It was finally done. It was finally over.
There was a sigh of relief, but also an air of confidence swirling around Gino.
The Espa Orb, for what it was worth, were now exchanged for the right amount of cores, scraps and credits. Well, not for the cores and scraps, but credits. A lot of credits.
258,000 credits. It was so much. Too much. But having more is never enough, and never a bad thing.
Granted, they weren't all for the orb itself. It was still a satisfying number no less.
All Gino could think about was what he could get with 258,000 worth of credits. How the Rebels would be set for life, the afterlife, the life beyond and all of that combined.
A quarter million credits was no joke, but then again, so was the Espa Orb.
Was it right?
There was no way in knowing what the Casaline could do with the Espa Orb, but Gino had done his fair share of research.
He knew that the bandits had not a single piece holding in their cell, and that a single orb to Arnbor would not really matter, until he chances upon another Ravager.
As it is with all decisions, Gino could feel it haunting him for quite some time. Like a bad strain on his neck that would ache whenever he tried to twist it, it would remind him.
The steps back up to the foundation of the Tower was another spiral staircase. After half an hour of climbing, Gino and Trinket eventually recognised the Prys sunlight that was cracking through the abandoned holes of the pillars, and so quickened their pace.
Gino crept up the final steps to the foundation while Trinket flew, less tired than his human compatriot. The giant doors as he noticed had been left open, probably for a new visitor, but then there was something else at the entrance that turned Gino’s eyes.
In conversation with Keylor Dargle were two young kids, both in tiny jackets that were too big for their little bodies. The girl was in a white coif, while the boy had nothing to hide away from the Prys heat.
Perhaps that was as it should be. The sunlight was a little too damning and a little too strong in the mornings, and the boy took notice. Whereas the girl, since they were Ravagers, no doubt, could have an ability to shelter herself from the sun.
For Gino, there were also a few unanswered questions he had.
Short and squat, but what are they doing here?
It’s not everyday - even if the occurrences were rare - where kids would roam the lands of Arcadium, of Prys no less, in their loose jackets and underneath the beating weather.
It’s not everyday that kids would even want to leave shelter, if they had one to begin with.
“What do you want?” Gino could hear Keylor’s loud husky voice as he approached them.
“Food, shelter and some clothes,” the boy in a black jacket answered. The sweat all over his face made for a weary appearance. “My friend here would like another request.”
“First of all, we’re done giving away food, shelter and clothes. And whatever request your friend would like to have is out of the question.”
Gino and Trinket walked up to Keylor, taking the attention that the kids had of Keylor to them.
“What’s the problem?” The scavenger asked.
“Whatever it is, it’s none of your business,” Keylor said brusquely. The guard turned to the kids, his hands tightening the grip on his spear-hook. A fear tactic that worked. “Now leave. And you too, Gino. And that bot.”
The doors of the Tower closed shut as Gino, Trinket and the two kids made their way down the steps of the foundation. The slung chunk box was clutched tighter to the Rebel’s chest.
As Gino and Trinket followed the boy and girl behind, he could sense an inevitability. He squinted his eyes at the kid with the white jacket, and how she was walking was unlike the boy’s.
Power, he said to himself. It was growing, stronger and stronger.
It wasn’t the power that sent him into realization that this was something more, it was the power that the kids had within them that made him come to a separate conclusion.
“Wait,” Gino called out to the kids. They spun around, their loose jackets flapping and their eyes zooming onto him.
He looked closely at the girl, but she was hiding her eyes from him. She was wearing a forlorn expression marked by a small scar resembling a cut of a razor that formed underneath her right-eye.
For some reason, Gino could tell that she was special.
“What do you want? Are you a Ravager?” The black jacket kid spoke, taking Gino’s look away from his friend. His face was still melting in the Prys sun, and that caused a distraction in the conversation.
“This is Arcadium. Everyone’s a Ravager,” Gino explained.
A sparkle broke in the kid’s eyes.
“You have powers?” The boy asked.
What does he want? Does he not know?
“We all have,” Gino replied. “Ravagers have powers. We’re all Ravagers, right?”
The boy looked at Trinket with a suspecting eye. “Even that?” He pointed with his short fingers.
“N-”
Gino lifted his hands at the hoverbot before it could continue and made a spinning gesture followed by an open hand. He turned to the kids, mouthing the words ‘cover your ears’.
Only the girl did as told, plugging her ears with her index fingers while the boy looked on, dazed and amused.
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Gino pinched his middle finger and his thumb, and his companion jumped in the air.
Trinket clicked its gears, sending a loud buzz in a small area for a split-second and promptly stopped.
***
“NO!” Merfyn screeched, tumbling to the red carpet of the Casaline vault as his ears streamed blood. It was minimal, but it wasn’t everyday that it happened.
The buzzing and the ringing that was drumming into his ears was permanent, even though the effect had been long gone.
It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but the droning on -- it had gotten far too painful and pathetic for him to endure.
Merfyn had only wanted to listen in on Gino’s conversation with the kids, something that Keylor had warned about under his breath, and so he focused on it. As such, he paid a price.
“MERFYN!” Arnbor thundered from the other room. The pain was amplifying all the sounds Merfyn was receiving, and so even the lightest clatter of pins and plates would immediately overwhelm the sounds in his ears.
He was getting restless and so he laid his head down and his eyes up at the ceiling, just letting himself drift away from the pain.
It was all he knew. And it would take some time to recover for sure.
Momentarily after Merfyn’s eyes dipped close, the Casaline boss entered the vault.
“Useless,” he whispered, watching his assistant’s flailing hands come to a stop as the last of the bleeding trickled out.
