Aurra was not what Rayna had expected. But her expectations were not yet a concern among the group, who had other immediate worries.

  They had no idea what would happen to the child once she entered their world. Turn into a datastone—into the demon? Or release the creature that dwelled in her? Recall memories from a previous life that was mangled for the sake of science? It turned out, none of those things happened.

  Despite her bizarre origins, she was certainly a newsoul; Aurra was a strange world to her and none of her protectors knew where to begin on the explanations. But they had to get the chance first, as she passed out cold shortly after they arrived back in City O. Yet it was far from a sound sleep.

  Accompanied by Verim and Wendell, Shin had carried the child up to a large apartment suite provided by Dr. Flicker. Not long after Rayna had been tucked into one of the beds, she dipped into what Shin could only describe as a night terror—the worst she had ever seen.

  Rayna tossed and turned and at times screamed incoherently from her bed, but none of it seemed to be coming from the girl herself. It was like she wasn’t there at all, like something had taken control of her. Verim joked about the need for an exorcist a couple of time—something Shin didn’t find the least bit amusing—but quickly realized the severity of Rayna’s condition and resorted to feeding her some nectartart extract.

  He used one of the seeds of the engineered flower and carefully spent an hour nurturing its growth. Nectartart ranked high on the degree of mastery for plant users, and even Verim had difficulty keeping it healthy during its fragile accelerated growth stage. But once cultivated, the nectar would keep for a long while and was good for about a dozen drops. One droplet would give the user a feeling of euphoria; two would completely knock them out into a dreamless sleep. Based on what they had seen, it may have been the only thing strong enough to keep her behavior under control.

  They kept an eye on her in shifts through the night, and by early morning, she still hadn’t made a sound. After nearly nodding off, the allure of Wendell’s prepared breakfast was too much for Shin.

  Deciding that Rayna would be fine for the few minutes it would take her to eat, she changed into a new pair of clothes and headed out to the kitchen’s bar, where Scud was drinking from a saucer of cream and Wendell was serving a very delicious-looking omelet to Verim.

  “How is she?” Wendell asked Shin as she took a seat at the bar and was served her own fancy folded egg-cake.

  “No change. But thanks for helping me out, you two. I know you tried to hang onto those nectartarts, but we really had no other option.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Verim replied. “All part of the mission, right? So, Wendell, how’s Scud doing without his eyes?”

  “Better than I’d thought. I try to keep from laughing whenever he runs into something, though. I can’t insult him after what he did for me.”

  “What do you think, Shin? Is the demon coming out again?”

  “How could I be sure? We took a big risk bringing her to Aurra to begin with. It would’ve been a miracle if there wasn’t a single side effect.”

  “What are we going to do, then? Where are we going to take her?”

  “Wherever is safe for the time being. I’d like to help Milla in City I… but we really shouldn’t break the team up or take Rayna there. We might just want to stay low for now and wait for contact.”

  “I am going to City F today,” Wendell said. “You can come with me if you’d like, but I must report to the military base.”

  “We could still use your help,” Shin replied. “If one of us came with you to F and nothing comes up, could you stay with us a bit longer?”

  “I suppose I could consider it, yes.”

  “Whatever happens, we have to make sure the demon doesn’t come back,” Verim said. “For all we know, Rayna might transform into it herself. Even if she doesn’t, it will probably be much stronger, and we’ll attract the attention of the Guard so quickly we’d have no time to change our plans.”

  “Do you think something sets her off? A trigger?” Wendell asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Great anger or sadness, maybe? If we can just keep her calm and happy, I have a feeling that the demon will be suppressed.”

  “Definitely sounds better than letting her stay in a rage.”

  Shin sighed. “She’s a sweet, smart child. What could set her off?”

  “Do you want to know?”

  They turned around. Rayna had crept up on them without a sound. She climbed up onto a barstool and petted Scud passively.

  “It came for me again last night,” she murmured. “But the dreams were so much clearer. They were like the old dreams, too… the ones I almost forgot about. Before the demon came to life, I mean.”

  “Tell us, Rayna,” Shin said compassionately. “We’d like to help.”

  “Before it was alive, it saw a world of red and darkness. It flew around, always searching for a way out. It didn’t hurt me as much… I didn’t scare my parents as much back then…”

  “So… you can get worse than you were last night?” Verim asked.

  “Was I… really that bad?”

