Rising Shards

I immediately questioned the whole ‘learn from my mistakes about rushing into dangerous situations’ as I entered a barn filled with what looked like piles and piles of dead bodies. I latched onto Oka immediately. Upon closer inspection, they were all just animatronics of Kitty Kilander, all with a wide, forced smile.

“Why’d she make them so terrifying?” I asked. “Why’d she even make them?”

“The vacant, soulless eyes, the petrified zombie smile…” Marmalade said.

“Just like the real thing!” Oka said.

Caya scanned a singed spot on the ground that had some smoking sludge splattered around it.

“Give me a few minutes to trace this and we can be off,” Caya said.

“Excellent,” Mahina said.

“You’re pretty tough,” I said. “Stella would be really freaking out by now.”

“Nothing wrong with a little freaking out,” Mahina said. “When I was in high school, void business like this was a regular Tuesday. I want her home safe, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve lived through much worse than this. That said…I would like permission to give one of the teenagers a single strike, non-lethally and non-severely injuring of course, for taking my daughter.”

“I don’t…know if I should say yes or no to this.” Diast said.

“Permission granted.” Caya said.

Mahina laughed deeply. Diast winced, unsure if the two were joking or not.

“Dr. Diast,” Caya said. “While I’m getting the jump to the next void node ready, can you check who’s willing to come with and who needs to go back home?”

“On it.” Diast said.

Diast informed the other teachers outside of the plan, and started asking students who wanted to come with continuing the search, and who needed parent/guardian permission for another jump. Most people in our class had parents who knew the drill of the void and were fairly hands off about it, but some were new to Cani life or were just protective, so void trips after the Fang Moon Web incident had a lot more check ins about where everyone was.

Stella wasn’t new to Cani life, but she was immensely protective, so me going any further necessitated a call to her.

“Hi Stella,” I said. “No luck on Kalei yet, but we figured out where she went, I think.”

“Right…” Stella said. “It’s…a bit hectic over here with the ones I’m…well, I put a movie on, that seemed to calm them down a bit. It’s mostly Penteldtam that needs calming down, he’s really hyper about this skateboard and I do not want him near anything breakable. Anyways, I’m guessing you two are going somewhere else then?”

“Yeah…” I said.

“Same rules as before, right Evy?” Stella asked.

“Zeta’s doing great at it so far,” Dr. Diast said. “She almost rushed into something, but remembered what we talked about.”

“You don’t have to tell her the almost part!” I said. “I stopped myself!”

“In case you need another reminder Zeta,” Stella said, using her preemptive scolding voice. “I will be devastated if you do anything like you rushing twelve trillion void nodes away to try and solve something on your own.”

“Yeah, I know…” I said.

“Ah, dang,” Stella said. “Penteldtam’s eyeing the top of the shelves again, he found a ladder earlier…I better go.”

“We’ll keep you posted.” Diast said.

“We’re ready.” Caya said right as the call ended. Diast wasn’t a big flincher like me, but she still reacted like I did when Stella caught me getting a taste of a cake’s icing that she was bringing to her theater group. “Did you only have time to call Faleur’s guardian?”

“I, er,” Diast said, unprepared for a question like that. “You know, when…after the last incident with…the whole…I just wanna, you know, like make sure Stella’s comfy, or Ms. Faleur, I mean, that she’s not concerned about—"

Caya gave Dr. Diast a big smack on her back, smirking as she headed toward the others. “Good on ya.”

Diast froze again, eyes darting back and forth between me and Caya.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“I’m…tempted to call Stella back because I think Caya just figured out, or maybe she knew for a bit already about Stella and me and…well.” Diast smeared her face a bit. “We can talk about that later. Kalei first.”

Regrouping with the others, we were being split into groups of who would be moving forward and who would head back home. Aira would have to go back, as would a still sleeping Laenie, but Aira told Caya she could be on hand with any information she could give about what Ovie and 09 were up to. Some of the others were a bit banged up and would need to go home. Kai Matora winced as her right knee was being looked at by Ms. Letoh.

“What’s happening with Kai?” I asked.

“She kicked one of the drones’ heads off,” Lillia said. “Then her landing was a bit off.”

“I can go, it’s fine!” Kai said.

“Dude, don’t be an idiot.” Ko said. “You don’t want to explode your knee muscles before the chasers season even starts.”

Kai sighed. “Fine.” She held her fist up. “Don’t do anything stupid either.”

“I got Lillia here,” Ko said as she fist bumped her sister. “She won’t let me do anything stupid.”

“I was just trying to have a sisterly moment and you turned it into a flirt,” Kai said.

“Gotta stay on brand here, right?” Ko grinned.

“Yeah, yeah…” Kai said.

As the head back home group got ready to…head back home, Marmalade scratched her head. “I didn’t contribute anything, so I should maybe go back…” She said.

“C’mon Marms,” Iris said. “You didn’t contribute anything yet. So.”

“You wanna head home before you even contribute something, dude?” Maia asked. “Actually, that sounds like a smart idea really, I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bail on this.”

“Uh uh, MaiMai.” Iris said, grabbing Maia’s elbow and shaking her a bit. “We just fought some stupid robots! We can contribute more better things than that! Contribution!”

“OK, stop saying contribute, you’re giving me a headache.” Maia said.

“I…guess I’ll come with, then.” Marmalade said.

Oka looked a bit antsy to get going.

“Sorry, I’m just really tired of being surrounded by all this Kitty crap.” Oka said. “And I don’t want to waste a bunch of time while Kalei’s stuck somewhere.”

“Agreed on both,” I said. “Did you need to call Berin for permission to keep going?”

“Uh huh,” Oka said. “He was pretty cool about it, I’m surprised. Granted, he’s got another frantic legal day or whatever so I’m probably not high on his worry list. I mean, he cares obviously, but he knows the drill around here. I hope that didn't sound like I was being rude to Stella, because her protectiveness is good too!”

"You're fine, don't worry," I said.

When the group of students and teachers safely jumped back home, the rest of us went into the creepy Kitty animatronic storage facility, where Caya prepared a void pedestal. Caya, Diast, and Mahina would be leading us.

“Kalei’s signal heads to a void node called Aranae,” Caya said, handing us each a piece of gate rosin. “Looks like they went to a desert area, so brace for that. I’ll configure your adaptive gear once we’re there.”

“Hey, so quick question,” Iris said, raising her hand. “Are we gonna like, kill them?”

“Kill who?” Caya asked.

“Like, the ones who took Kalei?” Iris said. “They took one of our own! We need like, revenge, right? Like...” She did a stabbing motion, then a strangling one. “Yeah?”

“No, Iris, we’re not going to murder anyone.” Caya said, visibly wondering if Iris should have gone home with the others.

“On that note,” Diast said. “If any of you run into any Wildfire Hearts kids that are behind this, like you know, not drone robots that are very sliceable, and a teacher isn’t around…”

“Or a Mahina.” Mahina added.

“Right, or a Mahina,” Diast said. “Like, contact us first, but also, just try to disarm the situation. A big stupid fight won’t help anyone.”

I was worried Diast was going to use Oka and I as an example, but there wasn’t enough time to give a bigger speech than that. We each scraped a piece of gate rosin on our fangs, continuing our journey leaping to some place faraway.