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It was getting late in Mumbai. Kingo kept joking that it was Sprite’s “bedtime” so she wouldn’t be late for school. She missed being able to turn invisible, so instead she had to settle for stomping away to “her room”—the former home gym in Kingo’s huge mansion. It still smelled like trying too hard.
She slammed the door and felt like screaming but that would be such a teen cliche. So far, being human was a lot stupider than she had imagined.
Sprite was getting her things ready for school tomorrow, even though she had insisted she could pass some kind of equivalency test. But Kingo said it was for social skills more than learning. What she had learned was that her Hindi was outdated and many of the words she knew were considered archaic now. The other girls were confused by her.
She never quite fit. She was always too young and too old.
That was when she heard Karun shout. He called for Kingo and then used several words that were probably modern expletives.
Also, a gale force wind blew through the house and re-slammed Sprite’s door open.
She ran down the stairs to find Karun on the floor. He looked hurt, and instinctively she tried to mask them to whatever predator was about. But... she couldn’t do that anymore.
“What happened?” she asked, looking around for Kingo—he could still fight.
“He is gone, Miss,” Karun said, almost apologetically.
That is how she learned that Arishem had appeared and taken her family. Not just Kingo. She called Dane Whitman and got no answer but found mention of a woman disappearing in London on social media.
Ben did answer his phone. He didn’t seem to know who was calling and was disappointed when Sprite’s face appeared instead of Phastos’. She had probably given him hope that Phastos had been able to get mobile reception in outer space. If anyone could, it was Phastos. It was daylight when Ben was, and she could hear the boy Jack wailing in the background. “Arishem took Kingo too,” she explained. And felt bad because Ben looked like he’d be sick. “But he must have taken them for some purpose,” she tried to clarify. “I mean, if he wanted them dead... he could just...” she trailed off. Ben didn’t look comforted.
She had followed Arishem her whole life but knew nothing of him, really. Only that Arishem had created them, imbued then with Celestial energy. All of them. ... Except now Sprite wasn’t Arishem’s to control. She had no Celestial energy, no way for him to tell her from the billions of other humans, she supposed.
Ajax, Gilgamesh and Ikaris were dead. Thena, Makkari and Druig had left Earth. Now Sersei, Kingo and Phastos has been taken, probably to the World Forge, wherever that was. She didn’t know how to get there.
But she knew a little bit about family. “Tell Jack it will be okay,” she hears herself tell Ben. “We will be there as soon as we can.”
Karun knows how to get clearance to use the jet, she knows. And Kingo wouldn’t mind if they used it.
She should be with the others, she knows. If they are facing judgement she deserves it too. But she chose to be human. And the humans are hers now. They are the only family she has.