  “Y-yeah. You were wailing uncontrollably.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought that I might be getting better. But I felt the demon stir when that man… did whatever he did to my parents. And then again when he tried to take control of me, but the demon fought back. I think it’s coming back to life… and I really don’t want it to.”

  “Then we’re going to see that it doesn’t,” Shin replied. “If we can, we’ll even take it out of you and it’ll be gone forever.”

  “I don’t know if you can. I think it will always be part of me.”

  Wendell changed the subject slightly, “You knew of our world, and you wanted to see it right away. Why was that?”

  “I needed to know what… it showed me. Are you all… dead?”

  Shin barely suppressed a laugh before answering, “Our worlds lie side by side. Like two rooms separated by a thick wall. And there is a door between them that you walk through when you die. It’s an endless cycle.”

  “So, this isn’t heaven, or…”

  “No, not at all. It’s a whole other world that works very differently than Earth, and we’ve got our own share of bad and good. The difference here is that you take your Earth memories with you. Even from past lives.”

  “I see… Then we’re reborn over and over.”

  “Yes. Do you have any memories? Do you remember being here?”

  “No, but it feels… familiar? Like I was born here? But I’ve never seen it, not before the demon showed it to me.”

  “Were you just chasing after this feeling?” Verim said.

  “No. There’s… there’s more.”

  Wendell gave Rayna a bowl of Aurrian cereal and some milk, which she began eating like any other child her age would with their family. She spoke in between bites, hiding any emotion. Perhaps she had gotten used to the only method she knew of that kept the demon at bay.

  “I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. No one but my parents… ‘liked’ me. Some of my earliest memories are from the beach. We used to go a lot, and it made me feel better. It was calm, and big, and open.

  “Mom and Dad worried about me all the time. I didn’t sleep well. I scared them with my tantrums that I couldn’t control. So… they were nervous when they sent me into preschool. For a few weeks, everything was going well. I actually made a lot of friends, and I never had any problems.”

  “Were you able to control yourself there?” Shin asked.

  “Not forever. I began to scare the others. And they stopped talking to me. That only made me get worse, and then I was all alone at school… But there was someone who still liked me. No matter how bad I got, he…”

  Shin, noticing that Rayna was quickly becoming tearful, stopped her, “It’s okay. That’s enough for now. You can tell us more later.”

  “You’re just trying to keep from becoming too sad or something.”

  “Well, yes. But you know why that is. Rayna, could you do something for me?” Shin asked in effort to change the topic.

  “What?”

  She took out a smooth gray pebble from a pouch. “Hold this in your hand, close your eyes, and tell me what image comes into your head.”

  “Why? That doesn’t make any sense…”

  “Trust me. In Aurra, everyone has a power called alchemagi. And everyone has a different alignment. I want to find out what yours is.”

  “Huh? Like Harry Potter? What kind of, um… spells are there?”

  “Who? Uh, hold on. It’s actually easier if I don’t tell you yet. But once you hold the stone, we’ll know what you can do right away.”

  Rayna looked at the rock for a few moments before clasping it in her hands and closing her eyes tightly.

  The reaction came quickly, and was very unexpected.

  “It… it’s burning me…” Rayna murmured.

  “Burning you? It’s not supposed to do that…”

  Verim saw the powerful blue glow emanating from Rayna’s hands, and fearing for her safety, forced them open. The rock dropped to the countertop where it became white hot. Within seconds, it had vaporized into tiny specks of dust that quickly vanished, and all that was left of the rock was a charred mark on the marble counter.

  “Did… Did I do it wrong?” Rayna said with a tremble.

  “I’ve never seen something like that happen before,” Wendell said.

  “Me neither,” Verim replied. “Rayna? Did you see anything?”

  She shook her head. “No. Just darkness.”

  “That was an alchemagi rock,” Shin explained. “Children use it to learn of their alignment long before they can actually use the power. But… they’re not supposed to, well, ignite. I have no idea why that happened.”

  “It could be the demon’s power,” Wendell suggested.

  “Yes, could be…” And then Shin spoke to Verim’s mind, “We need to get her to Rivia as soon as we can. And I’m sure that we could find her parents in the same place.”

  Verim nodded in response.

  “Your world is strange,” Rayna said as she went back to her cereal as if nothing had happened. “Tell me more about it. Tell me everything.”

  “There’s so much to tell. I don’t know where to start.”

  “What about my parents? Are they here?”

  “They’re… Well, I’m sure they’re in something like a prison. But it’s a safe place, so I think they’re okay. We can take you to them soon.”

