The second time Azia saw the bubble, it was slightly less impressive. It still hadn’t entirely lost its luster.

  She’d never admit to the way she awoke before Seleth on purpose, if not solely to witness it twice. True to his word, it really did seem reflexive. She gave him time to enjoy it, for whatever that consisted of. He deserved that much, for all she’d put him through in the past twenty-four hours. In his shoes, she’d be overstimulated. Azia was already overstimulated by just knowing him in the first place.

  Toxins from on high were enough. She didn’t bother overwhelming him with anything else, lest she overwhelm her forcibly-assigned research subject on the first day. It left her time to fill with softer concepts, by comparison. She never did take Seleth to the nursery, and it was still an item on her to-do list.

  Regardless, Azia had led him through shining halls, pristine auditoriums, sparkling laboratories, and a beloved library he would surely grow accustomed to. To be fair, the chance to guide him through the latter in detail had been stolen. It was probably Kassy’s right.

  Seleth had absorbed every facet of the Institute with calm eyes and a satisfied smile. For once, it made Azia smile in turn. In a perfect world, curiosity would overshadow the more questionable aspects of his personality. She doubted it would last, and she savored her peace while she had it.

  It left soft sunshine slipping through the windows of his quarters, sinking once more into yet the same watery chrysalis. Seleth had been just as silent, just as tranquil, and just as afloat in a sleeping sea of his own making. Disturbing him felt sacrilegious. He seemed eager enough to break free of rippling walls--and those of his room, just the same.

  He’d traded them for her bed twice over. Crossed legs and another grin were, apparently, just as comfortable. “What’s on the agenda today?”

  For how much she’d showered him with the day before, Azia was almost concerned as to retention. He seemed sharp enough. She threw caution to the wind and replaced it with graphite. “I didn’t answer everything you asked me yesterday. I’m sorry about that. I never forgot, though. If you’re fine with it, I can answer all of those questions.”

  “Good with me,” Seleth said. “We doing the back-and-forth thing again? One question for me, one question for you?”

  “If you want,” she offered. “There’s going to come a point where this is gonna get technical. I’ll have to start getting samples. Testing your water, and…those sorts of things.”

  “Testing it how?”

  Azia hunted for a blank sheet of paper, leafing through coarse bindings as she spoke. “Lots of different ways. Chemically, to start with. I know what it’s supposed to be made of, hypothetically. It’s got a very easy formula to remember, as a compound. Better than the esua formula, that’s for sure.”

  “Then…why mess with it?” Seleth pressed, resting his cheek in his palm. “What’s even left to check?”

  She found barren lines, eventually. For now, Azia’s pencil was at rest between comfortable fingers. “What it reacts with, mostly. Positively, negatively, anything. Plus, I want to make sure it really does have the chemical makeup I think it does.”

  The same pencil came lazily level with his face from afar. “That reminds me. When you blush, it’s blue. What’s going on with your blood?”

  Seleth uncrossed his legs, recrossing them so soon after. “Specify.”

  “Do you have blood at all? As in, blood how we do? Honestly, do you make bodily fluids in any capacity? I already know you don’t excrete.”

  His smile was as simple as his words. “There’s blood. Probably not the kind you’re used to, though.”

  Azia paused, gesturing vaguely to his eyes with the tip of the pencil. “Can you cry?”

  Seleth chuckled. “I’m a sensitive guy, yes. Be gentle with me, remember? Handle me with love and--”

  “No, I mean physically. Are you capable of producing tears?”

  His smile slipped, somewhat. “Yeah.”

  “What are they made of?”

  Seleth scoffed. “What do you think they’re made of? You’re smart. Don’t overthink it.”

  Azia grimaced. Ultimately, she reclaimed her pencil without rolling her eyes. It was an accomplishment that she celebrated with scribbles.

  “Tell me you’re not gonna collect those, too,” he mumbled.

  “I should, at some point,” Azia insisted, never raising her eyes from the journal.

  “You’re gonna make me cry?” Seleth whined, mockingly or otherwise. “That’s not very nice.”

  “You agreed to this.”

  “How are you gonna make me cry?”

  “Not the point. It’s for a good reason, just remember that.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh, and he crafted an exaggerated grin. “Crying for science. The things I do for you.”

