Once they received a message from Leona, telling them that she had managed
to get on board The Olimpia all the way in Russian waters, Marie asked the
others to not say anything about what happened to them. The whole ordeal
with being locked up in a fishbowl for three days was a fluke, and it would
just cause needless concern. They were rescued, and all back safe and sound.
There was no need to bring it up again.
The rest of the team has returned now. Leona figured it was possible to
duplicate anything almost indefinitely as long as they didn’t completely
destroy the original object. He shouldn’t need to cut a hole in the center
of the lantern. If he just poked the base of it, a new one would be born,
and they would both retain their powers. As it turned out, this wasn’t one
hundred percent true. Possibly as some kind of inherent function of the
quantum duplication knife, each lantern stabbed loses its special ability to
illuminate system flaws. What it doesn’t lose, however, is its temporal
energy. It’s still stored in there, just unusable, like tearing out the
processor in a cell phone, but keeping the battery intact. Temporal energy
is amazing and insane, and capable of teleporting them to the other side of
the world, but it’s also just a really great power source. The teleporter
that Ramses designed only works on immortality water, and it’s not capable
of processing raw energy. So they had to take the long way around, but they
were able to do it in the air, and that was better than driving up into
Russia, and making their way over the land to Finland.
They walk into the condo, happy to be seeing each other again. Marie, Heath,
and Kivi are sitting at the kitchen counter. Leona starts to get a weird
feeling about it. They all look fine; too perfect, really. Sitting there
like this, they’re reminding her of the kids in a teen comedy about a rager
they threw before having to clean everything up in preparation for their
parents’ return. “What did you do?” she asks them.
“What are you talking about?” Marie asks.
“Something happened,” Leona presses. “What was it?”
“Everything’s fine, we’re glad you’re back,” Marie insists.
Kivi is about to explode. “We were captured by some black ops guys, and
taken to this glass prison cell in the middle of a warehouse, where they
left us for days—probably to die of starvation, or perhaps even
boredom—until Winona Honeycutt came in with, like, an entire army, and took
out all the bad guys, and rescued us from being electrocuted by a menacing
scowling man, who I guess just wanted to cut his losses, because I’m sure he
knew that Senator Honeycutt would want to have us back.”
Leona stares at Kivi for a minute, then turns her attention to Marie. “Why
are you keeping things from me?”
“I just wanted our family back. I was afraid that you would go back to the
Capital, and we would end up being separated again. I know I’m the cause of
the latest issue, with the Fountain of Youth. I just wanted to fix it. I
didn’t think it through.”
“Oh, and we met a new friend,” Kivi keeps going. “Her name is Andile, and
she—”
“Andile Mhlangu?” Leona interrupts.
“Yeah,” Heath confirms, “do you know her?”
Despite his low intelligence, and poor memory, Mateo actually recognizes and
remembers the name. “She was Leona’s college roommate...like, a dozen
timelines ago.”
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