It took several days, but Alexis was finally able to forgive Parker, somewhat. He had to apologize about a thousand times before she would though.

The days felt weird without having Hailee around in their free time. Parker knew he had to do something to find her, but what? He didn’t know how to contact Lara. He didn’t know how to sense where others were. He felt like he was a useless, little good-for-nothing.

Alexis tried to explain to him that there was nothing he could do about it or could have done to prevent it. Nothing she seemed to say would get through to him. After what felt like a hundred failed attempts to take the guilt off of his shoulders, she passed the torch to Caleb.

He tried to talk to Parker when Alexis wasn’t around because he knew how differently Parker acted when he was around Alexis versus around just him. It wasn’t a big difference, but there was an air to him around her that made it harder for him to admit that this wasn’t his fault.

“You couldn’t have done anything!” Caleb shouted at him as they climbed into their beds. The other guys in the room all looked over, deciding whether or not they should try to help out, and then went back to getting ready for bed.

“If I hadn’t been off playing entertainer to strangers in another country, I could’ve done something to stop him from taking her!” He threw his pillow against the wall and feathers shot out from the end of it.

“Come up with something new at least,” Caleb said. “We’ve told you, there’s nothing you could have done that the masters couldn’t.”

“I could’ve followed them! Remember,” he yelled, pointing at himself with two thumbs. “Omni. I could have followed him through the ground.”

“Remember,” Caleb yelled back, now point two thumbs at himself. “I’m an Omni too! And my Earth Imperial is better than yours thanks to losing an eye! Or don’t you remember that?” Caleb was aggressively fluffing his pillow so much the seams were about to burst. “So I’m the one that should feel guilty!”

Parker saw tears running down Caleb’s face. It was then that he remembered how close the two of them had grown over the past year. Racked with guilt, Parker walked over to Caleb and put his hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say, he just hoped that Caleb would accept his apology.

The rest of the night was filled with uncomfortable silence. None of the boys in the room felt the need or even the desire to hold a conversation. The intensity of the silence made it even harder to fall asleep.

The next couple of days went by like ants crawling through molasses. Parker and Alexis kept trying to think of ways to find Hailee but also didn’t want to ask Caleb for help because they didn’t want to upset him any more.

“I’m still surprised he yelled at you like that,” Alexis said.

“I’m not,” Parker responded. “I had it coming.”

Alexis looked at Parker surprised now. She was impressed at how he had been able to turn things around quite a bit in such a little amount of time. “Hey, is everything okay?”

Parker turned to her, “Yeah? Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well… Caleb yelled at you—”

“I just said I deserved it.”

“I know, but you’ve also been in a weird mood lately so I wanted to make sure that you weren’t taking it too personally.”

Parker thought for a few seconds. “Yeah I’m okay. I don’t know why, but I’m definitely not as mad as I have been lately.”

Alexis agreed with him but knew the only reason could be because of Lara, which worried her. “So, when is your training with Lara supposed to start?” Parker shrugged his shoulders and before Alexis could say anything else, he vanished from in front of her.

——

“Stop that!” Parker yelled.

Lara put her hand up and swiveled her head. “Wellll soooory! Here I thought we were supposed to start training.”

“We are, but a little warning would be nice. And you took me out of the middle of talking to someone, again.”

Lara apologized but walked away. Parker realized that he was supposed to be following her, even though she didn’t say to. He hustled to catch up to her as she was already talking to him.

“—in order to teleport.”

“Huh?” Parker questioned as he caught up with her.

She sighed and looked at him, already exasperated. “Is this how it’s going to be?”

“What?” Parker was already confused which made him feel less confident about his decision to let her train him. She was obviously not made out to be a teacher. He thought for a moment what it would be like if she were to be one of the masters at the school and then he almost laughed out loud but knew that wouldn’t end well.

“You need to listen in order for this work. You need to be one hundred percent focused if you’re going to succeed in teleporting. We’re going to start with teleporting an object first, it’ll be much safer.”

Parker hadn’t even noticed where they had ended up this time. It was much warmer than their usual locations that Lara picked for them to go to, especially considering it was still winter. The sun shone bright from overhead and waves crashed against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff they were standing by.

Lara stopped and pointed to a rock that was sitting in the grass. “You’re going to teleport that rock—” she looked around thinking. “—there,” she said as she drew a ring of fire in the grass. The fire burned low and didn’t spread.

