The earth started to shake all around them.
"
Hold the line!"
The world went white and out of focus. Every single one of them started glowing, the humans and the Zodiacs both, the cats -- Astraea and Sue Gottschalk suddenly shifted, mangled, flopped to the ground together as two
cats -- Sue Gottschalk was still in transition, obviously. Foramen glowed, fell. And every starseed there fed into the Opal Crystal, charging it as a battery. The Zodiacs charging it as one. The humans giving it power that they simply didn't have, winging it all on a prayer and hope and belief, on everything they had been through -- it took real strength to look at what had happened the past month and then say,
yes. I believe. I believe in a new future.
The Opal Crystal responded.
The buildings started falling apart around them, but even as they crumbled into rubble they disappeared -- the flagstones cracked, plants entwining themselves in the zigzags as though this was the site of some abandoned tenement, not a school. The campus was destroyed inch by inch underneath the black barrier, and the black barrier was wavering -- Princess Chronos was a column of multi-coloured light, striking the center of the shield.
And she glowed brighter. And the stone took more, more than they could give. Some of the students started turning transparent, and they didn't stop, dissolving -- from that crack in the barrier, the campus disintergrating all around them and the forest reclaiming as though this had always been the case -- only a few buildings were left. It looked as though it was an abandoned mental instutiton, falling apart. None of the school buildings, none of the archways, none of the hallways, none of the dorms.
With a final burn, a final burst --
The barrier disappeared.
Each of them fell. First Chronos, and Aries darted out to catch her even as both crumpled to the grassy ground. Then the other Zodiacs, Aries out like a light even as she settled down their Princess, the Guard crashing down to the ground like dominoes. There were some humans left. They fell too. In the new, old, disreputable grounds of the institution, there were humans left lying on the ground (whole and new) as though they'd always been there. In tattered clothes; the Barren Pines uniform was gone, and they were mostly to a man wearing dirty hospital gowns.
The Zodiacs powered down. Astraea was left a cat; Sue Gottschalk was left human, catearless, lying embarrassingly naked. And that was how they all were when the police found them, and when they were carted off to hospital.
It would take a very long time to realise the fact:
The nightmare of
Barren Pines was over.
*
It was described as an organ trafficking ring gone wrong, a pressgang of slavery abandoned before police could get the ones in charge. Students who had been declared dead a year ago -- a hospital malfunction, a con act. Destiny Memorial was embarrassed, under inspection. Students were returned to their families, some weeping, some thrilled, all with their children now back to their bosoms mostly whole -- mostly. The transfer students were back with families who were cursing their bad luck in sending their students there. Some families had believed their children dead for a full year.
They'd been given name suppression. The humans who woke up remembered only the beginning of their ordeal, not the Opal Crystal, not the identities of the Zodiacs -- but they would be forever changed, too. They were not normal human beings. Feeling youma move throughout Destiny City changed you: the world was not a safe place, the world was not a right place. The Barren Pines students who'd survived knew monsters. They'd been monsters.
They filled a ward:
Fallon Novette-Naim
Dagmar Thorsen
Esen Saylor
Avalon Renee
Yvette Weaver
Lowell Drinkwater
Imogen Farrago
Billy Roadinger
Piper Haswell
Melody Klein
Ignacio Araya
Elle Hammel
Remington Montgomery
Yahya Grant
Azzo Crowley
Calintha Johnson
Laney SuttonAll barring Landscape Sutton -- who went to the Glasgow ward with the other comatose patients, too deep in her catatonic state to wake.
It was now up to them to remember.
And the Zodiac Guard to hold.
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