  “And this magic power you can use…”

  “We can manipulate nature. All of us can, but some not as well as others. I’m a lightning adept, so I can charge matter. Verim here is a plant adept, so he can quickly grow vegetation. Wendell is a…” Shin stopped.

  “Fire,” he replied. “But I don’t use much alchemagi.”

  “What other kinds are there?” Rayna continued.

  “Those twins you saw in your dreams? The boy, Garder, is a water-air, or as we call them now, a watairre—”

  “And not a very good one,” Verim interjected.

  “True, but that’s not to say he isn’t talented in swordsmanship. It lets you control moisture. His sister Milla is a vector—she can align matter and energize it. There’s also iron, earth, mind, and a rare alignment where you can control light called solar. We have friends of each alignment.”

  “And I’m supposed to be one of those?”

  “Everyone is, yes. Even people on Earth are adept at something, but they just wouldn’t know it. It’s a natural element of the human body.”

  “Shin, we really should get going. It will hopefully only take us no more than an hour, but I need to get to F immediately,” Wendell reminded.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Right. Verim, mind staying here and holding down the fort?”

  “No problem. I’ll tell Rayna more about Aurra while you’re gone.”

  “Yeah. Here, take the claws.” She handed them off to him. “If anything happens, get her out of here. I’m sure you can find a safe place.”

  “I know. And here—I have something for you.”

  He gave her a small blue seed bag with his initials on it. She went ahead and pocketed it without asking what was inside.

  “I know you’re pretty good with plants, so I developed these for you. They’re easy to use. They’ll make vines filled with a conducting sap.”

  “Ah, perfect.”

  “Yep. You probably won’t have to use them, but I figured the sooner I gave ‘em to you, the sooner they’d get a field test. Now be careful out there—you’re going to be on the enemy’s home turf, don’t forget.”

  “We will. Rayna, Verim will take care of you for a bit. We’ll be back shortly, and then I’m sure you can meet our friends before long.”

  “Okay…” she replied meekly.

  Using the early morning light and the apartment’s lamps, Shin waited for the demirriage to form and let Wendell pilot it, blind Scud clasping tightly to his shoulder.

  The ride was not smooth. The void demirriages traversed through stuck around much longer than the typical split second. Blurred Aurrian landscape flashed by, and the light carriage shook violently throughout.

  “What’s happening?” Wendell asked as he held onto the sides.

  “No idea! Are you sure you had a clear enough memory?”

  “Perfectly clear! Could it be a suppression device?”

  “Don’t think so. But it might be…”

  Before Shin could take a guess, the landscape finally came into full view, and the carriage’s behavior returned to normal. After a quick look around, Shin had a good idea of what had gone wrong.

  Stepping out onto burnt ground, Wendell, Scud, and Shin found themselves surrounded by an arid world and an atmosphere of smoke. The military academy was destroyed and in ruins. Broken war machines smoldered in between the massive gaps in the stone walls, where only rubble remained. Military armor was sprawled out everywhere, many riddled with crossbow bolts or covered in rifle ash. In the horizon was City F, just barely visible through the smog. The base’s own smaller sunsphere had toppled down from its tower and was dug into the ground, partially cracked. With the protective field now a half-mile lower, the tops of the academy’s watchtowers were slowly burning away into the haze.

  “God damn…” Wendell muttered. “It’s all gone…”

  “Rebels couldn’t have done this. Not a chance,” Shin surmised. “The level of destruction here…”

  The top half of one of the towers suddenly broke away, and the remnants fell to the ground near the field’s edge. Aside from the wind and the faint sounds of burning fire, the complex was frozen and soundless.

  “Five thousand students at the academy at any given time…” Wendell grumbled angrily. “One thousand adjunct Guardsmen, two thousand officers, hundreds of senior officers… All gone. Guardsmen, in training or otherwise, are still people, Shin. This is too far…”

  “You’re not honestly thinking rebels did this, right?”

  “No. But someone had to. I knew many people here. Friends.”

  “Surely some made it out in time.”

  “Does this have something to do with the demirriage’s trouble?”

  “Probably. Supposedly, if the landscape one remembers is deformed enough, a kind of memory rupture occurs. The demirriage is struggling to find a place that doesn’t really exist anymore. And looking around… This place has been leveled. It’s just gone.”

  Scud’s nose was busy scouring the smells of the air. Wendell didn’t know where to begin and could only wander around idly, staying close to Shin the entire time.

