@writelikeyourerunningoutoftime
I'm gonna do something different for this one. Instead of leaving horribly long and slightly messy (sorry!) comments like I did for @LittleBear , I'll just edit the whole thing and leave a note after about what I changed/why I changed it. That way you'll easily see examples of what I thought needed to be mixed up a little without the confusion.
Note: I do like the theme you had going here! It was very descriptive. The sentences that were used for emphasis were done very well. A lot of people skip over those types of sentences in order to make long, elegant, winding ones that often lose the reader's focus. You did a pretty good job of paying attention to both detail and phrasing. The things that I will edit are mostly just sentences in which the message you were going for got a tiny bit lost in the wording.
Let's start, then!
Morning came with pain.
The streetlights outside the window had changed sometime during the night, and now the warmth of artificial UV rays flooded the room with warmth. At that moment there was peace outside Nyir's home, but she could practically sense the riots that would surely be occurring elsewhere.
Nyir felt vaguely disappointed. Sleep hadn't cured her tiredness, nor her soreness. Her eyes felt warm and heavy, like marbles rolling sluggishly through honey. She cursed between breaths.
“Damn it,” she moaned, slowly shoving herself upright. The sheets fell from her bruised body and gathered around her hips. They were tinted red with blood, a sight that made her spit out another curse. Had she torn her stitches?
She ran her fingers down her exposed scalp into her cornrows. The motion was soothing. She repeated it, taking deep breaths, until the rattling in her lungs had quieted to a soft wheeze and the pain was nothing more than a dull ache. Her free hand felt underneath her shirt, tearing off the damp bandages to trace the stitches, which were definitely torn. She’d never been a heavy sleeper. Her restlessness must have ripped them.
“I’m alive,” she breathed. The statement was neutral.
Nyir distanced herself from the wound and thought back over the night before - mostly Evera and everything she had said. She wondered if Evera had arrested the kid anyway, but decided against it. She’d seemed opposed to the idea, and she wasn’t one to change her mind easily. The Northern kid was safe, for now. But would that last?
Her eyes trailed over to the side table. Yuu’mi had been from the North, near the tunnels, and he'd been outspoken about it. Nyir hadn’t cared much about what he’d been saying, but now things were different. If he wasn't speaking up anymore, then who would? Nyir would not let his voice be forgotten; usually, though, his beliefs were just an afterthought. She was too busy to do anything about them.
Shaking those thoughts away impatiently, she forced herself to her feet. Dizziness nearly dragged her back down as the blood rushed from her head. She managed to stay upright as she made her way to the kitchen, keeping a hold to the walls and furniture to support her as she went.
When she got there, Tasper was already sitting at her table with Daso at his side. They were gathered around the radio with mugs of tea, listening to static.
Daso spotted her first and rose to his feet. “Hi, General! Feeling better, darling?”
“Nope,” she replied with a tight smile. “Why’re you in my house?” She sank into the chair across from him. Tasper poured her a cup of tea absently, his eyes still on the radio.
Daso sat back down as well. “Evera sent me. She wanted your permission to employ your regiment to help control the crowd." He gestured quickly to the radio. "She’s about to announce a meeting.”
“Clearance granted,” she responded with a half shrug, lifting her mug to her lips.
Tasper finally glanced away from the transceiver. “Can I tag along, Daso? I’m curious.”
“Sure, kid,” he answered with a smile, “and we’ll swing by to pick up Sacia. No one should travel alone with all this chaos, not even a daring doll like her.”
At that, Tas lowered his head. Nyir could see him thinking. Sometimes, she wished he wasn't so easy to read. "Did you fight with Sacia again?"
“Not really,” he replied, a little too fast, “I just… brought up stuff I shouldn’t’ve. The real problem is the way she treated Mitsig.”
Nyir shrugged. “Sure.” She prepared herself to say more, but the static on the radio changed to a loud voice.
“Attention all Lower World residents: This is Leader Evera. There have been rumors about missing rations, and I must set them straight. Please make your way to the Platform near the stables by 0900 to receive more information. Please trust that you are safe, and the Board is doing everything it can to keep you that way. Again, a meeting at the Platform near the stables at 0900. Thank you.”
The message started over. Nyir shut the radio off and looked at the clock on the wall. The meeting wasn’t for another hour or so. She sighed and shook her head. “You two go on and get there before the crowd. It’ll be hell trying to get there at the same time as everyone.”
“Trying to get rid of us so soon?” Daso shot back with a grin, already standing and pushing the chair back underneath the table.
Tasper finished his tea in one gulp and scrambled to his feet. “Yeah, good idea. I’ll be ready in a moment.” He hurried into the back of the house, disappearing into his room.
“I think Eve’s in over her head,” Daso blurted out the moment Tasper was out of earshot, his smile fading.
Nyir didn’t reply for a long moment, inspecting the shining black liquid in her cup. Finally, she said, “Don’t wait ‘til Tasper’s gone to speak your mind. You’re a kid too.”
Daso’s grin flew back onto his face, but she could see in his eyes that he was hurt. He leaned against the wall, lips puckering. “I’m nearly eighteen, you know!” he joked, standing up on his tiptoes.
“What I meant,” she said, lowering her mug, “was that I won’t hold things back from you, him, or anyone unless I want. It’s never because of your age.”
He nodded. “I know. I know.” A wry smirk appeared on his youthful face. “By the way, Dara got a promotion, thanks to us.”
“How do you mean?”
“The sample we collected.” He smiled, linking his fingers behind his head. “She’s got a theory and she’s going to be running the experiments herself. Leader Simanta herself gave her fifth level clearance.”
She nodded her head, unsurprised. “She was always the better twin out of the two of you.”
“She's the smart one, I'm the pretty one,” he snickered. “Anyway, she feels like she’s close to a breakthrough. She wanted to let you know that.”
Nyir shrugged. "She always says she's close, Daso."
“No, this time’s… different.” A rare serious look spread over his countenance. “She thinks she has a way to really hurt them, maybe even kill them.”
Her hand tightened around her mug, but she purposefully kept her expression calm. Despite herself, her heart rate began to speed up. In a daze, she repeated, “Kill them?”
“Theoretically,” Daso clarified. His face relaxed back into his usual smile, and he laughed, “So, no need to go off on suicide missions anymore, yeah?”
Nyir nodded again, her hand relaxing as well. “Sounds promising. I’ll visit her lab as soon as I’m able.”
They didn’t speak anymore. Tasper returned to the front and he and Daso left, mumbling quick goodbyes. She watched them with a passive eye, her thoughts tumultuous. Her jaw clenched.
A way to kill dragons. She wished she could believe it.
~~~~
There you go! I think that'll make it easier for you to compare this piece and yours. Now, let me summarize some of the things I changed.
Sometimes you had a few sentences that sounded a bit out of place. For example, there was one that said, "Enough about her, she decided." That reminded me a bit of something somebody would say if they were at a polite gathering, not something that a person would consciously decide. In that same vein, there were a few parts that took away from the tension. After one serious bit of dialogue, you added, "She sipped her tea." I thought stuff like that was an unneeded buffer between two quotes.
There were also some situations in which you repeated words in paragraphs that could've been replaced. There was one time in which you used "against it" in two sentences in a row. Another time, you used the word "torn" about three times. Things like that can be fixed pretty easily, but it's still something you might want to watch out for.
Once or twice, you had several streams of dialogue in a row that were interrupted by actions that didn't necessarily have to be there. To make it more readable, I took a few of them out.
Many things I tried not to change at all, and what I did edit I attempted to keep close to the original version.
