The Arena - The Moon Trilogy - Book #2

Chapter forty-five:

When Clarity was back in her room, she rummaged through her bag until she found her phone, then she plunked down on her bed. After so long without even touching the thing, it was a bit of a search to find the news app, but then she was getting on with her plan.

Because there weren't any filtered applied to what the app showed her, the biggest news showed itself first. Nothing interesting popped up as she scrolled down the feed, but then she stopped and almost burst out laughing when she saw one particular headline.

"Mutants falling from the sky; hundreds of mutants appear in Montana Major housing district."

She hadn't even thought about the aftermath of teleporting a bunch of escapee mutants into a housing district. Hopefully, everything had worked out all right.

However, she didn't feel like reading the actual article so she scrolled to the next one. There were a bunch of extremely boring articles about politics and agriculture, and she breezed through those quickly.

Then she switched the filter to the local news. According to the location services on her phone, she was in North Carolina. Pontoon, North Carolina, to be exact.

True to the traditions of local news, there were countless articles about local businesses, the must-have local political stories, and a few stray crime reports. Her finger paused above the screen when a bright orange picture loaded in. A building, consumed by hungry flames licking out into the air through the blackened windows. The time stamp on the headline said the article had been posted not three minutes before she'd come across it.

She clicked on the article, her pulse quickening. She looked more closely at the picture. A firetruck sprayed water on a blazing inferno, while a crowd of people pressed against the barriers that the police had set up in the middle of the street. The first blurb of the article held a piece of information that turned her blood to ice.

There are still people inside.

She blinked rapidly, a stupid, reckless, brilliant idea flashing into her head with the force of a bulldozer. She could help them... she could try to rescue those people.

Before she could let herself overthink it, she solidified her resolve. She would do what she could to save as many of the trapped people as she could. She had to.

Hoping it would work as intended, she concentrated on the picture.

In the blink of an eye, she was at the scene. She'd teleported into the crowd so that her sudden appearance wouldn't catch anyone's eye, but as soon as she was there, she was ducking under the barriers and rushing toward the man that looked like he was in charge.

She was glad that her idea had worked. She'd never actually tried teleporting to somewhere based just off of appearances. Did that mean she could teleport to a place on a postcard if she wanted to?

"Ma'am, you need to step back." A policewoman said urgently, coming up behind her in a poor attempt at getting her back behind the barriers. She brushed her off, hurrying faster toward the head fireman, who was shouting orders at the rest of the team.

"Ma'am!" the police officer shouted, running after her. But she'd already reached the head fireman. His team was frantically rushing to follow his orders, trying to dull the heat so that they could rescue the people trapped inside.

"Excuse me?" Clarity asked, shouting to make herself heard over the noise of the crackling flames. The man didn't hear, so she tugged at his rubbery jacket to get his attention.

He spun around.

"What are you doing here?" he snapped. He glared daggers at the police officer who came up behind Clarity, and the poor woman shrugged helplessly.