The Arena - The Moon Trilogy - Book #2

Chapter twenty-five:

Someone was shaking her.

The thought broke into her mind and snapped her from the dream that had been filtering lazily through her sleeping mind.

"Clarity." They whispered over and over, the sound of her name creating yet more darts to crack the surface of her dozing.

She grunted and reluctantly opened her eyes. 77432 was standing over her.

"What do you want?" Clarity asked, the words coming out a bit snappier than she'd intended, but it wasn't her fault. She'd just been woken up, rather rudely, from a pretty deep sleep.

"I want to train you." 77432 said, sounding slightly grumpy as well, maybe even offended.

"Train me to do what?" Clarity asked slowly. She rubbed her eyes as she sat up. A huge yawn escaped her mouth.

"To teleport." 77432 replied, now obviously annoyed—not that it hadn't been clear before.

"You can train for that sort of thing?" Clarity, still groggy, asked. It seemed like the kind of thing that just came naturally.

"It's more of a lesson than real training, but yeah." 77432 stated, taking several paces backward until she was standing in the general middle area of the cell. Clarity noticed then that everyone else was asleep, like she had just been.

"First, I'll tell you how it works." 77432 stopped and turned to her. "Ready?"

"I guess so." Clarity replied, sliding off the bench and onto her feet, shaking off another yawn that rose threateningly in her throat.

"Okay. This may be confusing. I haven't actually- taught... anyone before..." she suddenly seemed awkward. Her bare feet shuffled through the dust.

"That's fine. I'll do my best to understand." Clarity offered an encouraging smile. It was almost comforting to see the sudden crack in the usual cold professionalism that usually hung about the woman's countenance like a fog.

"Okay." She took a deep breath. "Well, there's a science behind what we do, obviously. So understanding that is the first step to improvement..." she trailed off, the words sputtering out as thought her train of thought had hit a brick wall. "Well... hmm... think of it like a train. We're hitching a ride on a train from one point to the next. It's the ability to jump onto the train and tell it where we want to go that allows us to teleport."

Although clarity didn't fully understand, she nodded.

"But instead of trains, it's particles in the air. Molecules and atoms, you know?" she paused again, and Clarity could see the gears turning behind her eyes.

She was dying to ask a million questions, but she knew that they could wait until after the older girl said what she needed to say.

"We have the ability to bend fast-moving particles to our will. You're familiar with the speed of sound? The speed of light? Well, we can go that fast if we want to by hitching a ride on the tiny building blocks that make up light and sound and even smell. And as you should know, all particles, even light particles, take time to get places. So the farther away your target destination is, the longer you will take to get there. You follow?"

Clarity nodded again. It was a bit clearer now what the lesson was trying to convey.

"Good. When we were fighting, I noticed it took you a second to teleport—or at least to get from one place to another. It was a sort of limbo area where you were neither here nor there. The time in between leaving and arriving can be potentially fatal if you aren't being careful. You're breaking yourself up into small enough pieces to be able to successfully catch a ride on the molecule trains, so if you aren't able to concentrate hard enough to reassemble yourself, you could be floating around with atoms for the rest of your life.