Season 1, Episode 6 - The Tree Plot XXIII - "Canta Per Me"

As Audrey and Lynn dragged away Rodolfo and Mackenzie from the burning building, they saw a sudden spark of Rddhi burst through the inferno. They heard a rumbling sound and then saw walls of solid ice poke through the smoke and fire.

“Hikari,” Rodolfo muttered before coughing up more blood.

“Where do we go?” Lynn asked Audrey. “A hospital?”

“No time,” Roldofo muttered. “It’s too late for me.”

Lynn shook her head, because people shouldn’t just die like that. She looked over at Audrey for support, but Audrey kept her teeth gritted and her eyes on the alleyway up ahead of them.

Audrey’s seen a dead body before, Lynn recalled. Does she know that this man is going to die, too?

Mackenzie groaned and grasped Lynn’s shoulder in order to pull herself to her feet. “I can walk,” she mumbled. Her first steps looked like awkward stumbles as she regained her strength; finally, she managed to shamble alongside them.

“This…way,” Rodolfo wheezed out, gesturing with his head toward an alleyway between two abandoned brick buildings. The girls did as instructed; Rodolfo stopped them when they reached an overgrown dumpster.

“Please…move it,” he requested. Looking a little confused, both Audrey and Lynn did that as well. They arrived on one side and pushed it; the dumpster groaned as rusty metal screeched against the gravel of the alleyway. With the dumpster out of the way, they found more gravel on the ground.

“Crush it,” Rodolfo instructed next. Lynn raised an eyebrow while Audrey got an idea. She grew a vine, wrapping the front end around an oak seed before growing it upwards into the air. She then sent a flash of Rddhi through the vine and into the seed; the trunk of an oak tree rapidly appeared, its weight slamming it back down to the earth, right down onto the patch of gravel Rodolfo pointed at it.

The trunk smashed through the gravel and into the earth. Audrey let go of the vine and trunk; the girls glanced down at where the patch of gravel once stood and discovered a hidden tunnel below the ground.

After nodding at her friends, Lynn leapt down into the darkness; she landed in knee-deep water that felt too cold and a little too grimy. Thanks to the sunlight (well, the sunlight that made it through the smog) pouring into the hole, Lynn realized that the tunnel was actually a sewer.

Lynn looked up. After wrapping vines tightly around him, Audrey lowered Rodolfo; Lynn received him and took the vines off of him. She gently set him down on the stone walkway following the course of water in the sewer; he felt weak in her arms.

“You’ll be fine,” Lynn encouraged. Rodolfo only gave her a pained smile.

Lynn heard a splash of water behind her; she glanced back and saw Mackenzie holding a vine as it lowered her into the sewer. Audrey then jumped down, completing their escape. Rodolfo touched the wall behind him; Rddhi traveled up a crack, mending it whole along the way, until it reached the hole and mended that as well, sealing it shut and sealing the girls below the ground. Without the sun, the girls found themselves in a pitch-black darkness.

With no other source of light, Mackenzie let Rddhi crackle up and down her body, providing small sparks of red flickers for the group. She took a seat next to Rodolfo and groaned; then she glanced over and realized all the strength had left him.

“We’ll get you to a hospital,” she encouraged, taking on her kindly Class Rep voice.

Lynn nodded vigorously; maybe it was just to convince herself. “You’ll be fine,” she repeated.

Rodolfo shook his head; his breath was erratic now. “I’ve lived long enough…to know when death is here.” He spoke softly. “All my life…I’ve been mending for the military and criminals. Thank you, girls, for making my last mend something that’s meaningful to you.”

Lynn gasped. “The Trowel! Hikari took it with her!” Her head swam with guilt and she rubbed her temples intensely.

Lynn needed to do something, anything; she wanted to be useful, she wanted to feel like she didn’t make yet another colossal mess-up in her long line of them. Upon seeing Mackenzie rub Roldofo’s head, Lynn scooped up some sewer water and wiped his face with it.

“...uh…thanks,” Rodolfo mumbled. Lynn realized sewer water wasn’t exactly the cleanest thing in the world, but she at least got the blood off his face. As for the blood leaking out of his chest, well…

Rodolfo reached down and, with trembling fingers, tore off strips of his jacket. He gestured to Audrey. “For your friend.”

Audrey understood and took the strips. Reluctantly, Lynn sat down on the other side of Rodolfo and allowed Audrey to tie the makeshift bandages around the wounds in her shoulder, forearm, and ribs. All the while, she rubbed her face with her good hand, wanting to be somewhere else, someone else.

When Audrey was all set, Roldofo reached over. Lynn’s eyes widened when his Rddhi flickered to life once more and the tear in the side of her suit mended itself good as new.

“There,” he said, his voice almost a whisper now. “My last mend…will be for the groundbreaking ceremony. For peace.”

Lynn wiped her eyes. “Without that Trowel, there won’t be a groundbreaking ceremony.” She hugged her knees. “I want to change the world and make everyone happy. But I can’t even go a single day without messing up.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Rodolfo encouraged. “Life is just…going from one screw-up…to the next. But sometimes you don’t mess up. You just have to…stick it out until it comes.”

Lynn slowly nodded. Rodolfo saw the look on her face and shifted a little.

“If you really want that Trowel back…you will find it at the Highmoon Tavern of the Eight-Heaven Archway.”

That name didn’t ring a bell for either Lynn or Mackenzie, but Audrey’s ears perked up. “The Chinese restaurant down in Palmer Beach?”

“The tavern…is on the first floor. There are three floors above it. You will find Hikari in the top floor. That is…the Sect of Steel’s headquarters.”

He looked over all three of them, their faces glowing a light red from Mackenzie’s Rddhi. “I will warn you…it will be dangerous. Both physically…and spiritually. In their quest to save the world…the Sect of Steel has set about to destroy it. Take care that the same does not happen to you.”

