Chap 147: Stubborn
Tee’s heartbeat finally slowed after she failed to find the source of the strange voice she’d heard. Leaving the bathroom, she decided to look for her friends, or even Kie. Her mind flashed back to their heated moment, and a quiet thrill rushed through her. Seeing him again would definitely get her mind off things.
In the common room, she found everyone except Saeda lounging on the couches, the air warm with the smell of something delicious. She slipped into the seat beside Kie, and he immediately sat up a little straighter, his smile softening just for her.
“Hey, sweet-tee,” he murmured, warmth lingering in every syllable.
“Hey.” Her gaze drifted to his plate, unable to help herself. “What is that?” she asked, eyes fixed on the colourful jumble of pasta and bright toppings.
Chewing, Kie nudged the plate closer. “Miko said it’s called Sunset Skillet Pasta.”
He lifted a forkful and brought it to her lips. She tasted it.
“Wow. That’s good stuff.”
Kie leaned back and smiled. “Yeah. There’s more in the kitchen. You’re not getting another bite from mine.”
Tee gasped, clutching her chest like he’d personally betrayed her ancestors.
Across from them, Zod kept flipping through channels with the intensity of someone on a sacred quest. Every station was broadcasting breaking news about the park incident. Tee’s heart dropped.
Saeda stopped feeling guilty about not thanking Elder Menrith. At least she had some clue about what was wrong with her broken aura-sensing. Her smile faded almost immediately.
She passed the familiar statues as she walked the long red carpet leading away from Elder Caledor’s office. Once outside the tall building, the bright-colored hair of a few Vergant workers stood out among the corners and trees of the compound.
Using those Vergants to test her aura-sensing would be a flawed experiment. She didn’t know whether they’d been drained of their excess Ether. And asking one of them to be her test subject didn’t sound like a great idea either. If her teammates were the source of the interference, she needed to be far away from them. But how was she supposed to do that?
The Lieutenant… Why would the Lieutenant teleport her alone away from Primus without the Commander’s order?
A cool wind blew her curly hair into her face, raising goosebumps along her arms. She’d been in that dull, warm office far too long. She hugged herself at an unfamiliar feeling and it wasn’t from the cold.
A revelation was coming. A big one. Her anxiety felt like it was reaching back at her from the future. She looked up at the specks of the distant purple sky behind the tall rooftops—orange on one side, darkness slowly swallowing the other.
Aura-sensing returned to the forefront of her mind. Brushing her hair behind her left ear, she started walking away from the building.
Vergants? She’d have better luck testing her theory with her teammates than with strangers much older than her. Apparently the chilly outdoors had knocked some sense into her.
Miko was nice, Zod was willing, Kie was reasonable, and Tee was crazy enough to try anything. Which one should she ask? With no clear answer, she set her mind on finding an elevator.
Around that time, Tee and Kie would’ve been done washing the dishes after dinner, Miko and Zod would be chilling by the pool, and she would be in her room meditating or drawing on her tablet. If not, she would’ve been on a grueling Harbinger hunt or some dangerous nighttime mission—like tracking a Xenosapian.
The realization that she had a lot to be thankful for, and should probably find something fun to do with her unexpected free time, put a little kick in her pace. She stepped under the shelter of a building, and just a foot away from the elevator the door opened for her. Without thinking, she entered the coordinates for her living complex.
Inside the confining metal walls, her stomach growl echoed and magnified. The door opened a minute later before her mind could wander too far, and she stepped out. Miko and Zod had already announced they weren’t cooking dinner, but whatever they were baking should be ready. Yes—food.
She headed to the kitchen, filled her plate, and joined her teammates in the common room. Zod and Miko shared one couch, Kie and Tee were settled on another, leaving Saeda a whole couch to herself.
Zod’s unwanted voice cut through the telegram emitter’s noise. “All the broadcasts are two-sided about a bomb or a tech malfunction.”
“Can we stop talking about that bloody park?” Tee asked.
Zod kept his eyes glued to the hologram and let her words go straight out the other ear.
The awkward silence that followed was Saeda’s cue. “Speaking of the Harbingers…” She looked at Tee across the center table. “Tee, did you see the Harbingers at our outing before everything turned doomsday?”
Tee spoke through the tiny space left in her stuffed mouth. “Wutt? – Harbingers?” She forced down the giant lump she was chewing, then answered clearly, “Nope.”
Saeda looked down into her plate. “Strange.”
The rest of the day passed quickly, and soon it was the next.
After warmup, Tee and her teammates stood in a straight line as the Commander paced in front of them, looking each of them up and down. Then he turned and walked off, and the cadets followed. They reached the room with the teleportation machines and prepared to head out for their specialized training. The green glow swirled in the center of the walkway on the machine as the Commander began speaking.
