They rode the lift back down to the bottom floor of the tower, returning to the Crucible lobby. The battle had apparently ended and been called for the day, as the lobby was crowded with Guardians. Some were still coming in off the field or trickling to the lift, but others were gathered into knots, chatting as companionably and casually as commuters waiting for a train to arrive after work, intent on going to their favorite pub.
For the briefest of moments, Minerva could smell a hint of beer, see the image of a dark wood and gilded archway, the glint of sunlight off of iron wrought windows. Then it was gone again, just as quickly.
A memory? She didn't know. It had no emotional context, no association. It was like being shown a single photograph so briefly her eyes couldn't quite catch it. Only an impression remained.
Lord Shaxx appeared out of the crowd almost as if he had formed from various pieces of it, heading in their direction. As he greeted Zavala and the two spoke in low tones, Minerva continued to look around at the other gathered guardians, more and more of whom were glancing their direction.
Some wore helmets, but others had already removed them. She saw a variety of faces; human, Exo, Awoken, male and female and androgynous. Those that wore cloaks were easily identified as Hunters, and given the general size and breadth of the ones wearing strips of cloth at their waists or belts she guessed those were the Titans. The strips of cloth varied as much as the Hunter's cloaks seemed to: some were ragged and almost looked like torn bandage, others were woven with intricate colors and elaborate designs. Some were only a few inches in length or width, others could almost have been termed half-skirts that draped nearly to the knees.
That left the Warlocks. By process of elimination they had to be the ones wearing arm-bands. Like the cloaks and those cloth strips, these arm-bands varied widely in quality and intricacy. Some even seemed holographic, which made her blink in fascination.
Their armor- all their armor- seemed just as eclectic. There were hundreds of designs, from gleaming to battered, from intimidating to supple, functional to outright bizarre. Just as many Ghosts hovered like a low flock of birds over the crowds, and dozens of languages followed by dozens of various translations filled the air in a low rumble.
Zavala stepped away from Shaxx having concluded their conversation. The motion drew her attention and she followed as he started toward the crowd, most of which were now looking at them curiously. They stepped aside as the pair approached, and then resumed their conversations.
Zavala lead her out through the doors and back onto the torn up field. The ruins were now eerily quiet, a haze of dirt and powder still hanging thin in the air around it.
Five Guardians were heading across the field toward them, three walking in a cluster a dozen yards ahead of the other two. Min instantly recognized Rhonda, Ian, and Tychon. Tychon had his hand on Rhonda's arm, and both the newbies looked ragged and shell-shocked. As she watched them pass, Min felt that tightening in her gut again, the taste in her mouth going bitter. Despite what she'd been told and what most of her thought even made sense, she couldn't get over the fact that Nara had been torturing Rhonda…and laughing.
They approached the two trailing behind. Both had their helmets off and Min's first thought was that it was no wonder the others called them the Twins.
She could tell which was which by their armor. Blayd's suit was heavy and functional and painted in scarlet and gold. The helmet tucked under her arm had a broadly sweeping faceplate and a stiff brush of scarlet horsehair rising in a thick strip along its ridge. The cloth at her waist was a half-skirt of tan and dark brown, elegantly embroidered with the image of a howling wolf. A heavy rifle fraught with filigree and the size of a small child was slung over her shoulder. A short and nasty looking blade was in her belt.
Nara's armor she recognized instantly- dark and thick and oily, it had the same spiny metal ridges over the shoulder-pads as was on the miasmic helmet held in her hand. Just over her shoulder, Min could see the handle of that horrific skull-faced rifle. The cloth she wore at her waist was dark gray, and looked as if she had deliberately smeared a bloody hand over it to clean it off.
Beyond their armor, the two women were of the same height, with thick shaggy black hair in uneven chops. They looked like they both cut their hair merely by taking handfuls of it and slicing it off with a dagger, unconcerned with aesthetic. They had the same almost agonizingly straight nose, the same broad cheekbones, the same stern chin, the same arch to their brows, the same lips. Their skin and eyes were the exact same shade of brown as the others'.
There was no other explanation for what she was seeing save that the two were actual identical twins, as astronomical as those chances may have been.
Twins, or clones, Min thought.
There would be no mistaking one for the other, however- even if they had dressed the same. Blayd had a scar on her lower lip that was puzzling in its presence: Ghost healing left no scars. She also had a smear of pale blue-green spread in a band over her eyes from temple to temple, eyebrows to cheekbones. It could not be makeup- the woman was grimy with sweat and the band was perfect.
A tattoo of some kind?
Nara's face was mostly covered by the broad, white suggestion of a skull that came down to her upper lip. Her dark eyes glittered from the eye sockets with a secret and frenetic light that her sister's eyes lacked. Though they were not green, they reminded Min of the swirls of miasma in her helmet, the spills of swamp light from her weapon's macabre beak.
