TFS: Burnt Earth
CONNOR 51: HOPE

Connor

The treehouse isn’t big enough to hold us all in audience. I’m fine with that. My conscience can’t handle another death right now. Molly? Fuck, she’s displaying some signs of a conscience, and it definitely can’t handle a death so early in its infancy.

“We’ll build it bigger,” I propose.

“The fuck?”

“The treehouse,” I continue. “We’ll make it base camp.”

“Base camp for what?”

“Like, where we live,” I clarify.

“We live in Sheelin,” she reminds me.

“Molly, you know Sheyla will destroy Sheelin.” Swear to fuck, I can hear her heart grinding from over here.

“Sheelin’s an innocent bystander,” she rebuts.

“It’s the only way,” I offer sympathetically. “As you well know, sometimes they have to get sacrificed for the greater good.”

Oh. That’s what a level three grimace looks like. I was never really sure.

“Sheyla has to take on the Tribunal,” she admits. “Totally on board that train. It’s the only way she can escape slavery. What I don’t understand is why Sheelin has to suffer because of that. She’s always looked out for me, taking care of me when no one else was capable. She’s my best bitch. Leaving her was hard. I miss her every day. I know she misses me too, and I also know she understands why I can’t return to her. Not yet. Not while the Tribunal are still inside her.”

“You realize she’s the problem, right?” I redirect.

She glares daggers at me.

“Her very existence guarantees the prolonged threat of more Solathairs being born,” I reason. “She’s a breeder needing to be sterilized.”

Oh, there’s that level three grimace again. I’m not winning here.

“Sheyla might not even defeat them,” she contends.

“Do you honestly believe she won’t?” I volley.

She sighs. “No, I don’t believe that. They fucked around. Now they’re gonna find out.”

“You won’t get to say goodbye,” I acknowledge quietly.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she snipes.

Not feeling the blow would’ve been better for her, but she does feel it. The full force of it. It stings her heart like a million honeybees, all knowing they’re dying yet proceeding with their mission anyway. Same as Sheyla plans to. Her Plan A is to trade her life for her mom’s. Self-sacrifice final level. What exactly is Plan B? What if they give no fucks? What if she can’t save her mom anyway?

Unsurprisingly, Sheyla manages a successful inversion for Ryan, adding another talent to her ever-expanding wheelhouse. She can extract a Solathair’s elemental energy, creating a landing stone without anyone dying. Impressive. The cost? Not big or anything, just a portion of her humanity. By the end of it, she inverts Declan and Tally too, giving her three landing stones: water, air, and earth. This expands my hope well. With a Fire landing stone, she could get herself out of Sheelin. It’s an escape option that didn’t exist previously.

Her transition is coming. It’s no longer a matter of if. It’s graduated to when. She thinks we can’t see it happening. To be fair, she’s hiding it remarkably well, but the stress on her human body is obvious. She’s sleeping more than not. Even when she’s awake, she’s not totally on point. She’s dying a slow death. Watching that, and accepting it as her choice, is inarguably the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.

“Did you want to come with us?” Sheyla petitions later on in the week. “I have people to say goodbye to.”

“I hope you realize how lucky you are,” Molly grumbles miserably.

Goodbyes aren’t a luxury she’s familiar with. Not to Sheelin, nor to her old life.

“I do,” Sheyla asserts.

“You haven’t been made to lose anything,” she scolds her. “How could you?”

She gives a simple response that shuts Molly up. “Brody.”

Fuck, does that ever hit home, for me and Molly. Neither of us has really worked through processing the loss. We lost a teammate. A friend. What Sheyla lost? It was more. She’s been carrying around his departure stone this whole time. Calls it her Pocket Rocket. She even talks to it. I get her distress, especially considering she needs four departure stones to get to Sheelin. Brody’s her fourth. Molly’s asked me on multiple occasions if Solathairs have a berserk bus equivalent. I said no. She might be right. She frequently is.

Sad fact, we can’t even blame her behaviour on the loss of her humanity because this has been going on since Brody blew his fuse. I guess maybe he scrambled her wires during that blast. Or, maybe this is a bigger general issue due to someone as naïve as her being exposed to this dark life. It’s a side effect or her being thrust into the dirty ocean when her clean fish bowl exploded. Makes me curious how Olivia’s holding up. Did we fuck her up just as badly by killing her parents? I mean, we didn’t suck Oliver into the extractor in her presence, but she definitely could’ve seen Molly snapping her mom’s neck. Probably time for a check in.

“So, do you want to come?”

“No,” Molly declines. “I’ve got shit to do.”

“I’ve got some shit to do too,” I mutter.

Sheyla smiles and leaves us to our planting. The Amazon Coterie did the most amazing thing. They levelled up on the food chain prospects in a two-part process. For part one, they cleared out the trees enough the sun can shine through an opening to the garden. Light transfers into the plants, which converts into carbohydrates. They use the converted energy to fuel themselves, pulling it out of the plants. Step one is photosynthesis. Step two is distillation. I assumed Dreyna’s gift was a filter, as this is how it’s always been explained, but it’s more than that. She can control the temperature of her water energy. When she allows it to get hot enough, to boiling, it causes her essence to disperse as a vapour. This allows Sumair feeding without direct connection. It’s efficient, along with saving the lives of Sumairs, Solathairs, and humans alike.

They’re currently working on packaging options to contain the energy in capsules. If they’re successful, this’ll be a game changer for all sides. It’s the answer to an otherwise unsolvable problem of safe feeding. I’m really looking forward to being a part of this solution. What we’re planting here today are seeds of hope.

In the meantime, I have some restitution to make. Something that’s been eating at me for fifteen years. Time to finally lay my guilt to rest.

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