The Guardians - The Collapsing of the Wall (Book 3)
Chapter 10: Meeting at sunset

Sitting in front of the door, Lily feels a stab in her stomach. For an unknown reason, she feels only now the sign of the energy sisters lighting up, and she jumps to her feet.

“Brook? What the hell? They just left! Something is wrong!” she tells herself covered by despair.

She thinks of what’s worse, assuming that the others were attacked by surprise. She starts walking in the room, thinking of what she can do. The tension is too much for her now, and she feels her veins swelling on her forehead. She is locked in here and she is disturbed by the fact that she had let Isaac and Tamara’s words to talk her out of her ideas. Another thought crosses her mind, and that’s about Brook and why she hadn’t visited her before the left.

“I need to get out of here. What the hell was I thinking? I can’t leave them alone there! I have to fight! To be there with them! What am I doing here? Only cowards stay hidden! What’s good in Dean’s plan if the others I care about end up dead?”

She runs at the door and hits it stronger with her legs. But it’s too resistant, even for her powers. She gets angry and hits it even harder.

“Hey! It’s someone there?” she shouts hoping that a Guardian may hear her.

But they are outside because Tamara had left them the task to surround the Base and to guard it in case something attacked them.

“Oh, shit! This can’t be happening! Where was my mind? I listened to Tamara’s insidious words and Isaac’s emotional blackmail! Lily, you fool!”

She hits the door again, bending it a little this time. Her legs leave some marks in the metal, but it’s in vain. The door doesn’t want to open without the code from the outside. She feels like a prisoner in the place she once ruled, and she feels like she’s losing her mind.

When she opens her eyes, Brook feels as well the agitation inside Lily. The energy Lily sends her helps her get up, and she crawls looking for something to stop her bleeding. She desperately searches among the things on the ground, until she notices a few meters away from her something that looks like a healer. She leans on her arms and she finally reaches it, leaving a trace of blood behind her. She grabs it trembling and puts it on her chest. Soon, the wound stings her, hurts her, and then it closes, leaving a scar behind. She gets up dizzily, barely standing straight, hitting the walls and the shelves remained standing.

When she arrives in front of Leo, she falls on the floor lacked life. She starts crying, putting her warm arms around his body. She feels a huge anger, hatred and revenge lust she hadn’t felt before. She pulls him away from the blood pool, covering his body with a blanket with blood spots on it. She touches his face, but her hands are shaking too badly, so she covers it soon too, swallowing her tears.

“I swear to you I will kill that bastard! I will kill them all! I hate this fucking world! I hate this cruel and unfair life!” she shouts crying.

She gets up and tries to open the door, but Mark made sure to lock her in there.

“Damn it!” she yells from the top of her lungs. “Someone? Can anyone hear me? Is anyone left in here? Help!”

Her voice resounds on the corridor, and Lily’s the same, from two floors above. They can’t hear each other, and no one hears them, but they don’t give up. They both keep hitting the doors forcefully, shouting from the bottom of their lungs for help.

It’s like an echo, and their voices seem to meet at some point in the long and cold hallway, in the sunshine that’s coming inside on the wide windows. The despair from Lily’s voice and the pain from Brook’s gather in one shout, which is not powerful enough though to get out from the Base to the ears of the guards.

The heat takes over the bodies of the Guardians from the electric cars, but it doesn’t make them back off. It’s afternoon, and they had gone a long road without incidents. If you looked from above, there was a pretty good view of their route, for they were leaving behind dust and sand.

“That’s the Wall at the horizon”, says Tamara.

“We will be there by sunset. We won’t have time for a break, so take your energy from what the Magicians offer you. You need to be in good shape”, says Artemis.

“How do you think it will be when you will see him again?” Tamara surprises her.

“My fool son.”

“You’re right about this one.”

“Yes, but not a traitor. Even I believed it when I saw how sincere he was.”

Isaac makes a face when he hears them, a thing that Addison notices too and she lifts her eyebrows without controlling her reactions.

“Are you still mad at Dean?”

“What do you think? He killed my sister, and I am the only one who doesn’t believe in his so-called plan!”

Addison wants to say something, but she swallows her words at the last minute.

“No. don’t do that. Just say what you were going to say.”

“I…”

“Even if it will bother me, for I think I know what you want to tell me, I’d rather hear it from you.”

“Okay. You asked for it. Do you still have feelings for Lily?”

Isaac remains shocked a bit, even though he was expecting this kind of question, but only formulated in her specific shameless way.

