneath that one.” Jonah hadn’t followed her but moved to the kitchenette, most likely to brew her favorite drink for them both.
Isla left her satchel perched on the chair, holding her belongings, covering up the small rip across the cushion before riffling through it. She pulled out the three new markers and left them with the rest they’d gathered. Her eyes darted between them, already searching for a pattern between the symbols. As expected, these newer ones had the swirling emblem that indicated the path connected to Deimos. She grimaced when battle strategies began forming in her mind.
