For a brief moment, Savan saw two other cubes flying from the opposite direction of their team. That made them glad for a moment, knowing that Angie’s group was close by, maybe a few hours away. Still, all they wanted now was to just lay down for the time being. Savan shed all the tears they could on the way here, so all they were left with was a running nose and puffy eyes.
Vivar and Azin did the same as the clopy and sat still. Azin wanted to scan the area just in case of any other perils, but before she could ask Marc about it, Vivar stopped her with a concerned pat on her back and just let her know they should give him some space. While appearing unsure, the C.T.D agreed with the knight.
-“ It shocked him as well, the attack. His heartbeat is higher than usual. I’ll just watch over them, for now”, she related in a terse message.
The knight thought the boy was affected because he had just lost a comrade, but he never suspected that his feelings for the deceased went deeper than that. No one knew, except for Marc and his father, who wasn’t around to comfort him. So all he could do was suffer in loneliness, without someone understanding what he was actually going through. “ Can…can I even tell them that? Would Savan or Vivar even understand why I’m too ashamed to talk with them about it? Azin would…if she was like that one time”, thought the boy to himself.
-” That’s it!” proclaimed Marc loudly out of the sudden. “ Vivar! We can reverse the process, right? The mind control over the C.T.Ds, right?” His eyes were fixated on him, unblinking, with a heavy breath after he screamed all of his words- “ Has he lost it?” was the first thing that came to Vivar’s head, but he brushed it off, thinking that he probably was overwhelmed by his emotions.
-” Yes, that is my plan. I believe after the next two rounds, we will finally arrive at that point. But why do you ask, all of a sudden? Did he forget about the cameras”. With each word he got closer to Marc, almost whispering at the last point, trying to hide their conversation. When he got close enough to cover it, Vivar made a shush sign with his finger.
The wide-eyed boy was puzzled as to why the knight did that, but then pulled a coin-like object from his pocket.
-” Don’t worry, I deactivated all the cameras with this gift from my father, we aren’t followed for now. So what I wanted to ask…no, demand. I want Azin to be the first, I want her to be the first that remembers her name.”
Vivar was, once again, surprised by how quickly Marc changed right in front of him. Savan, who only listened from a distance, approached them after hearing parts of their conversation, especially the final one. They knew why he asked this, but wanted to make sure he was certain.
-“ Marc, are you sure about that? We don’t even know if this would work, or what it will do to the C.T.Ds. I don’t want to harm Azin.”
-” Soo, so then what, test it? On what, how? Do we even have time for that?”
Savan and Vivar shared concerned looks. While C.T.D was the first to say a word, he was quickly interrupted by a confident sounding Savan- “ Serviceman. The plan is to find him and test it on him first. Vivar and his ally wanted to keep Medusa around for that but…”, they then stop themself to recollect. Still, besides sorrow, they also let some pent-up rage finally pop out. They clenched their teeth, and fists, shook a bit, and for the first time they got the courage to say it all out:
-” Damn it all!”, screamed the clopy with wrath in their voice. “ I told you, Vivar, and your shitty “ally” that we should do something about them. I didn’t know what, though, so I kept quiet, always letting you do as you wanted, but I don’t wanna lose someone again.”
After a few seconds of neither of them responding, Savan continued- ” Ok you two? Not Azin, not Angie, no one!” They put their hands over their face and let out a deep, primal scream, which was louder than expected. After what felt like they released all the air in their lungs, the clopy proposed their next movement: “ So we re-group, finish the rounds, and we go after Serviceman. Do you agree Marc?”
The boy was left speechless by the unusual change in the clopy’s reaction but then noticed that it might have been just an outburst of the moment. Savan was trembling like a pipe under pressure, shivers going all over their body, so the boy agreed to play along for now.
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-“ Sure, I understand what you're saying”.
In another part of the Playground, a man was trenching through an area filled with rock pillars and some bushes, listening intently to the conversation between his son and Savan. While the chip he provided did work as promised, no cameras were active to spy on them, he “forgot” to mention about the listening device he implanted in the little gadget.
