Soaring Over The World (Soaring Saga #2)

**Chapter Seventeen ~ More Maritime Madness (By Ari)**

      Oh man, was all I could think after I woke up from fainting after the Citadel fight. Oh MAN.

"C'mon, Ari! Wake up!" 

"He's fine, I told you!" 

"He doesn't look very fine!"

"He'll wake up any second now! I personally think we should focus on whatever chaos went on in the city!"

"We can't take care of other people if we ourselves can't be taken care of! Wasn't it you that said that?"

"Please don't use my logic against me!"

       I blinked my eyes open at the sound of my name and at the twins and Cirocco arguing. I tried to sit up to find myself in a hotel room, but failed and fell back into the mess of pillows that was keeping me up. I tried to shove them away from my face, but my ribs hurt when I tried to reach up, so I accepted my pillow-filled fate and just groaned.

"See? He's awake!"

"M-hm!" I tried to say through the pillows.

"Are you okay, bud?" Cirocco asked me, pulling the pillows away from my face. I tried to act like I totally wasn't super hurting right then and just smiled.

      She smiled back. God, her smile was nice. Ari had only recently realized that apparently humans did have canine teeth, but they weren't nearly as defined as Avians, which was weird. Well, it was better than having a beak or something else weirdly bird-y. But Cirocco's smile in perticular... it was playful and pretty and confident and could show so many different emotions.

      I looked down to check where the obnoxious pain was coming from to find a bandage wrapped around my side, and I was a tad concerned about the faint red stain on it. I think I made a face at it or something, because River explained,

"Damon cut your side there pretty badly when he was on top of you. That guy was pretty good with that scythe."

"Who now?" I clarified. I thought he'd said demon. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy they'd faced at the Citadel was a demon.

"Damon was the name of the guy from the Halifax Citadel," Audra explained from the corner of the room, "I heard him. Well, I heard his thoughts, anyway."

"A'ight, how many of you were just standing there while I was asleep and for how long? How do you know he wasn't talking to someone else?" I asked, then realized how dumb that sounded, since the guy wasn't even talking. Audra just shook her head.

"His name was Damon. I tried to search but I couldn't find a last name. His PardusFighters' code name, however, was BlackTopaz."

"That just sounds like a made up word." Raina asked.

"No. It's a kind of gemstone. What I found interesting, though, was two things," Audra explained, "One, he was in the same squadron as Roxy, AKA BlackSand, and they seemed pretty close in age. They both seemed around twenty. Since Lio had said that the colours in the code names mean something, I assume each squadron had a colour and each code name starts with that colour. So those two are in the Black squadron."

"Yeesh, he must be confusing for anyone in the Pink squadron, if that's a thing in the PardusFighters," I joked, refering to his strangely feminine outfit. Not that there was anything wrong with femininity, just that I wouldn't have ever thought I'd be almost killed by a sarcastic twenty year old guy dressed like that.

"Well, the second thing I was going to say," Audra continued, "is that the PardusFighters aren't even the organization's real name. He said so himself."