“Well, I think it’s pretty clear now that there’s nothing left. I mean, even if we tried to rebuild the city from the rubble, it wouldn’t amount to much,” Erik said as he shrugged.
“Yeah, and this is just one city in an entire mortal world,” Colby added. “There’s not much to salvage here. Everyone is dead, and most everything is destroyed.”
“So, the question now becomes, how far are you willing to go in order to bring this all back?” Erik asked Brenna.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head and felt the tears well in her eyes again. “I mean, I chose to save the other realms and all of you. What if choosing to bring back Earth puts everyone in danger again?”
None of the guys had an answer for her. No one knew how the balancing of the universe worked.
“I think the only one who can help us with that is Norna,” Brandt said after a while. “We should go back to the forest now. There’s nothing more to see here.”
“No,” she said as she wiped her eyes with her hand. “I want to stay for a few moments longer. Please.”
“Okay.” Brandt felt bad for her, but he didn’t know how to ease her sorrow. There was nothing he could do to bring back the city. He knew she missed her home and longed for it and that seeing it in such destruction tore her apart. He would give her as much time to just sit and be here as she needed to have before they left.
He stood up, and the other men eyed him to see where he was going. “I’m going to look around the apartment for a bit,” he told her as he gently ran his hand on her back. “Tell me when you’re ready to leave, okay?”
Brenna nodded. She was afraid if she tried to speak that her voice would crack, and she would burst into tears again. She just wanted to sit here and feel the breeze of the city against her face.
The other men got up as well. They wanted to respect Brenna’s time to sit in her city and mourn. They went to look around their bedrooms and see if there was anything left worth taking with them. Most of the rooms were a literal pile of rubble. It looked like a tornado had swept through the apartment. Brandt managed to find Brenna’s favorite cozy blanket, which, although it was covered in dirt and debris, was mostly still in one piece. He picked it up and draped it over his arm to bring with him. He also found a few broken pieces of his graphite pencils and stuffed them into his pocket. The other men had similar luck in their rooms. Among the pile of shattered glass on the floor of his room, Erik found one single shot glass still intact. He smiled as he picked it up and noticed that it was his favorite one. Colby and Jerrik emerged from their rooms, both with a few random items in hand. It was silly to collect stupid, broken objects from a world that had been decimated; there were many more important things to be concerned about. But it seemed to bring them all a small sense of peace and normalcy to hold in their hands the tokens of their past life.
Brandt came out of the hallway and started walking back toward Brenna with the blanket in his hand. He was going to wrap it around her shoulders, and although he knew it would probably make her start to cry again, he also knew that it would comfort her. But he noticed a trembling of the floor beneath his feet.
“Stop walking!” he said to the others as he put his palm up in the air.
The other men stopped and looked at him from the other side of the hall, and Brenna looked up from her chair in the center of the living room.
“What’s wrong?” Erik asked.
“The floor, it’s not stable.” Brandt took another careful step forward, and when he did, he felt the floor bow slightly beneath him.
“Back up,” Erik said as he held his arm out in front of Jerrik and Colby and urged them back down the hall. They stepped slowly and listened as the apartment creaked.
“Brenna,” Brandt called to her nervously. “Don’t move.”
She looked at him with fear in her eyes as she sat still in the chair. She remembered what Norna had said to her, being immortal doesn’t mean you can’t be killed. “Brandt?” she called to him as her voice shook.
“It’s okay,” he said as he tried to reassure her as much as tried to reassure himself. “It’ll be okay, just don’t—”
Before he was able to get the last word out, the apartment floor crumbled, and Brenna fell with it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was as if they were watching her fall in slow motion, and somehow, it was enough time for them to do something about it. Jerrik immediately called upon his power to slow time for Brenna as she fell, thus lessening the impact. The four men carefully crawled to the edges of the opening in the collapsed floor and looked into the deep hole to see if they could see where Brenna fell.
“Brenna!” Brandt shouted into the opening, which had gone through several floors of the apartment building.
“I’m here,” she shouted back up. He could tell by her voice that she was in pain.
Brandt started to climb down the inside of the gaping orifice.
“What are you doing?” Erik asked. “You’re going to make it collapse farther and then you’ll fall as well.”
“No, I can do this. The weak part of the flooring has already come apart. The rest is pretty solid. I can climb down. I have to get to her.”
The other men carefully started to do the same. The descent was sketchy at best, and there was more than one time in which Colby or Jerrik lost their footing and was sure they would plummet. But they eventually made it down to where Brenna was and found her laid out on her back and not moving. She gave them a weak smile as they found solid footing around her.
“You came to rescue me,” she said. “My heroes.”
“Even when you’re half-broken, you’re still sassy,” Erik teased.
She laughed and winced as her ribs moved. Brandt went to lift her, but it hurt her so much that she let out a small scream. The others looked on, feeling helpless and upset.
“Colby,” Erik suddenly had an idea. “Can you use your power in reverse?”
“Huh?”
“Can you take some of her pain away?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it before. I wouldn’t even know how to try to do that; my power mostly just causes pain when I think about it.”
“Well, instead of thinking about pain, think about taking it away,” Erik suggested. “Try.”
Colby focused his power on Brenna and on the obvious broken bones and torn muscles that her fall had caused. They were all still and waited to see if what he was trying to do was working.
“Well?” Erik asked him.
Colby didn’t respond. He looked like he was concentrating too hard to hear what was being said to him.
“Try to pick her up again,” Erik told Brandt.
Brandt reached for Brenna and gently tried to lift her again. This time, she only flinched slightly.
“It’s working!” Brandt said excitedly.
If Colby could keep it up until they were able to get her back to the forest, then Brandt would be able to move her and carry her the whole way there. The floor they were on seemed to be stable enough, so. They located the stairwell and started the climb the rest of the way down.
“No, I can’t leave yet,” Brenna moaned softly. “I wasn’t ready.”