-“ My boy must be in a rebellious phase again. I so do hate when my children get those, but a bit of discipline will fix that. Now, on that ally of theirs…”, he pondered, slowly approaching a rock which split in two in front of him, letting him enter a hidden portion of a tunnel. At the end of it, he approached an oval building and demanded loudly- “ Let mister Robert and Samuel’s accounts in a group call. Tell them I found some evidence that confirms their suspicions.”
-----
Angie and Syna were dealing with their own filled hands, with both trying to console Chirani, and neither was the right person for the job. They were unable to say the right words or to understand if he needed some time alone. It started promising, telling him how they feel sorry for his loss but then devolved into stories told in a semi-serious, semi-clueless way as if they were reading a half-baked script.
Both of the girls gave up after a few minutes, almost admitting defeat before making one last attempt to comfort him.
-“ Listen, we are truly sorry for…huh...losing your sister. So we want to give you some space, but we also need to move on”, Syna then punched Angie for her “sensitive” way of telling him the last part -” What I wanted to ask was…could you let Finer carry you?”
The man stared back at them with dead, dried eyes, then used his palms to wipe his face even though he was sour as a dessert at this point. “ Do you think something is following us?”, he asked in return.
The girls were a bit stunned that he caught on, so they just nodded and said - “ Serviceman.”
-” Alright, then I’ll keep an eye out for him.”
They weren’t sure that it was wise to let him go up in the air, but his C.T.D spoke to them for the first time and let them know that - “ I’ll take care of him. Do not worry”. The two then lifted off the ground, following the group underneath them.
From time to time Chirani reported back, having spotted the giant C.T.D for quite some time now. He was behind them, but always kept the same distance and stopped in place whenever they did the same. Serviceman was definitely following them, but for what purpose it was still not clear.
-----
A few hours later, Syna contacted Chirani after spending hours trying to get the courage to give him a call.
-” Hey”, she said first, after spending a few seconds in silence.
-” Hey”, he responded, blandly.
Syna gulped down a knot in her throat to get some courage, and afterwards apologized as fast as she could- “ I’m sorry for my message from the first leaderboard. I never wanted to harm you or your sister, just-”, too which he interrupted her:
- “ Our benefactors, right? But it would be more correct to say our captors. It’s fine, I kinda understood that you didn’t abhor us or something, but even by eliminating us from the race you would have sentenced us to death.”
The girl didn’t know if it was part of the plan to keep him out of the loop, but she no longer cared that much about what Priya, Milla, or her parents wanted. She decided to tell him everything they knew so far, including her issue with deciding who was telling her the truth.
-” Oh, is that all?”, he responded to everything with a small giggle. Chirani then realized that he was carried around by what was once a human, and without thinking, apologized to Finer for getting him all dirty with his shoes. Then he stopped after scrapping the C.T.D, realizing that-
- “You don’t understand that, do you? That I brought dirt on you…”. He then spent some time not giving the girl another message, until he finally decided on what sounded right to him.
-” Syna…I think you’re wrong. A way out that would have been provided by the Brands doesn’t exist. If this is all you know for now, and if all is true, then I think that becoming the winner means jack.”
The girl put the WristCom and accepted that it was probably true by now. “ I kind of knew, to be honest”, she said after a while. “ I hoped that Milla was the exception to the rule, that her past positive actions were done from her desire to change…something. That my dream was something achievable. But she started off alone like I would have been. The only exception that is trying to help us also explodes at anything I say about this. I thought she just liked to mock, but maybe she was the real mirror… Ah, damn it.”
-” Rough, I guess. How do you feel?”
“ That’s why I called you first, this is supposed for me to make you feel better”, she said laughing through angry grunts.
-” Yeah, well, you’re bad at this. Or at least your bedside manners suck, but you did manage to make my mind take a break over the whole thing. Thank you, by the way”.
-” No problem”.
-----
An hour later, the two groups finally met, in the middle of a field of varied flowers and plants, most of which bloomed or were close to it.