He shifted his eyes towards the spinning black axle on the ornate desk by one side of the vault, and then he remembered what he had told Merfyn to do.
Arnbor’s thumb sat on the red button located on the sharp side of the axle and it glowed crimson.
“I have a target for you,” he spoke into the axle. “And you will be paid handsomely. Once everything is done, of course.”
***
The ear-piercing buzz had stopped, but the boy in the black jacket who hadn’t caught onto Gino’s wide-mouth instructions suffered.
“What was that?!” He wasn’t sure if he was frustrated or angry, or disappointed, but he was sure that it was a mix of the three.
Gino reached into his separate chunk box, a smaller one, slung to his belt and produced two chipped ear buds for the boy.
“Wear them. I know it’s a little too late but hey, cure is better than prevention,” Gino threw the buds to the kid.
“I believe it is the opposite,” Trinket chimed.
“You believe anything, Trink.”
The four made their way down the last slopes of the steps while Gino brought them to a round corner, just before they made their way to the Lectro.
He was already making another decision for today, and as he figured, he wasn’t about to make a wrong one. Even if, he had considered, that selling the Espa Orb wasn’t on a list of mistakes.
“You wanted to say something,” Gino halted the group’s steps as they all turned to look at him.
The boy, still suffering from the pain inhabited by the buzzing, pointed to Trinket, who was the source of his pain. “Does he have powers?”
“Not he -- it. And no, it doesn’t have powers. It annoys you though.”
Trinket honked once more. That mental note that was conceived prior hadn’t been fully scorched into his mind, and so he made another note for that note specifically.
“I’m a microbot, or a hoverbot, or you can call me Trinket. I follow big doofuses around the block, well, only one doofus-” Trinket pointed an electric stick at Gino, “-him, and I can prove to be an unquantifiable ally.”
As the girl shifted her jacket around, a shimmer appeared from her robe and caught the wandering eye of Gino.
“Stop. The girl,” he approached her slowly. The girl, who saw Gino walk towards her climbed behind her friend in defense.
“What do you want with her?” The boy demanded an answer.
“I don’t suppose she is more than just your friend?” Gino watched the shimmer, but it was now covered heavily by the jacket.
There was stunned silence between Gino and the boy. Possibly for fear of knowledge. Possibly for fear of understanding.
Possibly for both.
“She is a friend. And only that,” the boy explained. “So what do you want?”
“The brooch on her robe. I see it. Show it to me.” Gino’s eyes widened, but the girl already had an impression that perhaps he wanted her for something else.
There was a stench of hunger in his voice, but it wasn’t the tone that scared her; it was the thing that the boy had warned of, and now she understood what he meant.
“And if she shows it to you, will you provide us food, shelter and clothes?” The boy asked.
Fair exchange, Gino thought, if the symbol on her robe was as powerful as he had noticed.
“Perhaps.”
The boy sighed. He understood that the man in front of him, a scavenger no doubt, could potentially hold the key to the safety of their futures, and so he had no choice.
He held the girl’s hand and whispered something into her ear. She nodded.
The girl stepped aside slowly, now standing away from her friend, and pulled her white jacket off to reveal her silver robe underneath.
And there, on her robe on her right-chest was a brooch with a symbol that Gino had seen earlier.
It wasn’t that the brooch was of anything familiar. It was because Gino understood how much the brooch actually meant.
Arnbor’s longsword. The Kielbergs. The rising phoenix.
Suddenly everything that was rotating in Gino’s mind came together attached to a loose string.
Was this girl the potential heir to the Kielbergs? A daughter? An adopted Ravager?
Impossible.
They had been dead for long - too long, so long - that any possibility for the Kielbergs, or any mention of them for that matter, would be thrown out of the window.
The brooch attached to the girl’s robe in brushed steel, and the glowing phoenix, and - Gino had let himself get carried away again.
If she was, indeed, a part of the Kielberg family, then what would he even do? He couldn’t reunite Arcadium anyway; it was the reason that the world had been torn asunder.
The Kielberg’s rule was no good to any Ravager.
For a second, he relished the idea of discussing with his team of Rebels, and see how they would come up with an answer to this predicament.
“So, how, scavenger?” The boy interrupted Gino’s thoughts.
“I can offer you food and shelter. Clothes, on the other hand, maybe not so much.” Gino stood back from the girl, who was still watching him closely. “What’s your name?” He asked. “I want to know. Before we embark on anything.”
The kids looked at each other.
“I’m Cyril. She’s Aurel,” the boy said.
“Right. That’s easy. Follow me.” Gino waved onwards as he walked past the girl. Trinket zoomed past the kids, and slid up beside his doofus pal.
“Are you sure about this?” It beeped with worry.
“You saw the brooch,” Gino whispered. “God knows what she’s capable of.”
“And if she is, indeed, who she is-”
“That’s why we’re bringing them back. I can’t make a decision on my own,” he interrupted the bot’s sentence.
Trinket flew to the front of him, the colours of its beam radiating in a multitude of colours.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What if she lands in the hands of a Casaline member? They were so close to being there.”
That conversation could have been totally different had I not stepped in, he figured.
Gino halted as the Lectro reflected the Prys sunlight back onto them.
“Trust me,” he whispered to Trinket. “I got this.”
Gino tossed the bartering goods in the passenger’s seat and climbed aboard the Lectro, and the kids followed suit. They took the backseat while Trinket floated above the chunk box, staring at the broken headphones that had been lying around.
“We need to get this fixed,” Trinket said.
“Sure,” Gino replied with a smile, a genuine smile.
With the sun beating down on the vehicle and the rocky ruins ahead of them, they left for the hideout of the Renegade Rebels.