Cyril’s eyes grow large. “Fitz Vacker?!” he yells. “Mom . . . she never talks about him. Both of her brothers are disgraces to the Vacker name.”
I lower my head. Is this how far we’ve come, that we have to beg for mercy from my broken father, Cyril’s uncle?
Jensi sighs. “We’re hoping Fitz has enough sanity left to keep the two of you safe. And if not him, Keefe.”
“Wow,” I say. “So we’re just running off to a random guy we don’t know?”
“Pretty much,” says Bex, smiling sadly. “There’s nothing else we can do.” She looks up out of a crystal wall, at the sun hanging low in the sky.
“It’s getting late,” Jensi says, the same look in his eyes as Bex. “You’d better get a head start if the Councillors find out.”
Bex sighs. “It would be too painful for you anyway to watch us be broken.”
Jensi pulls a leaping crystal from this shirt. “This leaping crystal goes to Baltimore, Maryland, a Forbidden City, where Fitz and Keefe’s last base was. We don’t know for sure if they’re still there.”
Bex walks to me. Tears shimmer in her eyes. “You look just like them, you know,” she says, taking my gloved hands in hers.
I close my eyes. Tears run down my cheeks. Bex has been like a mother to me, there’s no changing that fact. Until an hour ago she was my mother. But now…
I hug her for the last time. She will die, less painfully than she thought, but she’ll still be gone after this. “I wish I looked like you,” I choke out. “I wish you were my mom really. I wish I wasn’t different.”
She holds my face in her hands. “You are different. But you will save the world if your mother was that special. So go save the world.”
Jensi hugs me too, but I have no words left. It’s too painful to leave. I feel myself breaking, not so much from guilt, but from sadness.
“Go now,” Jensi says. “We don’t have much time before we have to leave to the Councillors.” He presses the leaping crystal into my hands. “Put it in the Void,” he instructs me. I nod and Cyril steps next to me. I hold the crystal up to the light.
The first thing I notice upon our arrival is the rank smell of the Forbidden City. Cyril and I begin to cough at the stench. I hold up the crystal and snap it into the Void.
“Hey,” Cyril says. “Let’s take off our capes. I’ve heard somewhere that we’ll look conspicuous here with our outfits.” I nod, so our capes flap to the ground.
I look around. We’re in an alley with several boxes scattered about, and beyond is a busy sidewalk and street. “What do we do now?” I ask. “They’re obviously not here.”
Cyril turns around, rummaging through the boxes. He holds up a metal contraption, by the look of it, human. “A gun,” he whispers. “A Technopath made this.”
“A what?” I ask.
“A human weapon.” When I look at him strangely, he shrugs. “I’ve done my research.” But as he tilts the gun about, his eyes widen, his Technopath abilities firing up. “Fascinating.”
“What is it?” I ask, leaning closer over his shoulder.
“It looks like… a sort of Pathfinder,” he says, mesmerized. “See this?” There’s an extent of metal on the gun that makes a clicking sound when he pulls it back. “This would normally activate the bullet to shoot. But instead…” He gestures to the hole inside of the gun. Inside is a crystal. A leaping crystal.
“Wow,” I breathe. “But where does it go?” I ask.
“We’re about to find out,” Cyril says, smirking. He points the gun towards us, pulls the trigger, and we are carried away by light.