"Big Boss?" Blayd said to Zavala as they reached them. She smiled slightly but her eyes were wary. "What have you got?"
"News," Zavala said. "One of the Vanished has returned."
He explained quickly about Eris Morn's sudden reappearance, and her odd condition. Blayd appeared to catch on one detail.
"Ship? You say she stole a ship?" she asked.
"So it appears," Zavala told her. "Holliday and her bots are going over it now."
"Can I see it?"
"I want no one unnecessary near that ship for the time being," he said. "Until we can be sure if it is safe and what we are dealing with. We're taking everything cautiously, including Eris Morn. The changes to her..."
Min glanced at Nara as he said those words. The motion was unconscious, but badly timed. Her eyes met Nara's as the Guardian looked at her as well.
"You got something to say, newbie?" Nara asked. It was the first time she'd spoken. Her voice sounded much like Blayd's as well, but only if her sister had possessed a chain-smoking habit. She grinned as she said it, and the grin seemed to send the vague shadows moving behind her eyes into high vibration.
Min said nothing, but neither did she look away. Nara's grin gained a hair, then she lifted a hand and thumped Minerva over the sternum with the back of her hand as she looked at Zavala, then back at Min. "You seen the films for today yet, Big Boss? You should have seen the newb here light up coming after me. Shaxx call you yet for Titan? He's slipping if not."
"She has already been called," Zavala said, but his eyes moved to Minerva thoughtfully. "You lit up?"
"I don't know what that means," Minerva said.
"It means you tapped into your Light's ability to control energy that surrounds you," Blayd said, and Minerva remembered when, during the fight, Nara had hopped into the air and come down so hard with her fist she'd left a crater behind. Pale blue flashes of light had surrounded her and had been driven into the ground when she'd done that, as if she'd joined forces with a lightning strike. Then she remembered that feeling at the very end of the fight, right before Shaxx had stopped them. She'd been charging Nara, and something had seemed to flash in her mind- a growing glow and a painless heat. Had she been about to do much the same?
Zavala didn't comment on this further, but he looked deeply thoughtful again before returning his attention to the Twins. "I have no expectations of the two of you in regards to Eris Morn," he said. "I thought you just deserved to know that one of them came back. What you do with that information is up to you."
"Can we clear to go back to the Moon?" Nara said, finally tearing her gaze away from Min and fixing it on Zavala. Min didn't miss the way her sister suddenly seemed to pale. "One came back against odds; might be some of the others are still alive up there after all."
"No," Zavala said firmly. "You cannot clear to return to the Moon. It remains off-limits until we get a better handle on the situation and hear what Morn has to say. I will not risk more Guardians."
Nara scowled but didn't argue. Instead she said, "I want to talk to her when she's able."
"I will let you know," Zavala agreed. Nara nodded, then stepped past the pair without a further word and strode off toward the lobby.
"Thank you Zavala," Blayd said, then nodded pleasantly to Minerva. "It was good to meet you, Guardian. Welcome to the Titans."
"Thank you," Min replied, and Blayd headed away after her twin.
"She's eager to return to the Moon?" Min said after the pair was out of hearing range.
"Yes," Zavala told her. "I like to think it's out of a desire to complete their original failed mission and finally find out what happened to their fellow Guardians- and avenge them if possible."
"But you're not sure," Min stated.
"No. However she's had a thousand chances to disobey our orders and has not yet done so. I do not think she'll start now."
"Blayd seemed terrified of the suggestion of going back."
"We still don't know what the two of them might have gone through up there. Blayd doesn't consciously remember but subconsciously such things can never be erased. Whatever it was, Eris Morn has been up there going through it for five years. I don't know whether or not to hope for her madness or her sanity."
The next several days settled into a routine and endless torment. Each morning Min would wake in her tiny room to the cheerful greeting of her Ghost and the usual presence of at least one or two cats. After eating it was down to the Crucible, where hours felt like years and every possible agony seemed to lurk in the shattered stone of the ruins. Then it would be a return to her room and a drop into a heavy sleep plagued with sudden nightmares and wake-starts that left her bathed in sweat, her heart racing. The first night, those wake-starts had involved vomiting and sobbing. After two or three days however, the vomiting stopped.
She did not see Kalina during these days- a time she was already thinking of as the Torture. The faces of the Guardians in the battle blended together; she did not linger in the lobby as many of them did at the end of the day though more than once some random group of Titans had tried to call her over to join them. One small blessing in the midst of this chaos was that the Twins had not yet put in a visit back to the Crucible, and Min had not had to face Nara or her venomous gun again.
Every moment spent in the Crucible was learning how to fight, and how to die. The dying she did more of- at first. Slowly, however, the Torture seemed to be doing its intended job. She was getting better, lasting longer, and starting to fear those incidents of sucking oblivion or exquisite pain less.
She heard nothing more of Eris Morn, and for the time being she was more than happy to put that strange, mummy-smelling woman out of her mind completely.
