It’s late and everyone at Westcrest is asleep except for Jeremy and Sarra who have stayed up late in the garage to work on the motorbike and talk.
“So… are you invincible?” asks Sarra as she searches through a tray for a specifically sized bolt.
Jeremy shrugs. “Nope,” he says. “Just… lucky I guess.”
Sarra nods. Finding the bolt she was searching for she begins to thread it onto a screw. The bike could have already been repaired five times over by now, but the rest of Westcrest’s members realise that Jeremy and Sarra are using it as an excuse to spend time together. “We’re all lucky,” Sarra says after a while. “To be here, I mean. At Westcrest.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” says Jeremy. He’s fiddling with a box covered in switches and flashing lights allows them to check the power calibration of the motorbike’s engine. This is actually the main method of repairing the conveyance. Setting the correct calibration to enable the bike to perform certain tasks—like flying—requires a specific order of switches to be set.
“We are,” says Sarra. “Without this place we’d be… well, I don’t know where I would be.”
“What happened?” Jeremy asks her. “Before you came here? How did they find you?”
“Ha,” says Sarra, but there’s no humour in the sound she makes. “I thought you’d never ask. It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” says Jeremy and there’s a sort of looming silence after he says those words that hangs in the air and stretches on towards eternity. Sarra almost asks him if he’s sure about that, but she knows that would be unfair on him.
“I grew up in Cunningham,” she says. “In a trailer. My parents were… well, it’s more like they weren’t. Eventually somebody showed up along to save me. But he wasn’t exactly who I thought he was.”
“Sounds like DuPont,” says Jeremy. The Haitaian had taken Jeremy in off the streets and put him to work, but he hadn’t been any real sort of father figure. Jeremy didn’t think any sort of real father would ever willingly send their child into danger like DuPont had been so keen to do.
“Dane was like DuPont in a lot of ways,” says Sarra with a nod. Her dark fringe has fallen across her face and Jeremy gets the sudden urge to brush it out of her eyes, but he can’t because his hands are covered in oil. “He was from the future—an anachronist, Chatravati calls them. A time traveller. I thought that he cared about me, but all he cared about was my power.”
Jeremy nods because he knows exactly how that feels.
“I did some bad things,” says Sarra. “I… hurt people. But then Chatravati found me and brought me here so that I could make up for it. He’s different, you know. Chatravati actually cares about us. That’s why we’re lucky.”
A strange feeling has come over Jeremy. It’s not so different to how he felt when facing off against the rampaging troll, except if there’s one thing that he’s certain of it’s that Sarra’s no troll.
“I’m glad I’m here,” says Jeremy. “I’m glad I stayed. I…”
Sarra laughs then, a little awkward laugh and they both sit in silence with the dismantled bike sitting around them. The eldritch glow of the bike’s engine casts blue light across their faces.
“Can you pass that?” Sarra asks and points at a spanner sitting near Jeremy’s leg. He reaches forward to hand it to her and notices a black smear of grease decorating one of her cheeks like warpaint.
“You’ve got something…” he says and touches his hand to her face. He smudges the mark with his thumb, making it look worse than it did to begin with. Energy sparks between them—Sarra can feel the palms of her hands getting hot. Jeremy starts to move away but she grabs him by both sides of his jacket and pulls him towards her.
Jeremy opens his mouth to speak, but Sarra shakes her head.
And then they kiss.