My three counselors stood, speaking quietly next to the large pile of bears.
Bastille followed my gaze. ‘That was dangerous, what you did, Smedry.’
‘What? Multiplying the bears?’ I shrugged. ‘It could have gone the other direction, I suppose, and Aydee’s Talent could have made our stock vanish. But I figured that we only had a few bears left, and that wasn’t enough to do what we needed to. So what did we have to lose?’
‘I’m not worried about what we could have lost,’ Bastille said. ‘I’m worried about what we could have gained.’
‘Wait? Huh?’ (You say stuff like that a lot when you’re as dumb as I am.)
‘Shattering Glass, Smedry! What would have happened if Aydee had said we had fifty thousand bears? What if she’d said four or five million bears! We’d have been buried in them. You could have destroyed the city, smothering everyone inside of it.’
I cringed, an image popping into my head of purple teddy bears washing over the city. Of the Mokians being crushed beneath the weight of a sea of pleasant plushness. A tsunami of teddies doing the Librarians’ work for them. A blitzkrieg of bears, a torrent of toys, an . . . um . . . upheaval of ursines.
Or, in simpler terms, a shattering lot of bears.
‘Gak!’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ Bastille said. She wagged a finger at me. ‘Smedry Talents are dangerous, particularly in the young. I’d have thought that you – of all people – would realize this.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a bubble in the glass, Bastille,’ Kaz said, smacking me on the arm. ‘You did great, kid. That kind of bear firepower is just the kind of thing Tuki Tuki needed.’
‘It was risky,’ Bastille said, folding her arms.
‘Yeah, but I don’t think it was as dangerous as you say. Aydee’s got one of the most powerful Prime Talents around, but I doubt she’d have been able to make millions of bears. Likely, she couldn’t have destroyed the city – at best, she’d have just crushed those of us here in this field.’
‘Very comforting,’ Bastille said dryly.
‘Well, you know what my pop says. “Danger, risks, and lots of fun. The Smedry way!”’
Kaz, as I’ve mentioned, is a scholar of magical forces. He knew more about Talents than anyone else alive. In fact, that’s probably what he’d been doing here when he’d visited Tuki Tuki originally – studying at the university.
‘My lord,’ Mink – the soda-can counselor – said, approaching. ‘This boon of bears is quite timely, but how are we going to use it to destroy those robots? They’re protected by the Librarian army!’
‘And don’t forget the tunnels,’ Dink said.
‘And always wash behind your ears,’ Wink added.
‘I need three things from you,’ I said, thinking quickly. ‘Some backpacks that will hold several of those bears, six of your fastest warriors, and some really long stilts.’
The counselors looked at one another.
‘Go!’ I said, waving. ‘That dome is about to fall!’
The three scattered, scrambling to do as I asked.
Bastille suddenly turned eastward, toward the ocean. Toward Nalhalla. Her eyes opened. ‘Alcatraz, I think the knights are actually coming.’
‘What? You can see them?’ I looked eagerly.
‘I can’t see them,’ Bastille said. ‘I can feel them.’ She tapped the back of her neck, where the Fleshstone was set into her skin, hidden by her silvery hair. It connected her to the Crystin Mindstone, which then connected her to all of the other Knights of Crystallia.
I didn’t see why they were so keen on the thing. I mean, it was because of that very connection that the Knights had all fallen to Archedis’s tricks back in Nalhalla. He’d done something to the Mindstone, and it – connected to all of the Crystin – had knocked them out. Seemed like a liability to me.
Of course, that connection also had the ability to turn thirteen-year-old girls into superknight kung-fu killing machines. So it wasn’t all bad.
‘You can sense the other knights?’ I said frowning.
‘Only in the most general of terms,’ she said. ‘We . . . well, we don’t talk about it. If a lot of them feel the same thing at once, I will notice it. And if a lot of them start moving at once, I can feel it. A large number of knights just left Nalhalla.’