“Of course I do. She’s my sister!” he avoids the answer.

“Don’t do this with me. I’m asking you if you are still in love with her.”

“I don’t think that you can be in love with two people at the same time.”

“Then the question is: are you in love with me or with her?”

“Stop talking nonsense. I’m in love with you, of course. I am over that madness with Lily, but I will never stop loving her.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that. She’s a person who makes you love her anyway. I’m the perfect example. A couple of months ago I couldn’t even walk on the road to Unity with her without punching each other in the face, and now I feel like I’ve known her for a lifetime.”

“She was my first love, and she will remain that. I don’t want it to be a problem.”

“It won’t. I understand you. I appreciate that you are sincere.”

Their discussion continues while Mark’s laughing under their noses. HE charges his batteries from the sun, and he sits back relaxed, leaning on the chair. He’s listening to the discussions around, and he feels like in a dream.

Gloria sits tight as well, a couple of cars behind, thinking about her decision to join them in the battle. She had thought not to come, but she didn’t want to seem a coward, so she had made the courage, even if she knew that she could have been killed instantly. After all, it was her fault these things had happened, and since her chip had been deactivated and she had lost the contact with the others, she expected they noticed her betrayal.

“Where’s Brook?” asks Tamara looking at the other cars.

“She’s probably with Leo somewhere in the back. Didn’t you notice that they like privacy?” laughs Artemis.

Brook’s lust for revenge seems to be huge because she breaks down the locker after an unstoppable fight of hours in a row with it.

“Oh, God!” she yells shocked when the pieces scatter on the ground and the door starts creaking.

She covers her mouth, and she starts running on the corridor, looking for some help. She thinks that the others may be outside, for Tamara wouldn’t have left the Base without soldiers, so she heads in a rush to the stairs. She’s confused, angry, sad, and she remembers about Lily only when she hears an echo from the superior floors. It’s something far away, but she recognizes her voice’s vibration, for they aren’t energy sisters in vain. She turns around and goes up the stairs to her. She hears her voice clearly now, and the hits too. She hadn’t given up either, only her door had been harder to break down.

Brook hits her door with her fists, making her wince and fall on the floor.

“Lily!”

“Brook?”

“Lily, I’m here!”

“Brook, what are you doing here? I felt something! I thought they attacked you!”

“God, Lily! a tragedy happened!” she yells crying.

“What is it?”

“The door won’t open! Shit!”

“The code, Brook! Enter the code!”

“I’m doing that, but it’s not the code that I remember!”

“Damn it! Tamara must have done something!” says Lily irritated.

“I’m coming back!” says Brook and runs to Tamara’s office.

But when she walks in there she remembers she had seen the communication tablet broken on the floor, in the room where she had been lying unconsciously for so long. She knows the code from the office’s door, so she enters and starts looking for Tamara’s tablet. Without any success though, because she had taken it away with her so she can communicate with the others.

She gets out grumbling, and she heads to the button’s room, where were the rest of the communications and electronics. It seems pretty dark in there, and when she enters the code she realizes that the door was already opened. It’s dark inside, and the buttons are not turned on. She approaches and smells something burned, and then she notices something like a green gelatin on the electric panel from the wall. All the communication methods were cut off, so Tamara couldn’t reach her or the other way around.

She puts the hands on her head, and she replaces out that not all the buttons were destroyed, but only the ones that she needed to prevent the others. Some of the panels responsible for the Base codes and some doors were still functional, and she suddenly knows that was Mark’s hand in there. She thinks of getting help from the Guardians that are downstairs, but there’s a chance that they are traitors too, so she prefers to get Lily out of there on her own.

She grabs a sword, a gun, and a pistol, and she carries them with her until she reaches the floor where Lily is captive.

“They cut off the communications. I can’t reach Tamara to ask her the code. Step away from the door because it will get messy! I will get you out of here and we will catch those bastards!”

Lily takes a step back when Brook hits the panel with the sword, and there are sparks thrown all over in the air. Lily hears that sound too, while she’s still processing what Brook had said earlier.

“What bastards? What are you talking about?”

Brook continues to hit the panel and, seeing that the door won’t open, she decides to use the gun. While she shoots at it, she screams loudly:

“That Mark wretch killed Leo! He tried to kill me too, but it seems that he couldn’t! He locked me in here and now we have to catch up with them and let them know about him!”

The panel explodes, the door opens slowly, and Lily sees Brook full of smut and ready to cry. She grabs her in her arms, and she can’t help it so she starts crying again.