  Azia said nothing as to the blood. She was shocked he didn’t ask, truthfully. To be fair, she’d devised more than enough ideas as to how to earn that recently--ethically or otherwise.

  “My turn,” Seleth said excitedly.

  He wasn’t wrong. She didn’t object. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s…kind of a big one. Is that okay?”

  Azia raised an eyebrow. “I’ll do my best.”

  Seleth straightened up, tracing useless patterns along the covers with one absentminded fingertip. “I meant to ask this one yesterday, actually. This whole ‘missing water’ thing. You guys can invent a whole substitute for water. You can get it into your body. You can live with it. You can even resurrect entire dead species of living things. You can do all this awesome stuff that shouldn’t be possible. What the hell is so hard about water?”

  Azia was quiet. Her hand fell still, and it took more than a moment to find her words. New as he still was to her world, she softened the terminology as much as was possible. Ideally, it would suffice.

  “After we lost it, something in the atmosphere changed--we think. We haven’t figured out what it is, and we haven’t figured out how to fix it. Whatever it was, it made covalent bonding between the atoms necessary to make water impossible.”

  Seleth tilted his head. It still wasn’t soft enough. Azia groaned inwardly.

  “The…atoms don’t stick together,” she tried, wedging the pencil between the folds of the journal. Sloppy motions of her hands were the best supplement she had to her explanation. “To make it ourselves, we’d have to find a way to force them to stick. That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to figure out, although we haven’t had much luck so far.”

  Seleth nodded slowly. “That makes…sense.”

  Azia didn’t entirely believe him. She couldn’t get much simpler, to be fair.

  “So, Big Question Number Two,” he said quietly. “This one’s also from yesterday, if you’re up for it.”

  He was breaking his own rules again. She let him, in the end. “Yeah.”

  Seleth averted his eyes for a moment. When they reconvened with Azia's own, they were startlingly neutral. “What happened? What…took it?”

  She’d known it was coming, just as before. There would be no Rain to interrupt her this time, hopefully. With care, Azia folded the journal shut, settling the little book into her lap. For a different reason altogether, she handled every word gently.

  “I want to preface this by saying that this is our best guess--part of it, anyway,” Azia began. “Some of it is proven. Some of it isn’t. We’ve been fighting to put it together since it happened.”

  In silence, Seleth nodded once more. Azia took a deep breath.

  “6,000 years ago, the sun exploded,” she murmured.

  “What the hell?” he interrupted, flinching. One skeptical hand flew to greet the shimmering glass panes behind him. “The sun is literally right--”

  Azia raised one calm palm of her own. To her relief, Seleth obeyed her plea for peace, slowly settling back into stillness. It wasn’t worth chiding him over. In his shoes, her reaction might’ve been the same.

  “It exploded,” she continued. “To this day, no one knows why. The immediate aftermath wiped out approximately 98% of all life on Earth. About 12,600,000,000 people were killed.”

  Seleth’s eyes widened. “That many?”

  “I think this goes without saying, but…that’s when we lost all of the water. Every body of water on the planet evaporated instantly. Every molecule of water in the atmosphere was annihilated instantly. Every cloud in the sky was torn to pieces instantly. Those that survived almost didn’t make it at all. The window that the alchemists had was…small. They figured out the blood problem pretty shortly after esua was synthesized. To be honest, they didn’t even know. They got lucky.”

  “They didn’t know there was no water on the inside?”

  Azia shook her head. “That part was genuinely a miracle. It’s amazing everyone held out as long as they did. To function without a drop of water in your system is…insane. Think of how many processes need that. Even 6,000 years later, esua isn’t quick. Esua still takes a few minutes to make. Back then, we have reason to believe it took days.”

  Seleth was quiet. Azia had expected shock. He gave it to her, somewhat, and yet the skepticism was new. He raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  Azia blinked. “What?”

  “You guys had no water--no blood--inside of you for days, and you still survived?”

  She shifted awkwardly in her seat. “I told you, it was basically a miracle.”

  “That shouldn’t even be possible. No one should be here.”

  Seleth had been accepting of all else, so far. Azia was surprised that this was where he’d opted to cut her off. “That’s…just what happened,” she insisted. “I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. We’ve only got esua inside of us, now.”

