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018. A Voice Whispers

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Gardenias.

Mom used to press and frame those. I still remember their sweet scent whenever me and Mom wandered through Havenfield, picking the prettiest ones for the living room.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from stepping into a suspicious Neverseen lightbeam, but it probably wasn't a gardenia meadow and a blue glass tower. Actually, I'm pretty sure I was expecting Death, Blood, Lava, and Death.

This place is actually... kinda pretty? What the heck?

And then I notice two trees, small next to the oddly bare forest on the right.

One with a sepia trunk and wispy black leaves, with midnight blue berries, and another with silvery-black needles adorning a scratched magnolia trunk.

Rosaleen tenses beside me. "Wanderlings," she murmurs.

Wanderlings of... who? Who can they possibly care about so much that—

"Umber and Brant," Ruy says, from behind us. I jump a little and turn. "This is the Neverseen's Point of Recruitment, and... we honor a lot of Neverseen members here."

"These are all Wanderlings," Rosaleen says.

And then I realize she's right. The "forest" on the right is only bare because they're all Wanderlings. There must be around twenty fully grown trees.

"Why is there—Why is there so much dead—" I choke on the word dead.

"Why are there eighteen dead elves?" Rosaleen finishes for me, her voice quiet.

Alvar looks at Ruy, then says, "We'll tell you right after you get in, okay? It's a long story."

Rosaleen and I nod, and so they lead us inside the blue glass tower.

It has a camouflaged door which slides to the right, then closes the moment we're all inside. Even though it's cool, it feels like we're trapped inside.

There's a hallway that leads to a opaque glass barrier. Alvar cuts his palm and presses it to the glass. It disappears.

Blood detection, and some Phaser-inspired technology. Definitely by the Neverseen, normally we don't use blood for DNA.

We follow them inside to an empty hexagonal room, with a high ceiling and reflective black floors. Two figures stand in the center; Gisela and Vespera.

"What are we supposed to do with him, then? We should've just released him a long time ago—"

"He has his memory! We can't do anything." There's something in Vespera's voice, but her face and movements are still. It's... creepy. Everything else about her is blank.

"So what? We just keep him imprisoned? For how long? Until he rots away after we forget to feed him? Vespera, we need to—"

"Um—" They turn. Alvar offers an awkward wave. "Um, Alvar and I brought Dex and Rosaleen here. They're recruitments."

There's a silence. "Recruitments," Gisela repeats. "Ruy, Alvar, you're either blind or idiots."

"Isn't the Technopath with the Moonlark?" Vespera looks at us, her face void of expression.

"He was," Ruy says.

Vespera frowns, turning her cold gaze to Rosaleen. "Am I supposed to know who she is?"

"No, no, it's not like that. She convinced him to join us," Alvar says. "Like—they even stole the fake cache and figured out it was a fraud."

Gisela raises an eyebrow. She doesn't believe them. "Uh-huh. And how did she convince him, again? When was this? Why would she do this?"