“Brook, I can’t believe it! God, Leo…”

“I will kill them…” says Brook sticking her nails in Lily’s back.

“We will kill them. We will stop them. They will pay! I promise you!”

Lily catches her face with her palms, wiping her tears and black spots of dirt.

“Are you sure that you want to ruin Dean’s plan and get out of here?” asks Brook. “In any way, I’m going after them…”

“Brook, I can’t think of not coming with you! I’m struggling to get out of here for a couple of hours! They locked me in, they fooled me to stay, but now I think that Isaac’s right. What if Dean doesn’t have a plan and he just tried to save my life?”

“I don’t know, Lily. All I know is that I need this war to end once and for all. If Mark is a traitor, that means Leo discovered something he shouldn’t. That’s why he killed him.”

“God, Brook… I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry! I can’t believe what you’re telling me!”

“The tablet was broken on the floor, so he must have walked inside and seen some discussion. Maybe with Leonor…”

The two of them stare one in another’s eyes, and Lily’s turn yellow. They are shining again, like in the old times, the Mark burns her, and Brook sees that through the blouse she has on her. She feels what Lily feels, and that’s incertitude, despair, and a mad fear, which she has no idea where it had come from.

“What’s happening?” asks Brook.

“I have no idea”, answers Lily. “But now it’s gone. Come on, let’s get some guns and hit the road!”

The two of them rush to get in the gun’s room, from where they take some weapons, and the Brook stops suddenly in front of the room she had been held.

“What are you doing? We’re in a hurry! We need to warn them!”

“This is where it happened…” she whispers.

Lily covers her mouth and approaches the door.

“Go inside”, Brook tells her.

She follows Lily, who remains still in front of the view she sees. A body covered with a blanket, a pool of blood on the floor, traces of blood on the broken shelves, but also on the walls. The tablet lies broken on the floor, and when Lily goes further and she accidentally steps into another pool of blood she feels shivers.

“Oh, God”, she says more for herself.

She kneels near Leo’s body, and she’s afraid to look at Brook, who is standing like stone cold in the doorstep. She slowly uncovers his face, and she hears Brook groaning, and when she sees Leo’s face she truly realizes that what her friend had told her was true. She starts crying, she feels shivers down her spine, but Brook isn’t in there anymore. She gets out of the room, and she replaces Brook putting some cans of food in a backpack.

“Let’s go”, she says wiping her face.

Lily stares at her shocked, but she doesn’t want to say something stupid or useless so she remains silent. She slowly closes the door, she takes the battle suit on her arm and they both rush to the exit. When they step out, they start a long list of questions from the guards, and one of the keep staring at Lily as if they were seeing ghosts, for inside their minds that was the only explanation.

Brook struggles to explain them the situation in a brief way, and they remain even shocked than before, but they still offer them one of their vehicles so they can get where they want to. They watch them disappearing in the horizon, insecure that they had done the right thing, but Lily had been their leader after all, and if she wasn’t dead, they still considered her their true ruler.

The sun doesn’t shine when the Guardians arrive near the Wall’s Portal. The blue and purple colors steal their looks, and they feel like they are looking at a crystalline water, and not at a wall which keeps the monsters away from the worlds. There’s no time for them to wait though, so they continue their way along the huge Wall. It is so long, and it’s making a weird noise, like a frothing, like the pitch, but it also throws blue reflexes from time to time. Sometimes even sparks, other times electricity, and there are even brown spots here and there.

The Guardians are fascinated by them, but they also fear them, for there is the unknown, and if it would explode and collapse now, they would be the ones who will write history under its broken pieces. When the sun meets the line of the horizon, Tamara makes small eyes. Not because of the pale light that’s barely bothering her eyesight, but because she sees black spots far away, covering a part of the sun.

“What is it?” Artemis asks.

“Look. We’ve got company. Guardians, prepare for the battle!” she shouts jumping out from the car.

They form the rows in front of the vehicles, getting their guns ready in the light of the sun that was warming their tensed bodies. The ones from far were approaching fast, and they were more focused on them, fixing positions and strategies. The black from the Guardians led by Tamara was shining in the light of sunset, and the others were wearing brown costumes, a thing that they could see now clearly, for they were close to them, and some were jumping out of their cars running, screaming, howling, while others preferred to stall.

The strategic games started now, and the battle was about to start too in the pale light of the sunset, but also in the colored reflexes of the Wall’s Portal.