  He was still staring. It was getting uncomfortable. Seleth narrowed his eyes, and that was worse. “I thought you said there was blood in the…”

  He trailed off. Azia wondered if he’d pick it up again, and yet he never did. At long last, Seleth relented with a sigh, bringing the lingering disbelief on his face with him. “Never mind. Then what?”

  Azia almost forgot where she was altogether. The look on his face wasn’t helping. She fidgeted with the spine of her journal. “It’s fuzzy, from there. The current theory is that a cosmic phenomenon of some kind led to the…for lack of better words, re-coagulation of the sun. What was left of it, I mean. It pulled itself together and started burning again. We’re mostly going off ancient records for that, and whatever astrological evidence we can get."

  Seleth still declined to press her. Azia liked to imagine the skepticism was gone--for now. She appreciated it. “There were other miracles, honestly. We don’t have a great explanation for the composition of the atmosphere. We don’t have a great explanation for a lot of stuff. You’d be amazed at how many things rely on water--and the sun. We got lucky with that, too. We did our best. We rebuilt. We made do with what we had.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “It wasn’t always pretty. There were…conflicts. Wars. When you lose something that keeps the world alive, you lose a lot of the resources that go with it. The alchemists still took the lead, and they brought back what they could. If they hadn’t been as involved as they were, I doubt things ever would’ve calmed down. There’s a lot of debate as to whether or not what they do is ‘right,’ regardless. In terms of what happened, there’s theories, and there’s interpretations. There’s continuing investigations, like I said.”

  Azia paused. “And in terms of…getting it back, there’s interpretations about how to do that, too. Not all of us see eye to eye, on that front.”

  Seleth stared, his expression largely blank. “You guys have different ideas for how to make it happen, right? The whole ‘sticking together’ thing, and all that?”

  Azia fell silent. When she found the drive to answer, it was with quieter words than she’d intended to offer. “I’m not talking about the alchemists.”

  Seleth blinked. Azia sighed. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, catching the little journal as it slipped into her hands. “Do you feel like going out somewhere?”

  His grin was weak, at best. “My God, are you asking me on a date?”

  “I’m being serious.”

  Seleth’s face fell quickly enough. He matched her tone, confused eyes or not. “Sure.”

  Azia rose to her feet, settling the journal onto her desk. In its place, her boots took priority. “I know the last…thing I showed you outside wasn’t the safest. At the very least, there’s no danger involved in this one. It’s still something I want you to see.”

  Seleth watched as she hoisted her bag onto her back, her glaive clinging to the same. “That’s fine with me. Fresh air. Adventure. I’m good with that.”

  Joking words didn’t match his soft voice. “You haven’t seen much of the desert, right? You said you don’t remember how you got out there, so I assume you wouldn’t really know your way around it.”

  He came to her side, and his hands slipped comfortably into his pockets. “Hot. Sandy. That’s as far as I got.”

  “I figured as much,” Azia said, straightening up. Glistening metal shuffled against delicate materials with a gentle clink, and she adjusted the straps carefully. “We’ll come back. It’s not that long of a drive.”

  Seleth cocked his head. “That’s…a lot of sand to drive over. How does that work?”

  It was one question Azia could answer through action, instead. That part was the least of her concerns, really. He’d probably enjoy the voyage, destination be damned. She’d shown what they’d gained, disgusting as it was. Entertaining the opposite weighed heavy on her heart.

  They didn’t need to voyage anywhere, actually. He was utterly sparkling long before she’d so much as started the engine.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Seleth mumbled with far too much excitement.

  Something about it was almost endearing. Azia smirked in the process of dusting off the seat. “It’s roughly a thirty-minute drive. You don’t need to hydrate in any capacity, right? As in, your water takes care of everything? I’m not sure how exposed you were before, but it really does get hot. I brought my own esua, and I--”

  “Is this really yours?” he asked gleefully, gesturing to the bike.

  Azia sighed, if not with something less than annoyance. “Yes, it’s mine.”

  “You drive this.”

  “Yes.”

  “Regularly?”

  “Yes.”

  “You. You drive this?” Seleth repeated, his motions yet more aggressive.