  “The battle here must’ve been going on for a week, at least. It doesn’t look like they were just hit by something hard and the base… turned into this within hours. Damn, if only I had been here.”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to do anything—”

  “But I’d have an answer. Look around, Shin. A few powerful alchemagists don’t destroy like this. The base was wiped out by an army.”

  “Wendell. F is close to the Sahara on the other side. In that battle, it seemed as if we were fighting recruits. Turned out that the Guard was giving us their weak to weed them out. They’ve got to be undergoing some kind of purge in the ranks. I think F’s military force was another victim.”

  “Why would they do that? Wipe out both independent recruits and their own men, instead of adopting them into whatever new regime they’re creating? It makes no sense!” he shouted.

  “It doesn’t from a traditional view. But if the Guard is trying to consolidate their armies for this war, they can focus their resources onto fewer men. My team encountered several instances where Guardsmen used very powerful spells against us that they shouldn’t have been capable of.”

  “So… they’re building a super army,” he muttered. “A smaller, easy to manage, corrupted army able to use the most powerful weaponry…”

  “Still… I doubt General Terront approved of this directly.”

  “Onasia’s Guard Commander? No. This reeks of the king’s ideals and efforts. Even the senate security council has retained some morality.”

  “They might not even have any idea what’s going on. Perhaps we should get Milla to visit with them. If they’d listen to anyone, it’d be her. We need to convince them that fighting rebels shouldn’t be their focus.”

  “Wouldn’t City A be under tight lockdown during this time?”

  “Milla was Queen Seriph. She can get us there. But by now, the senate might not even be functioning… I think we’re losing our chance to end all of this. Unless Garder and Jeryn have found Lontonkon, it’s only going to worse. In any other era, he’d be put on trial by now.”

  “Then perhaps there is some other power backing him.”

  “The only person who might be in that position—that we know of—is Drides. But to think that there would be someone more powerful than Aurra’s ruler… I don’t think it’s ever happened before. Not even the top pretorians are supposed to have level four alchemagi, and unless they did, the king would always retain the highest of abilities.”

  “There is nothing we can do here,” Wendell sighed. “We should return to the apartment and work on reuniting with your friends.”

  “Shouldn’t we look for survivors?”

  “I don’t think there are any. Look at this place. It would hardly be any different if the sun failed—speaking of which, it isn’t looking well.”

  “I have two lamps on me,” Shin assured.

  “There is no one alive. Trust me. A job this thorough; they’d make sure no one was left to tell someone what had happened.”

  “Then I guess we’ll go. I’m… sorry about all this. I suppose you don’t believe your advisor made it out. Wendell?”

  He had noticed something moving in the distance, and realized that it was very large and mechanical.

  “Wait, see that out there?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It’s active. Know what it is?”

  “It’s too big to be a tank. Whoever is in there, friend or enemy, may be our only source for information.”

  “Let’s check it out, then.”

  “Right. Careful, now. It likely does belong to the enemy.”

  Wendell brought out the Aurrian rifle from his storage device and held it with one hand as the group cautiously approached. When they were within a few hundred meters, the large bulking machine backed out of the rubble it had dug itself into, and Wendell and Shin got a clear look at it.

  It was an odd-looking thing, two stories tall with a top resting at an angle. Running on heavy treads as tall as Shin, the beast seemed built simply to support and use the device on top: giant construction equipment called a hammer. Except in this case, it was much larger than the normal size.

  “Is that a hammer on that thing?” Shin murmured as the two stopped in their tracks. “It’s big. But you don’t find those on mobile machines. They have to be brought in via train. I don’t see how the platform could even store the energy to build up enough pressure and use the tool to its maximum. It’s… really oversized.”

  “But look around, Shin. The walls surrounding the complex look like they could’ve been knocked down by an army of these things.”

  “Are these walls tough?”

  “Very. Hammers are used to flatten City blocks, right? They use a group of them, position them correctly, then calculate the exact amount of power each needs to use to destroy the building safely.”

  “But they weight like, what, ten tons?”

  “More or less…”

  “And if this one is bigger than normal to begin with…”

  Hammers were an ancient marvel of Aurrian technology. Created long before the industrial revolution swept Earth, the device was simple and effective. A shaft made of reinforced metal surrounded an enormously heavy pillar of synthesized uranium, and the hammer itself was built on a rail system powered directly by a sun globe, a power source equivalent to a small nuclear reactor that could give it its explosive force.

