Heaven Gilded Zarcroft Hybrid

Thirty Eight

Cynaline had been awake for three hours at this point, ordering us breakfast and helping us get our stuff together to head back to Zinoray's. Jamie typed on his laptop, still in his pajamas. Dorothy and I sat with him, playing Solitaire with him since we couldn't connect to the Zarcrotian internet.

I drank a can of kiwi juice (or whatever they called it). As I drank, the flavor disappeared. My tastebuds were numb. And just like the night before, pain knotted in my stomach. I hid the discomfort.

"I think I'm getting sick, guys," I hesitated.

"Is that why you weren't hungry before?" Dorothy asked.

"Yeah. Maybe my body's still getting used to the Exo air."

"You should be fine by now." Cynaline waited by the elevator. "They gave you medicine and ran a bunch of tests before you woke up in the hospital room. Hopefully it's not an allergic reaction to any of those."

I shrugged.

"You find your necklace yet?" Jamie asked me.

"Nope," I said. "It just evaporated into thin air."

The elevator dinged. A speaker beside it beeped, and a man's voice came out. "Food's here!"

"Alright!" Cynaline rubbed his hands together and opened the cabin.

Gané stood in the cabin with a suitcase. He was dressed in a thin, gray sweater, with neater hair than before. Cynaline grabbed the brown paper bag of hot food, but stepped back at the sight of a large suitcase in Gané's other hand.

"We're starting already?" he asked, unwrapping a breakfast sandwich.

"Yeah," Gané said. "I know this is sudden, but my father is leaving in two hours, so I don't have more time to wait around."

He laid his suitcase on the floor and pulled a tablet from within it, along with a stylus. Facing the screen towards us, he drew on a map of his father's room. It was the same map I saw him sketching up a few days ago.

"The idea is simple," he announced. "You will teleport into his closet, take the Incarnate, replace it with the decoys, and portal again to the train station nearby."

"You have coordinates for the closet?" Cynaline asked.

"It's an estimate. I was only able to gather them for his main bedroom."

"What if he sees us?" Dorothy raised her hand.

"He's at a diner right now. And there are no security cameras in the hotel rooms."

Cynaline grabbed the tablet and typed some numbers on his teleporter in the other hand. He tossed the teleporter to Dorothy.

"Ready to go?" he asked.

"By myself?"she mused. "Why me?"

"Well, I'm not going. I have wings."

She looked to Gané. "Can someone else go? I'm still a little tired."

"Sure!" he said. "I still have to explain the decoy situation, though."

He got on the floor and opened the suitcase fully. Sitting inside were two dazzling, ruby sabers. Liquid gemstone molded into a weapon. But it couldn't have been...

Dorothy, in a trance, knelt on the ground and grazed her finger over the blades.

"How did you make these?" she whispered.

"Rubies," Gané said. "I commissioned their forgery yesterday."

"Yesterday? How did they make them so fast? And out of gemstones?"

"They just printed them and sent them this morning."

"Sounds expensive," Jamie said. "Do they have any left over?"

"They're stones," Cynaline explained. "They're all over the place. There's probably some right here."

He sat on the bed and picked a glistening, ruby pebble from the sole of his shoe, among the regular gray dirt.

Dorothy's smile trembled from excitement. "Can I have it? Please?"

"Sure!" He dropped it into her outstretched hand. "I'll help you find more. Are you making a bracelet or something?"

She pressed her lips together. "I had other plans."

Gané suddenly set the sabers beside me on the bed, and handed me his tablet.

"Type these coordinates on your teleporter," he said. "And hold the sabers close to your body."

"You don't want to keep them in the suitcase?" I asked.

"It's too cumbersome. And I'm putting some clothes in there."

Jamie threw his arm around me. "I'm going, too. I wanna see what else this guy has in his closet."

"Great!" Gané looked at me and Jamie. "I'll text you the other coordinates for the station."

As Jamie handed me his teleporter, my blood ran cold. Like, frigid. A pressure rose in my throat, and the taste of sweet metal coated my tongue.

"You okay, man?" Jamie rubbed my back.

I jumped off the bed and ran over to the trash can.

Gross, gross!

A weight squeezed through my throat, choking me, until something dropped into the trash. Static fizzed in my mouth.

I panted, hunched over the bin.

And as I looked inside, I saw it: the egg necklace, covered in my saliva. It was in my stomach the whole time. My stomach.

I pinched it by the rope, quivering.

⚝⚝⚝

I ran the pendant under boiling hot soap and water for minutes on end, still heaving from relief. But now my stomach was empty. Nothing. My mouth watered in ravenous hunger. Even the hand soap looked tasty.

"So it was a weird glitch?" I repeated.

"Only explanation I can think of," Cynaline said, leaning beside me against the sink countertop.

"What if it happens again when we teleport to the penthouse? What if it ends up in my brain or something?"

"It was the Mall computer. We're not there anymore. It won't happen again."

As I dried the pendant off with a paper towel, it shocked my finger. A blanket of static sizzled all over the necklace. I dropped it in the sink.

"I thought this was made out of wood," I groaned, shaking my hand.

Cynaline rinsed it off again before feeling it in his palm. "It feels like prebanel, just like the guy said. Maybe the gold paint is conducting static. The rope, too. They're gold fibers."

"Gold? For five dollars?"

He looked confused. "Yeah."

"Gold and rubies. Do you have diamonds in the water, too?"

"You don't?"

"No one does!"

⚝⚝⚝

Once we left the bathroom, I stuffed the pendant in my luggage so I wouldn't loose it again.

"You found it after all," Jamie said. "I knew you had it in you."

"Ha ha." I stood up and took out the prepared teleporter. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah."

I looked around, and noticed Gané was gone.

"He went the station already," Jamie asked.

He cradled the decoy ruby sabers in his arms and held my hand. After the blue light engulfed us, our vision went dark and we teleported to the penthouse.