  She stifled a laugh. “What’s so unbelievable about that?”

  He was absolutely aglow, and she couldn’t bring him down. “Are we gonna ride it?”

  Azia speared the kickstand with the tip of her boot, throwing her leg over the seat. One tiny click was in stark contrast to the steady rumble that jolted to life beneath her. “Obviously? Why else would I even have--”

  “Can I drive it?”

  Azia narrowed her eyes. “No!”

  Seleth was practically bouncing on his heels, sand or not. For the briefest moment, he could’ve challenged Kassy’s energy. It wouldn’t be permanent, probably. Even as Azia firmly faced the wavering horizon beyond, the bike was still surprisingly light. She didn’t bother turning her head.

  “Stop staring at it and get on,” Azia half-scolded, not immune to the smile in her voice.

  “Sorry, sorry!”

  Seleth did so with more force than was necessary, the bike lurching underneath Azia in the process. Given the lack of hands around her torso, she finally cast a glance over her shoulder. There was an immense relief that came with Seleth's feet dangling over the back of the bike, kicking with yet the same excitement. If he hit the rear tire, Azia was going to kill him--provided Seleth didn’t fall and kill himself first.

  “That’s not very safe,” Azia muttered.

  “I’m good, I promise.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Make sure you hold on tight, then, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” he affirmed.

  For once, it wasn’t impure. Something about the lack of his clinging grip--genuinely needed or otherwise--was just as much of a relief. There would’ve been a bag between them, granted. Azia adjusted her scarf, for whatever that was worth before desert winds claimed her. Her foot came up, her wrist came down, and she dragged Seleth to distant loneliness.

  She wondered if he’d find it to be the same. She wondered if it would shake him at all. The novelty of a speeding motorbike conquering arid sands was enough to keep Seleth’s heart alight for longer than she’d expected. Fueled by sunshine as he apparently was, Azia had half a mind to wonder if the aging day only made it worse.

  A clear forecast held true, and she counted her blessings for that much. Thirty minutes’ distance didn’t warrant stuffing her gear into her bag, ultimately. If a hypothesis so tried and true failed her yet again, Azia still had what glimmering violence she needed. Seleth would be fine.

  He took the sprawling sands with grace. He took them with more interest than Azia had thought he would, really, given the barren wastes he was forced to witness. Each time she cast her eyes over her shoulder, the smile Seleth offered her was more or less a fixture. What hot daylight beat down upon her back did little to faze him, and he soaked up every drop of desert air without complaint.

  There was almost an irony that came with his anomalous features, by which Azia would’ve thought he’d dry out--if that was possible. It was warm. His existence was aquatic. She kept the concept to herself, lest he find it ridiculous.

  Seleth shared his satisfaction in abundance, as she’d figured he would. Azia had hardly seen him stop speaking since they’d met. The bike probably wasn’t helping. His raised voice was more than audible above the roar of the engine--although, knowing him, she would’ve heard it regardless. “So, where are you taking me, anyway?”

  Azia couldn’t believe it had taken him nearly the entire trip to ask. “The ocean.”

  She didn’t need to see his face to hear the confusion in his tone. “The what?”

  “The Reselic Ocean, specifically,” she added.

  Seleth scoffed. “Once again, you and what water?”

  “What’s left of it. Remember what I said about the whole ‘bodies of water evaporating’ thing? That included the oceans--all of them.”

  “Huh,” she heard plainly. “If…there was an ocean this close, was this always a--”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Azia interrupted. “The deserts weren’t always deserts. We had deserts, yes, but not even slightly to this degree. There’s a decent amount that contributed to that, meteorologically.”

  Seleth paused. “Everything’s like this?”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered if I took you to the Reselic Ocean or the Faric Ocean. Tenaveris Desert borders both. The Reselic Ocean is just the closer one. No matter where you go, they’re all going to have the same problem. You’re just gonna see the same thing.”

  Azia threw a quick glance over her shoulder, carefully calculated as she sped ever onwards. “That’s part of why I was so shocked that you were wandering around out here. There’s nothing. I know you don’t eat or drink, now, and I know you just run on sunlight, so it makes more sense. Still, everything blends together.”