  But what made the device so powerful was in how it worked. After the needed pressure was calculated, the shaft would strike first, and then the uranium pillar inside it. For an instant, the two components impacted at the same time to release a contained, damaging, pinpointed shock wave. Almost no energy was wasted through the process, which meant only a few of the machines were needed to knock down an entire skyscraper.

  But this take on the instrument could likely level a tower all alone.

  “I don’t think we can take this thing on,” Shin murmured.

  “Then I’ll do it. We need to find out what happened here. And it could be important to the resistance, right?”

  “If you’re giving this a try no matter what I say, then I might as well help you. I could fry its systems if we can get something exposed.”

  “That’s the plan, then.”

  The mobile hammer revved into high gear and began treading up a steep hill of debris to depart the ravaged complex. Determined not to let it escape, Shin and Wendell headed around to its backside, where they thought they would be completely safe.

  Instead, two armored compartments slid open. They were quick to take cover behind a smoldering tank just as automatic weaponry pelted and blackened its side.

  Now with two new targets—and witnesses, the operators changed their plan from leaving the site to ensuring no one could return to report what they had seen. The carrier went into reverse, hit the ground near the tank, and then revved one side of its treads to spin around in seconds.

  Surprised by the carrier’s speed, Shin and Wendell fled the destroyed tank just as the pillar came down on it. The tank was flattened like a tin can, broken into pieces and buried into the earth. The carrier spun around a second time and crushed the ground without needing to recharge. The impact blasted out a shock wave and formed a crater—about as big as the one Palar created back at the Fragmented entrance.

  Wendell and Shin coughed as swirling dust filled their lungs, and followed the dim light until they were out of the fog of particles. They took cover again behind a slab of fallen concrete and got their bearings.

  “There’s no way it should be that fast…” Shin grumbled. “I can still outrun it, but we can’t waste time looking for a weak point.”

  “Scud, go find us one. Quick,” Wendell ordered the cat on his shoulder. He switched around the animal’s eyepatch and sent him off.

  “Did… did you just give Drides his spyglass back?”

  “If he pops in, we’ll get out of here right away,” he assured. “Scud might be our only chance. He should have no problem getting around the carrier’s weaponry.”

  Scud darted off, disappearing under the machine. The humans held their ground, with Wendell sharing an eye with his cat.

  “Damn. I don’t see much—no outer connections, I mean. If you want to fry it, Shin, you’ll have to pierce the armor first.”

  “I was afraid of that… I assume you have some explosives handy?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Blow one of the treads for me. I can maneuver around it as long as all it can do is spin.”

  “Got it. I’ll tell Scud to distract them for a moment.”

  Wendell concentrated, and Scud came running out from under the carrier, attracting the attention of the forward operator. The cat ran off in the opposite direction of the group, and the machine turned to follow—its operators likely believing that Scud was returning to his master.

  Wendell removed the Earthen C-4 he had in his bag and charged forward with rifle extended in hand. As soon as the two rear compartments opened up, he fired a couple shots at both. The shells hit the lower frame of each porthole, exploding into black ash and blinding the gunners.

  The carrier swiveled around to run over Wendell, but he reached his target first. He jammed into the wheels three blocks of C-4, backed off, and then detonated the explosives with a remote trigger.

  Several of the wheels were blasted off entirely, while others were bent out of shape. The tread unraveled and snapped in half, rendering the carrier nearly immobile. Wendell smiling at his work, Scud returned to his shoulder and switched his eye patch around himself with a face nudge.

  With one tread mangled, the carrier lost its quick spinning speed. Shin managed to get over to Wendell before it even completed a full rotation, where she began scattering Verim’s new seeds all around.

  “Careful, Shin. We need at least one survivor,” Wendell reminded.

  “No promises,” she replied.

  “Are you decent with plants?”

  “It’s nearly second nature to me.”

  She summoned a level three growing technique, and the vines burst out of their seeds explosively. They quickly crawled up the carrier’s metal sides, entangling it and reducing its speed even further.

  The hammer came down repeatedly as the operators tried to free themselves. Vines broke off, but more grew to replace them, and within a minute, both the carrier and the hammer were completely immobilized.

  With the vines slowly digging into the steel hull with crushing power Shin couldn’t possess on her own, she realized that her sword couldn’t pierce the hull. She instead raised three fingers again, and jabbed them into a nearby vine and felt the thick, juicy sap inside.

