I looked up and saw Helen standing by the door, giving me a wave. She was still wearing her tactical gear. A nurse nearby glared at her and started to give her a strict telling off.
I quickly hobbled over. The claws on my feet slipped around on the smoothed-out cave floors but I imagined they'd work pretty well on dirt ground, or at least, that's what I tried to tell myself.
"Do you know where Bran is?" I asked as soon as I was near enough.
The nurse turned to chide me too then saw that I was one of her patients, so she just 'shushed' me instead then went back to her work.
"Out here," said Helen, gesturing to the door. I went out with her.
"Do you-" I began again.
"He's fine," Helen said quickly. "He's in the room beside this one. Still unconscious."
"...Okay" I wanted to ask more, I always wanted to ask more, but I didn't know enough about medicine or anything like that to make it worth Helen's while to tell me more. "Can I see him?"
"Probably," said Helen. She turned and craned her neck as she looked into the other room.
I did the same and saw that it was, like the room I'd woken up in, filled with hospital beds. My eyes quickly scanned over the people in the beds and latched onto one blond individual.
"Bran…" I mumbled. I made to go to you, but Helen caught me by the arm.
"He's fine," she repeated. "If you go in there now, you'll just get in the way."
I tried to pull my arm away from her, but her grip was like iron. I recalled you mentioning she was part taotie or something like that, but I didn't know what that was. After a few moments of tugging, I gave up and looked away.
She was right. There were nurses and doctors quickly threading through the different beds, seeing to the different patients, taking blood samples, giving injections. If I went in there, especially with my slippery feet…
"More importantly," said Helen, "how are you?"
The question threw me for a second. "Fine," I said after a moment.
Helen glanced down at my feet then shrugged. "Look, sorry. I'm a bit blunt when I'm working."
I shook my head. "No, it's fine. You're right."
I took a deep breath and turned to look away from you in your hospital bed. I couldn't tell exactly what was going on around you, but I could see that there were no bandages on you, just a single drip.
"What happened out there in the water?" I asked Helen. "Did you catch the guy who attacked me and Bran?"
She looked around then motion for me to follow her. I did, reluctantly, and after a minute or two of walking, we emerged back at the shore of the inland sea.
When she'd made sure there was no one close by, she pulled out her phone. "We're still trying to piece together what happened exactly since the power going down disrupted the security cameras and everything." She tapped a few times on her phone then turned it to face me. "Was the person who attacked you one of these people?"
I took the phone from her and saw that she'd brought up a video clip. I played it.
The video was short, about thirty seconds long, and featured a series of oddly shaped rectangles. After a moment, two figures walked into frame, and I realised that the video had to be from a security camera mounted up on the ceiling looking down over a corridor. Based on the look of the floor and the glass walls on both sides, I guessed it was footage from the now destroyed underwater part of the Under City.
I let the video play for another second then paused it. I pointed at the screen at the shorter figure to the left.
"That's the kid who attacked us," I told Helen.
She quickly turned the phone so that she could see the screen. "The kid?" she said, sounding surprised. I didn't blame her.
"He had these bells around his wrist that made this… noise. I don't know how to describe it."
Helen nodded, then gave the phone back to me. "I'll ask Bran for more details on it when he wakes up. What about the other person? Do you know them?"
I dutifully pressed the play button, though I internally doubted that we'd get that lucky. What were the odds that I'd be able to recognise both when I'd only been in the city a month or so and only met a handful of people?
It turned out I should probably buy a lottery ticket.
"Ah!" I exclaimed and nearly dropped Helen's phone.
"Do you know them?" asked Helen as she caught her phone.
"It's the handsome librarian!"
--
Bran woke groggy. He coughed once, then did his best to quash the second. His chest was on fire.
After waiting for the pain to subside, he opened his eyes.
Lights.
He closed his eyes, rubbed them, then rolled to the side and opened them again. The sheets smelled of hospital, but he clearly wasn't in one, not if the rock walls were anything to go by.
He took a breath, then forced himself up into a sitting position.
He could remember walking down the glass corridors with Misha; he could remember the attacker; then… water. He couldn't remember much of anything after that, except that someone had held him very tightly.
"Misha…" Bran mumbled.
He tried to look around to see if the dragon was near but even without his glasses he could tell he wasn't.
Time to go looking then.
Bran was lucky. It only took him ten minutes or so of random wandering around to finally find two familiar silhouettes. Bran let a person carrying a large box of medical supplies pass him in the tunnel, then continued forward out of the tunnel and to the lakeside.
"Gosh, you and Bran really have been busy. I actually think I heard someone mention having to do a deep-clean in a girl's mind. Maybe it's the same case." It was Helen that was speaking. "If it turns out to be more complicated, like you're describing… Well, if that's the case, it'll definitely end up on my desk, or my leader's desk."
"If it does, can you let me know how it goes?" asked Misha.
"I can try, but it might be a while before we can actually start working on it after it gets transferred to us."
"Has something happened?" asked Misha.
"Yeah, you wouldn't know about it, but actually there's a bit of a disaster going on in the financial world at the moment. It's gotten big enough that even my team's been brought on."
"Has it got to do with the devalued Gratitude?"
"You know about that?!"
"He knows all about that," said Bran, making his presence known.
Both Misha and Helen spun around.
"Bran!"
Misha's arms were around Bran's neck before he could react, but the embrace was not unwelcome. If anything, Bran was disappointed when it ended though he pushed away the desire to investigate exactly why.
"How are you feeling?" asked Misha as he pulled back. His face looked a little pink and he suddenly seemed nervous, though Bran wasn't sure why.
"I've been better," was his honest reply. "And you?"
Misha beamed at him. "I'm fine!" he said.
Bran looked him up and down. "After a rest, you can try switching back and forth again and see if that can clear up all this," he said, pointing at the scales.
"What, you don't like them?" asked Misha jokingly.
Looking at Misha's lips, Bran suddenly recalled something soft pressing against his own though he couldn't remember when or where. "No, I like the scales," he said breezily. "So, what are you and Helen talking about?"
The change of subject was just quick enough that Misha's brain was only able to catch up after Helen had started to tell her tale of how her squad got swept up in the initial collapse of the underwater city while evacuating the staff.
"I was just asking Misha about how you beat that kid, but he said he got knocked out," said Helen.
Bran lowered himself down and sat on the ground. He didn't regret coming to find Misha, but he was having second guesses about just how well he himself was. His chest still hurt like hell. "I didn't beat him," he said, his voice flat.
"You didn't…?"
Bran shook his head and leaned back against the rocks. "After he knocked Misha out, he disarmed me, then he grabbed my sword and…" He made a slashing motion with his hand.
"You mean he broke the glass?" asked Misha.
"Yeah, with my sword."
Misha sat down on the floor as well.
"...That would explain how the glass broke," said Helen slowly. "There are hundreds of spells and enchantments on each inch of glass to stop things like this from happening," she explained to Misha. Then she turned back to Bran. "Where's your sword now? I don't think I've seen it with the dredging crew."
Bran took a deep breath then picked up the end of Misha's tail and wrapped it around his hand. "My sword is… gone." He sighed. "The kid took it."