  She caught sight of Seleth scanning the escaping sands at her back, distant as they grew with each passing second. “I haven’t seen any buildings, or anything,” he observed aloud. “What’s the closest, like…I don’t know, beacon of civilization to here?”

  Azia was quiet.

  “Do people live this far out? Not a lot of point in living next to an ocean with nothing in it, I’d assume.”

  She could only bite her lip, her eyes fixed forward alone.

  “So that leaves you with what, exactly?”

  She weighed the words on her tongue, dry as they came. She’d showered him in truths, all-consuming and overstimulating. Not once had she lied. He deserved honesty, and she knew he could take it.

  “Azia?”

  And still, it was a reflex.

  “The Institute is…close enough,” she offered, battling the bitter taste in her mouth. “Nothing of worth out here.”

  Granted, that wasn’t a lie.

  Seleth took it well, ultimately. “I figured as much. Thirty minutes isn’t terrible, I guess. You go here often?”

  If anything, Azia was more concerned with ensuring that her compass kept a wobbling arrow spearing right. “Not really. Very, very rarely, and only to gather samples.”

  “Of?”

  “Fossilized biomatter, if I can find any. Where do you think we got the fish from?”

  “Ah.”

  Azia’s eyes drifted left. She found only sprawling beige. That was a good thing. Splitting her focus between him and her calculated path was difficult. At the very least, she could pass off her fixation as navigation needs alone. Seleth never called her on it, regardless.

  “And you’re just…stuck with sand every time? Like, when you go anywhere? You can bring fish back to life, but you can’t make the ride a little bit smoother?”

  “There’s no point in having roads out in the open desert. We’ve tried. The Rain makes them a nightmare to maintain--and build. It makes transporting supplies annoying, too. That’s just how it is. You’ll get used to it.”

  It took time to realize how fast she’d actually been going, and she eased her wrist back off the throttle as subtly as she could manage.

  “So, when do I get to drive?” he teased.

  In any other circumstance, Azia would’ve groaned. She would’ve rolled her eyes, as ever, or maybe surrendered to a smirk. The look on Seleth’s face had been enjoyable enough, and she liked to imagine it was there again. Instead, she was balancing banter and ensuring a naked horizon, by which not one questionable landmark came into Seleth’s line of sight. It was probably for the best that he was facing backwards, if that was her plan. “Never,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Come on, don’t be like that. Teach me,” he whined.

  She was going too fast again. She didn’t resist this time. “You don’t need to know how to drive.”

  “But it looks so fun!”

  “Anywhere you go, you’d be going with me, anyway.”

  “What if I wanna take you out somewhere?” Seleth asked playfully. “What kind of guy makes a girl drive him to--”

  “We’re here.”

  Azia had been so occupied with dodging interloping structures that she’d nearly missed the entire ocean. Ever-descending as it was, she surely would’ve driven into it at some point. Infinite sands fell tinted with something more, craggy and fine all at once. Beige bled into grays, and both dove deep into the depths of Hell. To this day, Azia still feared falling to the center of the earth--impossible as it was. A sea long barren stretched endlessly, battling to swallow her whole. It was otherworldly each and every time she saw it.

  She came to a gentle stop, dragging her foot along crumbling pebbles. The shift in surface was always jarring, and Azia disliked the feeling of the rugged ground beneath her feet. When she dismounted the bike, she was vaguely aware of Seleth doing the same at her back. For now, her eyes were on the plunging expanse of eternal nothing alone.

  “This is it,” Azia said plainly.

  Seleth said nothing in return. Azia hit the kickstand with the tip of her boot once more, stealing slow steps towards the ruined sea. “This is the Reselic Ocean.”

  Given the slow crunching of scattered pebbles to her left, she could only assume that Seleth echoed her approach. Azia had stable footing, slope be damned. She could never hush the part of her that feared she’d slip, careening into the dark. Flooding sunshine from on high could only fill so much. The logical part of her halted, eventually, and she drank in the naked chasm with her eyes alone.

  “It still has a lot of the same geographical features,” Azia offered, one wandering finger falling into the gaping void. “There’s the continental slope. It gets much deeper past that. We’ve had trouble exploring too far down, but we’re working on figuring out better ways. It’s…impossible for me to imagine it full, honestly. It wasn’t stagnant. It moved. It was complex. This whole thing was absolutely filled with water instead of being…this.”

