When Angel woke, he had no idea what time it was. The drab gray walls of the Reawakening hideout weren’t much to tell anything from. He wiped the weariness from his eyes and yawned.

Lilian sat in the tallest of the seven chairs before the console and was squinting at something on the screen. Faint clangs came from deeper within the hideout, and he couldn’t see the girls or Silver.

Blue twitched at his side, floating to keep by his side as he stood.

“It is time to follow the Key,” the artifact said. “Good. Old World Magic must be restored.”

“Can’t argue with you there, as dubious as you manage to make it sound,” Angel muttered. “Actually, I’ve still got a fair number of questions for you.”

“They can wait until we are moving,” Blue said. “The world is wretched without access to magic. It must be restored. Every passing second I spend in this wasteland fills me with distaste.”

“Can you even taste things?” Angel asked. “It’s not like you’ve got a tongue, so how can you feel distaste? Actually, you don’t strike me as an artificial intelligence at all. Are you a living creature?”

Blue crackled. It floated over to Angel’s back and pushed the flap open, depositing itself inside and shutting off. Angel glared at it, but he wasn’t about to get into an argument with the Star Fragment.

He walked over to Lilian, yawning again as he approached. She leaned back in the chair, waving the face in the monitor away and rubbing her eyes.

“Any luck? Tilly said you found something important,” Angel said.

Lilian wet her lips. “I think so.”

Her words were so faint that Angel could barely hear them. Frustration played across her face and her hands clenched.

“Once we get moving, I’ll see if I can do anything about your voice,” Angel said sympathetically. “I’m sorry I haven’t done it already. There’s just been so many things to take care of.”

“It’s fine. I’m not in any danger from it,” Lilian whispered. “But we might be from the information I found.”

“And what would that be?” Angel asked wearily.

“It’s about Heart and Soul. Mind had a link to the computer systems here, and he used to be able to tell where we were and if we were alive. He used it frequently when Shield, Reave, or I went out on missions and would keep the others updated. I managed to figure out how he was doing it. There was a separate console in his room that you should probably see.”

She stood up and led Angel over to the second door from the left in the room. It had been smashed open and hung ajar. The two slipped inside. Like Lilian’s room, it was rather sparsely decorated.

Aside from a bed in the corner, the only thing in the room was a metal desk built into the wall. A dull monitor hung before the desk, glowing faintly with white light. A metal box rested beside it.

Lilian pulled the box open and Angel peered inside. There were seven semicircular dents in a circle, connected with runes that traveled to the center of the box and presumably into it. Each of the dents had a tiny speck of color at its base. A crackle of purple lightning danced across Angel’s shoulder in warning.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Don’t touch that,” Blue warned from within his bag.

“They’re pieces of star fragments,” Angel realized. “Very tiny ones. He was doing some sort of sympathetic communication, then?”

“Sympathetic?” Lilian asked.

“It’s pretty advanced. It’s not actually its own type of magic or anything. It's the method telegraph use to transmit magical energy over long distances. It usually isn’t very strong, but it would be enough for some very basic information.”

“I see,” Lilian said. “So he was sending a signal through the parts he has here to get a response from the larger piece. That sounds really impressive.”

“It is,” Angel said. “Did Soul build this?”

“Yeah.” Lilian nodded. “At least, I presume so. I never knew this existed. Soul is the only one that knew anything about making Magitech among us, so it had to have been him.”

Angel nodded absentmindedly. He sat down at the desk and looked up at the monitor. A plain screen flickered, depicting seven orbs that matched the colors of the Star Fragment pieces within the box.

Five of them were lit up. There was a small map of the Barren beneath each orb, and five were marked on the map. A chill ran down Angel’s back as he realized just what the problem Lilian was talking about could be. In fact, there were multiple.

“The numbers don’t add up,” Angel muttered. “Soul, Heart, and Body are dead. She had the blue fragment, and that one isn’t lit. It is marked on the map right next to you, though. That means it recognizes when one of them die, even if a new owner claims the Star Fragment.”

“Exactly,” Lilian said in a grim whisper. “Reave, Mind, and Shield should be alive. But Heart and Soul should both be dead. Both Soul and Heart aren’t marked on the map, but they’re showing up as alive.”

“Is it possible that they’re out of signal?” Angel asked. “Soul was very much dead when I saw him. If this device needs a response from the Star Fragment to change its status, it’s possible that the last time it talked to Soul’s fragment was before he entered the catacomb where I trapped him. It may not have been able to penetrate that deep into the earth.”

“It’s possible,” Lilian admitted. “I honestly have no idea. I don’t know how this works, and Heart was lost in the middle of a war, so it’s possible that he was out of signal when he died as well.”

“That’s not the only issue, either,” Angel said, chewing his lower lip. “If Mind left this here, something tells me he has another one. This is too useful to just abandon, right?”

Lilian nodded. “Agreed. And that means they probably know exactly where we are, and they have for quite some time.”

“They’re just ignoring us,” Angel said, baring his teeth. “Reave didn’t strike me as the type to forgive and forget. He must think they’re so close to bringing Old World Magic back that we can’t interfere anymore, especially if he knows our location.”

Someone knocked on the door. They turned as Tilly walked through the doorway and leaned against the wall. “Sorry for interrupting, but I overheard you talking. Would the Reawakening bringing Old World Magic back be that bad? I know they’re killing people, but if they bring Old World Magic back, wouldn’t they stop?”

“If it was just a flip of a button, probably not,” Angel said. “But any event strong enough to return magic to the entire world is not going to be simple. A huge amount of energy will probably be needed to begin bringing Old World Magic back. Knowing the Reawakening, they’ll get it by killing a million people.”

“Ah,” Tilly said, her face darkening. “Yeah, that’s bad.”

“They haven’t found it yet,” Angel said, forcing himself to sound confident. “And the first thing we need to do is get rid of their way to track us. If Mind knows where we are, we won’t be able to sneak up on them. It must be how they knew we were coming back for Tilly and Alison.”

“They can only track me and Tilly,” Lilian said. “We could split off and trick them.”

“Tactically sound, but not safe,” Angel said, shaking his head. “What if Reave decides he wants to squish us? Or what if they really do bring back Old World Magic and he wants to get rid of the people that stood against him? You’d be slaughtered. No, we need to get rid of the tracking completely.”

“How can we do that?” Tilly asked. “We can get rid of the little pieces here, but anything Mind has is out of reach.”

“The same way they’re tracking us,” Angel replied, a grin tugging at his lips. “Sympathetic magic.”