The Light in His Darkness

Finally, a Plan

Tam was still worried about Glimmer the next day when they walked into the battle training portion of Foxfire. She had let him put a bandage on her eye, in an attempt to stop it from getting an infection, but he was still concerned over it anyway. Although he hadn't been able to tell at first, instead thinking it was a scar, when he genuinely opened his eyes, he could see that it was a rather nasty cut, and it wasn't exactly like she was taking the correct measures to heal.

"Do we really want to try this?" Sophie asked, snapping Tam out of his thoughts and transporting him right back to the class.

He couldn't blame her for being skeptical of their not-so-plan thing, but he shrugged. "It's not like we have all that much to lose at this point."

"True enough," she said. "Let's try it."

So the planning started. They already had a rough idea of what they wanted to do, thanks to Stina.

"No, there's a problem," Stina said. "How are we going to justify having a whole bunch of people there if we want to make an exchange or something? And how would that fit into a party about them finally being out of our lives?"

That caused everyone quite a bit of contemplating.

"Well, I think," Glimmer said slowly, "we could first tell them that we know it's not over, but we want the world to have a bit of reprieve first before throwing them into a whole other mess. Which solves the second question."

Another long few minutes of silence. "We'll come up with something," Dex eventually said. "Let's just try to plan it out from there, and maybe it'll make sense later."

It was the best they had. "Okay, so . . . who are we planning on telling them we'll be hand them over, and why would they believe we'd set it up to give them those people?"

"Glimmer and I, obviously," Tam said. "But Stina mentioned Linh last time. Why?" He'd immediately put on the defense when he'd heard Stina wanted to add his sister as part of the deal.

Stina smirked. "To give them extra incentive. Plus, Linh is crazy powerful, and having you two together would be easier for them to use against you. It's what would make sense. It'd intrigue them."

"It would definitely be appealing to them," Linh agreed.

"Wait," Tam realized. "If we tell them to meet at a place far away from this party, we can say that we don't want anyone to suspect why we're gone - they'd expect us to disappear. And that we're not doing this with the adults' permission - a party would be the most obvious way for us to sneak out without anyone noticing. That's what we say."

"So where do we want the party to be, and where do we want the meet-up to be?" Marella asked.

"I mean, no . . . ." Glimmer trailed off, thinking out loud.

"What?" Linh asked.

"If we were to have that meet-up at the place where their storehouse used to be, that would make them feel like they know it better than we do," Glimmer said. "It would make them comfortable. But we let everyone who's going to the party - we tell them, or a few of them, secretly, what we're going to do, and leave them with a way to get there, in order to come later and help you."

Tam noted that she'd said "you" and not "us". He didn't know why he noticed. He sighed.

And that was how their plan started to form - people spitballing ideas and taking off with them everywhere. Somehow, it seemed to work.

He almost couldn't believe it'd only taken them a few days to think about it . . . almost like it was too easy, but he wasn't willing to make it more complicated than it was worth.