“Zod, I need you to master your blasts. You’ve sparked it from your eyes and your hands.” He sighed. “So far, you can only maintain long range while holding your breath.” Holding one hand out toward the glowing vortex now at full size, he said, “I need you to master that by the end of this week.”
Zod gulped. “Commander, master it? W-w-what does that look like? You want me to blast from all parts of my body on command? And what about my telekinesis?”
The Commander clasped both hands behind his back and looked down into her cadet’s hazel eyes. “I want no limit on what you can do. Blast from the air if you must.”
Zod let out a puff of air as if her soul had escaped. The Commander pointed at the vortex again, and Zod understood. He stepped through, and the Commander began entering new coordinates into the machine’s control panel.
“Having all five of you master the same abilities is futile. So, though you have also sparked your blasts, I want you to focus on those one-step teleportations.”
Miko realized the Commander was speaking to her, gulped, and stepped forward.
“Like your fellow cadets, I want no limit on what you intend to master. I once heard of a Vergant who became a master of speed through sorcery. They could vibrate their molecules to fade through solid objects. With your unique ability, teleporting yourself inside a wall may prove dire. Worst-case scenario…”
He paused, looking up from the control panel to stare at nothing in particular. “Never mind that.” He extended a hand toward the vortex, signaling her to move.
Miko gulped again, imagining her task would involve sprinting at walls. Fragnuts!
Zod and Miko were gone, but Saeda’s aura-sensing still wasn’t working. She stepped forward, making it clear she would go next. Wherever the Commander sent her, she hoped it would be far from Primus so she could test her aura-sensing hypothesis.
The Commander noticed her standing with her chin high, ready to teleport. “How is that ability coming along?” he asked, putting emphasis on ‘that ability.’
“I’m getting down to the bottom of it, Commander,” she blurted.
“You’ll be focusing on your energy orb. Perhaps it’s a prerequisite for that other ability. You never can tell.”
Aside from her aura-sensing and visions, she had sparked energy blasts, energy orbs, and energy waves from her sword. But she couldn’t care less about mastering those at the moment. Those were combat abilities, and older ones should take precedence. What she needed was her long-time aura-sensing to locate the fragment before the Harbingers gave them another beating. Then they could try their old strategy.
Saeda nodded and stepped into her new location. No humans were around to scan for energy signatures. The vortex vanished behind her, and she crouched to touch the ground. She gasped at the sudden vision of birds that had perched there moments ago.
Screw the energy orb.
She sat with her legs folded beneath her and slipped into deep meditation. Think wholly, lacking nothing therein… What about that moment was the answer?
Her ability hadn’t worked when Zod and Miko were gone. Now that she was far from Primus, she could finally consider being away from all her teammates. But how many of them did she need to be away from for it to work? During her Harbinger mission in that strange world, only Tee had been missing and her ability had worked. Strange.
The Commander let out a heavy sigh. Two cadets remained.
“Kie,” he said, “you can generate energy whips from your sword that can damage far-ranging targets. But I want you to be more precise with that attack. Then you can work on replicating the technique without the sword.”
He handed Kie a pair of summoning gloves, and Kie stepped into the vortex. He emerged surrounded by towering pillars of rock—perfect for target practice. He knew exactly what to do and summoned a sword.
When the green glow at the heart of the teleportation machine finally guttered out, the air seemed to contract, as if the room exhaled something cold.
“Tee, follow me,” the Commander ordered in a strong voice before he walked away. He couldn’t leave it to her intuition to follow with that thick head of hers.
A prickling unease crept along her spine. She trailed the Commander away from the platform, through the door, and into a long, barren hallway.
The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the whispers began.
They didn’t echo so much as crawl along the walls, slithering into her ears. Liar… heartless… monster… The voices warped and layered over one another, each word sharper than the last, as though someone were carving the accusations directly into her chest. She kept walking, but her breath shortened, her vision tightening around the Commander’s back.
Her pulse hammered, loud enough that it drowned out the whispers for a moment. She stopped abruptly.
“Where are you taking me?” Her voice came out thinner than she intended.
The Commander halted too. For a heartbeat, nothing moved. Then soundlessly a section of the wall beside him split open, metal sliding back to reveal a lit doorway.
“To my office,” he said, though something in his tone made the words feel like a warning rather than an answer.
He disappeared through the door and she decided to follow. Inside he was behind a wide desk, placing pictures down onto their faces. It was much chillier there, like someone was trying to preserve the dead. To one side of the room was a glass wall that showed down into the mission base. Cabinets and nothing important filled the room.
