Some Thing Called Myself (Complete)

XLVIII: Something Warm

Ch. 48: Something Warm

She stood, but that wasn't enough to calm the argument.

"Mara?" Beh asked. He reached for her hand but stopped himself. "Are you okay?"

Her lips trembled, and she shook her head no. Mara was in the center of the last rows, and instead of going around the crowd, she cut through it, dodging or shoving anyone who stood in her way. She stopped under the shade of the tree and touched her bark, eyebrows furrowing.

"What is it?"

Mara looked up to find her squad around her—the whole squad, Mimi and Tai included. Behind them, the argument intensified when someone threw a glass bottle on the stage.

"There's something wrong." Mara leaned closer. The pungent smell was stronger here, the bark hot against her palm. She was midway in her path around the tree when her fingers found a hard edge. The tree seemed to shrink under her touch. "What the hell."

The muscles on Mara's shoulders tensed, and her stomach slid down a few inches. This was the place where the fissure was. Mara jumped over a tall root to look at the bark, and a gasp escaped her lips.

At her feet, there was an empty hole in the place where Uah's scale was once buried. On the tree trunk, instead of the fifteen-centimeter fissure Mara expected to see, she found a behemoth of a crack even taller than Godo.

***

"That's it; I've had enough, Elena." Jano slapped a hand on the table and got up to leave, but Commander Carlos gripped his arm and pulled him down again.

"We need to solve this, Januário," Commander Carlos murmured.

Elena scoffed. "What's so wrong about what I said? Someone took the damned scale that was keeping the Kerana tree alive, and she was the only one who had the opportunity to do that." She pointed at Mara. "Mariana and those mermaids spent almost one hour under our tree...unsupervised. Everything was in place until then—and I can say this for sure, 'cause I checked." She puffed up her chest. "As protocol dictates."

Once the other Sents started to notice the fissure and the blood-colored sap, Jano ordered the First Ring to set a perimeter around the tree and stop people from getting closer; at the same time, Elena ordered the remaining people to take whatever food and blankets they could carry to the cafeteria and remain there. They both agreed that the patio should be off-limits for now, so they decided to move the conversation to the main meeting room on the seventh floor.

There, the lack of a raging crowd made Elena much more vocal, and that hadn't been very good for Mara.

"And can't you all see that she's been behind every single major problem we've had in this HQ since she arrived?" Elena's white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair was so tight the metal bent under her fingers.

"I was tied up like everyone else," Mara said. She never felt close to Elena, but since the day Elena barred her squad's entry into the HQ and almost outed her as a Zombie, there was nothing but resentment and suspicion brewing between them. "And I didn't do anything. Not today, and not in the past three weeks. If you had problems in this HQ, Elena, the only person to blame here is you."

The room exploded in another loud argument, with the Senior Sents speaking one over the other. The First Ring was roughly divided into two very disproportional groups, Elena supporters and Jano supporters, with the first group much bigger than the second.

Commander Carlos raised a hand and silenced most of them. "How did you know the scale was missing, Mariana?"

"How did I...are you serious?" Mara let out a sigh and leaned back on her chair. She'd been answering questions for the past two hours. Mara was tired, hungry, and still covered in blood and sweat; her patience was at its limit. "Look, I just felt it, okay? I thought every Sentinel could do that." Mara swept the room with her eyes and scoffed. "I mean, you spent decades here; can't you feel our own fucking Kerana tree? Am I really the only one here who gives a fuck about her?"