The three girls nodded. Rodolfo let a sigh escape from his lips, then slouched against the wall. “At least…today was fun. Good luck, you three.”

That’s the thing about dying. It’s a subtle moment - the eyes closing, the head drooping as life leaves it. But the feeling that goes along with it can’t be properly described. You get an inkling about it from the movies and the news - a sense of, he’s gone, just like that. One moment here, the next moment gone. The person you just talked to is no longer here.

That feeling hit Lynn at full force. Because if she didn’t play with the stupid Trowel that morning, this whole thing could’ve been averted.

Mackenzie and Lynn sat against the wall, their minds registering the visual onslaught of a person dying for the first time. The actual scene seemed peaceful; their minds felt wracked with storms. “Is this how it felt for you, Audrey?” Lynn asked, playing with her hands, since she needed to do something.

Audrey was the only one still standing. She held a seed in her hand; she gave it a light toss into the sewer water.

“Sorry,” Lynn said.

“It’s alright,” Audrey answered. Lynn felt relieved to hear strength coming back to Audrey’s voice. But still…

“Should we bury the body or something?” Lynn asked once more.

Audrey just shook her head. “No time.”

“No time?!” Mackenzie repeated. Her voice sounded close to breaking.

“The Sect of Steel is still in the area,” Audrey reasoned, looking up towards the mended hole. “I don’t think he’d seal us off down here with no exit, right? There must be a way out of here.”

Lynn held her knees tighter. “And then what?”

Audrey didn’t answer. Lynn supposed that maybe Audrey didn’t know what to answer. They both gazed over at Mackenzie.

“What?” Mackenzie questioned. “Why do I need to choose what we do next?”

“You’re our leader,” Lynn said.

Mackenzie sighed and her head slumped. “I’m not a leader. I’m just a Class Rep who got a man killed and her two friends nearly killed.”

Lynn knew Mackenzie well enough to suspect that the reasons she just gave weren’t the entirety of her reasons. After Lynn gave her an encouraging look, Mackenzie kept going.

“I talk all this talk about restoring America and New England’s glory and all that,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “But what’s so special about us? We kill each other off just like any other people do. And if we’re not special, if we’re just like anybody else…then what’s the point of all this?”

Neither Lynn nor Audrey had answers for her. Mackenzie started hugging her own knees now. “I’m tired of leading. I’m not fit for it, either. I just want to sit and do nothing for a while.”

“Chin up!” Lynn tried to encourage. To speak more closely with her, she leaned over the corpse - yes, that’s what was there, a corpse. And that was enough to send Lynn’s back against the wall. “We really need your help, Mackenzie,” she pleaded. “I need your help. I don’t know what to do here.”

Rddhi flared from Mackenzie. “You don’t need my help,” she corrected, an edge to her voice. “You just want me to tell you what to do. You know what? You broke that Trowel, Lynn, so you tell us what to do!”

Lynn looked away. The Rddhi flare died down as Mackenzie realized what she said. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Lynn ran a hand through her hair, her fingers twirling the blue streak between them. “You’re right. I want to be a leader. But I’m nothing more than a follower. I hesitate to make a decision since I’m convinced it’ll be the wrong one, since it usually is. I just want someone to tell me what to do.”

She looked up at Audrey.

Audrey slid her shoe across the stone walkway in thought. “I think…maybe we should let this one go. Just tell the Academy what happened.” Then she crouched and rubbed her face with her hands. “Ah, but I told Esther I’d be more responsible now. She’d understand…but I was trying to change.”

With Mackenzie out of the picture and Audrey just as indecisive, Lynn knew that she needed to be the tie-breaker here. She got them into this mess. She was going to get them out of it.

But how? That was the million dollar question. It’s one thing to say you’ll do something - it’s another thing to actually do it. And actually doing it - that’s where Lynn’s issues arrived.

She shook her head. No. This has to stop now. If I want to take a step forward, I can’t rely on others telling me how to take that step. I need to do it myself. I need to make a decision. Whether it’s right or not…I need to pick a road and follow it to the end, whatever comes my way. That’s what leadership is.

Lynn picked herself and stood confidently. “We’re going to storm that tavern,” she declared. Audrey and Mackenzie looked over at her in surprise; Lynn strode forward to the edge of the walkway and gazed down.

Illuminated by Mackenzie’s red flickers, Lynn saw her own reflection gazing back up at her. “Everybody’s trying to change, so I will, too. I’m not going to let Rodolfo die in vain. I’m not going to let the Sect of Steel get away with this. I’m not going to let Mackenzie show up to the groundbreaking ceremony without that Trowel, and I’m not going to let Audrey’s hard work at changing herself go to waste.”

She looked back at her friends, her brow furrowed in determination. “We’re going to defeat the Sect of Steel. I’m going to kill Hikari. And we’re going to take that Trowel back.”

Audrey and Mackenzie said nothing; all they could do is process that information and share glances with each other.

Lynn gazed back at her reflection in the water. “Audrey,” she said, “Could you make me a sharp stick?”

Audrey scratched her head at first, still confused about Lynn’s change of heart and mind. “Uh…sure, yeah.”

Red Rddhi flickered, and Audrey handed over a sharpened branch to Lynn.

Lynn saw her reflection hold out the blue streak of hair with one hand. With the other, her reflection placed the blue streak against the sharpened stick and cut.

Lynn held the blue streak of hair in her hand for a moment. In front of her, the sewer water traveled slowly. All was silent down here.

She crouched down and placed the blue streak into the pocket of Rodolfo’s jacket.

Lynn adjusted the collars of her suit, then looked down into the darkness of the sewer.

“Let’s go.”