Weapon's training was the same as the rest- you grabbed a weapon and you learned to use it on the fly in the heat of battle. If you didn't, you died. Like most of the Titans seemed to, she found herself favoring high-speed automatic rifles that could chew through an opponent in a flurry of shot; though her first experiences of these was very much of the 'spray and pray' variety, she was becoming far more precise and less wasteful of her ammunition. Unlike her fellow Titans, she did not find a natural favor when it came to shotguns. She could not seem to find a natural balance of precision to range with them that suited her.
She also had not 'lit' up again, much as she had tried too, and that frustrated her. All of the Guardians, it seemed, had ways to use their Light to tap into various energies around them. They could use manipulations of these energies to create shields for themselves against weapons, to redirect fire, as projectiles themselves, or in the case of Titans, to add a devastating amount of power to physical blows that could literally tear apart stone or crack the ground itself.
These abilities were immensely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, yet try as she might Minerva could not seem to use them herself. Whatever she had tapped into that first day against Nara was now completely eluding her.
She had long since lost count of how many days had passed before she saw Shaxx waiting for her in the lobby one evening. Her muscles ached and burned and her eyelids dragged at her, but for the first time in a bout she had only died twice. She might have a long way to go, but she was finally starting to feel like she might have a chance to succeed at this weird hand Fate had dealt her.
"Minerva, Zavala would like you to meet him upstairs before you retire," Shaxx said, and nodding tiredly, Min went past and into the lift. The usual knots of happily chattering veterans and their rumble of translated voices vanished as the doors shut and the lift sped her upwards.
"I wonder why Zavala wants to see you," her Ghost said after a moment.
"I don't know," she said. Surely it was too early for fieldwork? She wasn't ready yet, she didn't think.
"Perhaps it's about that Morn woman."
"I have nothing to do with her," Minerva said. "Zavala wouldn't want to see me because of her."
The Ghost hummed thoughtfully, not sounding entirely convinced but not bothering to argue. "Perhaps then…they discovered something about your past?"
Min's stomach seemed to shrink and close in on itself. She had completely forgotten that the Vanguard were going to dig into her history, her life before waking on that deserted, freezing Russian freeway.
"They couldn't have found something that quickly, could they?" she said. If they had, she was suddenly incredibly certain she didn't want to hear it.
"I don't know. Stranger things have happened, I suppose."
She shook her head. "Why don't we stop trying to guess? We'll find out for certain in just a few minutes anyway."
Emerging from the lift she headed toward the Hall, that large room that served as a combination war room, communications center, and central council chambers of the Vanguard. At any given time, day or night, a scattering of Guardians and a dozen various Tower personnel were in this room.
As she stepped inside, she spotted Zavala standing beside the huge central table, looking over a projected light map of some place she didn't recognize and reading over half a dozen reports that were scattered in front of him. Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey were both there as well, but neither seemed to notice her, intent as they were on their conversation.
She wasn't sure that Zavala was going to notice her either, but as she neared he spoke. "You will not be in the Crucible tomorrow, Minerva."
"I won't?" She asked, blinking dully at him as she stopped nearby.
"No," he said. "You have been working very hard and are making excellent progress, but it is my understanding you have been isolating yourself. You emerge from the Crucible and return directly to your room, only to leave to attend the Crucible again. Is that true?"
He finally looked at her, and she nodded.
"May I ask why?"
"I thought that I was to concentrate on my training," she said, puzzled.
"And you are," he said. "But not all of your training is merely sleeping and fighting. You have been here now for six weeks, and you have spent none of that time on recreational or social activities. You still appear as lean as a newborn, so you are also not eating enough. A great deal of your training is learning how to fight and how to conquer fear, pain, and death- but it is not meant to be at the expense of the rest of your sanity, or humanity. This duty steals enough of that, there is no reason to give it more than is necessary."
His eyes returned to the reports and he leaned on the table as he regarded them. "Tomorrow," he said, "no Crucible. Recover your strength, spend some time in the Tower getting to know the place and the people in it. And for Light's sake, eat. The sheer amount of calories you use fighting is one thing, but repeated healing also takes its toll. If you forgo eating the proper amount you only exhaust yourself even more, and an exhausted Guardian is a sloppy Guardian."
"I understand."
"Good. You are dismissed."
She left the Hall, and as she headed toward her room she felt a bit of relief over the idea she wouldn't have to fight tomorrow. Oddly, that relief grated on her a little. As she brooded over why, her Ghost made a sound like he was clearing his throat. She looked up at him.
"What?"
"…eat?" he said, making a slight gesture back the other way, where food lay instead of beds. She let out a weary, slightly groaning breath, then reluctantly turned her course.
"Yeah," she said, feeling every bit of the exhaustion winding around her bones and doing her best to put it out of her mind. "I suppose food first."