  She fired a burst of electricity directly into the vine, which spread throughout its tendrils. The plant exploded in places and expelled sticky sap, but the bulk of the electricity was injected directly into the carrier.

  Its systems fried, the generators inside audibly shut down, and the carrier quickly fell into silence. Smoke leaked out from the numerous cracks and punctures caused by the crushing, electrified vines.

  “Got it,” Shin sighed. “My thanks to you and Verim.”

  “Yes. Worked out nicely.”

  “Let’s look for an entrance.”

  They scoured the craft as it burned from the inside, starting underneath it and circling a few times. It wasn’t until the third pass did Shin notice the well-concealed ladder attached to the hull. She pulled it out, and the two climbed up to the top where the hatch was clearly visible.

  Shin used her sword to pry it open, and then waited until the smoke billowed out from inside. It was thick and heavy, indicating that the carrier interior had been damaged far worse than either had expected.

  “Think anyone lived?” Shin wondered.

  “Guess I’ll find out. You stay up here.”

  Wendell descended inside with Scud, his nose sifting through the smell of burnt metal in search of any surviving operators.

  The inside was surprisingly hollow, likely to save the weight for the thick protective hull. A dome was in the center of the control room; a clear indication of the sun globe that existed inside it, used to power the carrier. Despite the power a globe provided, Wendell knew that it wasn’t enough to push twenty tons around, if not more. The mystery would have to wait until later—if anyone was alive, they likely wouldn’t be for much longer.

  “Wendell! Hurry up, I think the sunsphere is failing! The field is shrinking!” Shin called from above.

  She prepped the demirriage for immediate departure. In the distance, the half-buried sunsphere was leaking a white mist, and the field around the ruins was succumbing to the pounding haze outside.

  Three nerve-racking minutes later, Wendell reappeared, his back aching as he lugged an unconscious operator in a charred jumpsuit.

  “This seems to be it. You really did a number on this thing, Shin.”

  “Is he going to live?”

  “I hope Verim has plants that can help him. And get him to talk.”

  “Right,” Shin said with a small smile. “I guess this means you’ll be sticking around with us for some time to come.”

  “I suppose,” Wendell huffed and nearly collapsed by the surviving operator. “I’m sure whatever we learn can only benefit rebel knowledge, even if we already have a clear idea of what happened and why.”

  “If anything, maybe we can learn where this thing came from.”

  “Yeah. Are we ready to go?”

  “Demirriage is weak, but ready. Should be a smooth trip this time.”

  With the sphere failing behind them, Shin and Wendell dragged their prisoner in with them and departed the razed battleground.

  “Back already?” Verim commented right after the demirriage formed in the middle of the spacious living area.

  Rayna was at his side, a book on Aurrian history and alchemagi in her hands. The travelers lowered the survivor onto the nearby couch as the demirriage dissipated, and Verim gave him a look over.

  “Hm. Guy doesn’t look too good. What’d you do to him?”

  “We need to question him,” Shin replied. “We’re going to take him to I with us. And if the rebels have… been compromised there, I suppose the only other safe spot we know of is Rivia’s villa.”

  “So. We got ourselves a captured Guardsman…”

  “He’s got burns and smoke inhalation—if not more.”

  “Mm, I’ll do what I can to fix him up.”

  “Please do,” Wendell urged him. “The Guard seems to have just decimated one of their own military compounds. We need to know why.”

  “Uh-huh,” Verim murmured, taking out a bag of medicinal seeds.

  “Educate Rayna at all?” Shin asked and fell into an armchair.

  “Just getting her past the basics. Kid’s like a sponge.”

  “We’ll move out once the prisoner’s condition is stable.”

  “To Tess’ place, right?”

  “And where’s that?” Wendell asked.

  “Also in City I. The rebels are trying to evacuate it so nothing bad happens when the Fragmented City warps in,” Shin replied.

  “Ah… I don’t quite understand.”

  “We mentioned the place when we met. We’ll fill you in.”

  “Guess we’re initiating you, Rayna and Scud into the team,” Verim added. “I’m not sure where to start, but you got some catching up to do.”

  “Why me?” Rayna asked. “I still don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “Even if we’re only protecting you, it still makes you one of us.”

  “But will I ever get to go home?”

  “I promise you will,” Shin replied. “It just may take some time.”

  Wendell and Rayna sat side by side and listened to Shin as she recounted the journey so far and all of its major players.

  Within hours, they’d be moving themselves to the far north, with their only hope being that the rebels and Milla’s group were safe.