  For now, all she could gift to the deep was her gaze, tumbling down to places that light couldn’t follow. “This is how powerful the Sunburst was. We lost this. We lost all of them.”

  Azia gave her eyes to him instead. “I wanted you to see the--”

  Seleth, too, had given his to a forsaken ocean. His tears came with it. Azia froze.

  “Seleth?” she tried softly.

  His attention was on the expanse alone. He was utterly silent, and what gentle winds swept between them were all the noise she could find. His breaths were level, and his words were absent. Still, Seleth stared only ahead, and quiet tears slipped down his cheeks.

  “Hey,” Azia pressed. “What’s wrong?”

  Blank eyes or not, the tiniest waver in his voice wasn’t lost on her. “This is…”

  Seleth trailed off. Azia didn’t let him. “Are you okay? You’re…crying.”

  Even now, he didn’t steal his teary eyes from the useless horizon. “Am I?”

  “Yeah,” Azia answered weakly.

  The singular deep breath Seleth took shuddered all the way out. “Guess that answers that question for you, doesn’t it? Here’s your tears, if you…want them.”

  Azia’s heart sank. “That’s not important right now. What’s going on?”

  Seleth didn’t respond with words. When he raised his hands in tandem, she was initially confused. It was the first time she’d seen bubbles born solely to fall, precious aquamarine woven by his touch only to crash to the earth. His motions were far from careless, and he discarded gentle purity with caution. Every droplet that sank into rocky crevices accompanied yet more. He gifted the sea with a river of his own, tiny and futile as it was.

  “What are you doing?” Azia asked, her eyes glued to his trickling current.

  It matched with his tears, in that way, mingling with the same fizzling puddles as they fell. “This is the most I can do.”

  Azia gripped the hem of her shirt tightly. “The most you can do to…what?”

  “To give it back,” Seleth murmured. “I’m sorry I can’t…”

  When he tapered off, the swelling sparkle in his eyes was a threat. The most docile hint of azure in his sorrow only left his gorgeous gaze more ethereal. Azia hated that it was beautiful. Where he felt pain, it crashed down on her heart tenfold.

  One hand settled onto his shoulder. “We will get it back,” she spoke firmly. “All of it. That’s why we’re here, and that’s why we do what we do. We’re not expecting you to solve everything. Seleth, no one’s expecting you to solve anything.”

  Seleth severed his dripping streams, stray shimmers of mist still fraying beyond his fingers. “But this is why I’m even here,” he whispered. “This is…awful. This isn’t right. This isn’t supposed to be like this. None of this is supposed to--”

  “And it won’t always stay this way,” Azia interrupted, barring the path between him and the dead ocean ahead. “I’m an alchemist. This is my life’s work. This is my dream. I pour everything I’ve got into fixing this, and there’s hundreds of other people like me out there. There’s hundreds more that aren’t like me, too. This isn’t your burden to bear. It’s ours, and I dragged you into it. We need you, and you’re special, and you’re the closest we’ve gotten to anything meaningful in a long, long time. That doesn’t mean you have to be a miracle. That…doesn’t mean we’re useless.”

  Seleth blinked, heavy tears spilling down his cheeks once more. “I want to help.”

  “You are helping,” Azia insisted softly. “You are.”

  He didn’t speak. Eventually, he sighed, donning the weakest grin she’d ever seen him wear. “You…really can collect these, if you want,” Seleth joked half-heartedly, gesturing to his leaking eyes.

  Azia did all she could to return a smile. “I’ve got nothing to put them in. I…need a more controlled environment.”

  “You’re gonna make me cry twice?”

  “Now, I know you can.”

  “You’re mean,” Seleth mumbled playfully, his grin brightening in the slightest. “Be nice to me.”

  Every stray tear that collided with the broken earth was a blessing delayed for too long. In a way, he was the same. That it would come from his hurt was her only regret, and Azia put her faith in what he’d given by choice. Once more, her eyes drifted to the wet patch of gray below, glistening stones made pure by the sun.

  It was the first time in 6,000 years. Miracle or not, it wouldn’t be the last. She’d make sure of it.