He cleared his throat, grabbing her focus to the empty chair before his desk. The second she took a seat, a curtain began to draw over the glass wall, sealing them away from preying eyes.
He clasped both hands before him on this desk and looked her dead in the eye. “What happened at the park?” he asked her.
Her heart sank. Of all the things to bring up, why that? The news reports hinted at a machine malfunction, so why was he asking her that question again?
“What happened…had nothing to do with me,” she said casually.
“Our scans and data team report that you were found at the center of the cataclysm, which means, you were the cause. Strong dark energy readings also came from your body.”
That was new information to Tee. She remembered the creepy faces of Jack, Tetra and herself before the intense pain came. Then that was it, before waking up in the infirmary and having her steamy moment with Kie.
The Commander noticed her eyes began to trail off and a smile stretching onto her lips. He snapped a finger, and she jolted back to the present.
“Uh? What?” Her eyes narrowed remembering where she was. “Look, I don’t know what happened at the park that caused that. And I’m sure it had nothing to do with me.”
The Commander leaned back from the table, pressing his back into his chair. He stared at her for a moment before speaking.
“When do you plan to reveal to your teammates that you are a hybrid? Do you think your condition is a joke? Do you think those deaths were a joke..?”
Tee was shocked. Was he seriously blaming her for that incident? And even if she did cause it, it wasn’t intentional. She never asked to be a hybrid.
“Over one hundred people died that day—”
“Excuse me?” me asked, interrupting him. “Like I said already, I had nothing to do with that incident. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The Commander looked away from her, took a deep inhale and then released it. “Do you ever plan on getting that Balance Seal or start wearing a crest?”
Silence. She knew the Balance Seal was not some fancy term for killing her. Vergants who were Xeno-victims used it. But at her stage and condition, it was really a fifty-fifty chance of working. If it didn’t work, not only would she die, but she would mutate into the MegaSapian. If that happened, the deaths at the park may become the least of anyone’s worries.
If she did cause that incident at the park, would it happen again? Would not getting the Balance Seal leave room for a recurrence?
She gasped in terror at the thought of her teammates connecting the incident at the park to her. What if they found out about her being a hybrid and being the cause of all those deaths? What would they think of her?
The Commander slowly watched as Tee’s brows furrowed into something of horror. Whatever she was thinking about was more important than answering his question.
Whatever fire Tee had ready to defend herself, died out. She sat in silence, until the sound of the door slid aside reached her ears.
“Meeting dismissed,” he told her.
“Wait, don’t I get special training?” she asked.
The Commander ignored her question to begin typing on a hologram keyboard.
Auch.
She left through the door marching down the corridors. When she was gone, he sighed and stood. Not long he stood above his electric eel tank. A pool filled with electric eels swarming around, and trees around bustling in the wind.
The Lieutenant walked over with a cup of tea and stood next to him. “How did it go?”
He only sighed.
“She reminds me of you, actually,” the Lieutenant said.
The Commander lowered his head. “You’re right. I am stubborn, aren’t I?”
Tee spent her time in her room during the time she should be training. Her complex was lonely with her teammates away. On her telegram emitter in her room, she kept watching news about the incident at the park. She kept telling herself it had nothing to do with her so she couldn’t care. She never asked to be a hybrid.
Later after the others finished training, the day went by as usual. But Tee was unlike herself, lost in deep thought. Her teammates connected it to the incident at the park, so they understood.
Kie suggested they go for a walk on the beach. Tee wasn’t sure about that as it was night. But she didn’t resist.
The sky was dark. Global curfew had begun, but the moon gleamed silver over the waves.
They walked in silence, just far enough apart that their arms wouldn’t touch.
Kie’s hands were tucked into his front jacket pockets. "There’s nothing like a nice, romantic stroll on the beach," he joked dryly.
The wind swept through his hair as he tilted his head back, eyes closed.
"Back at the MG, when I'd sneak out during curfew," he said. "Climb to the roof just to stare at the moon and clear my head. Somehow I never felt scared. It’s almost like I needed it. It always made me feel better.”
Tee could understand that. With all the death and everything, who wouldn't want to escape?
“It should feel creepy being out during global curfew,” she said. “The Commander’s missions trained us well.”
She caught him walking with his eyes closed and grinned. "Careful, Cooper. A monster might sneak up and snatch you."
He chuckled under his breath.
Tee hugged herself against the wind.
"You scared?" Kie teased.
"No," she answered quickly.
He gave a low, mocking laugh.
She thought about tackling him from behind just to prove she wasn’t scared. But it was too late, and her heart wasn’t in it.
So instead, she walked beside him… saying nothing.