“How though?” Parker asked, staring back and forth from the rock to the ring of fire. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Just,” she said as the rock vanished and reappeared in the ring. Lara then teleported the rock back to its starting location.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing though!” He was already getting frustrated, and he hadn’t even actually started.

Lara held out her hands. “First, feel for the object.”

Parker had no idea what she meant by that but he did his absolute best to try and feel for the object. After a moment of silence he huffed and closed his eyes. He felt like a failure right away. “I don’t—” he stopped his sentence as she smacked him gently up the back of his head.

“Think about wanting the rock to be inside the ring of fire and absolutely no where else.”

Parker stared at the rock with an intensity he hadn’t felt or shown in quite a while. He thought about how the rock needed to move inside the ring. Turning his head slightly, he caught a glimpse of the fire and tried to think harder, if that was possible.

After a moment of more intense staring from Parker, he felt a weird tugging sensation in his sternum. It had to be the weirdest feeling he’d ever felt but it wasn’t unpleasant. Then the rock vanished from its spot.

Parker felt ecstatic and jumped up and down in the air. When he turned to look at the ring of fire to see if the rock landed where it was supposed to he saw that it was sitting half in the ring and half out. A feeling of defeat washed through him and he dropped his head.

“You turned your focus.”

“I what?” Parker asked confused.

“When you turned your head, you changed your focus from inside the ring of fire to the fire itself. That is why the rock ended up half in and half out, it landed exactly on the fire like you were thinking.” She teleported the rock back to its starting spot and told him to try again.

This time, Parker put all of his focus into the middle of the ring of fire. He felt the odd but now growing familiarity feeling of the tugging behind his sternum and the rock vanished. He turned quickly before getting prematurely excited and saw the rock sitting in the middle of the ring of fire. “Woo!” he shouted joyfully.

They spent hours on the hill making different things teleport back and forth. Making rocks balance on top of each other, creating the highest stack possible. When the sun began to set, Lara told him they were done and that he needed to practice feeling for others at school so they could practice teleporting people the next time.

“So, I’m going to practice teleporting random people next time?” Parker asked.

“No,” Lara started to laugh at the thought of Parker teleporting random people and how awfully it would probably go. “You will teleport me.”

Parker’s eyes opened wide. “What?”

“If you don’t do it right, I can correct it in the moment. Or at least I’m pretty sure I can. Regardless, I’m not worried about it after what I saw you accomplish today.”

“All right then…” Parker said. not nearly as confident as she was. What if he teleported just a part of her? Or when she appeared what if everything wasn’t in the same place it started?

——

The next thing Parker knew he was laying in his bed again. He looked around and didn’t see anyone else in the room which was a pleasant surprise. The thought of having to talk to others about where he’d been and why he was vanishing for extended periods of time was exhausting. He knew that everyone would ask him. Should he just make a public announcement in the dining hall?

He got out of bed and cleaned up for the day and made his way out to the common room. When he got there, all he saw was Monty sleeping by the fire like usual and a bunch of empty seats around the room.

Parker dropped through the entrance and landed in an empty corridor. “What in the world?” he asked himself. Where had everyone gone?

He wandered the castle for a while looking for anyone else but he couldn’t find anyone. No one was in the dining hall. The masters weren’t in their chambers. There wasn’t even anyone on the Aether field. How had hundreds of people just vanished? Did Lara have something to do with this? Or maybe Master Terra?

“Parker!” Alexis shouted from down the corridor.

“Alexis?” Parker yelled back, still confused. He wanted to know where everyone else was but hearing Alexis yell out his name and seeing her run down the corridor toward him was the most exciting and perfect thing he could want. “Where is everyone?”

She slammed into him with a hug, knocking the wind out of him and almost knocking him over. After they separated and they got a chance to the look the other one over quickly, she grabbed his hand and pulled as she tried to run back down the corridor.

He followed her without question as she led him through a labyrinth of corridors, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. Thinking about it, there was a lot of the castle that they’d never ventured to in their time at the school. So much had happened since they arrived it seemed like there almost wasn’t the time to go exploring, and when there was time to actually explore, he wanted to do nothing.

After what seemed like running through a hundred or so corridors, Alexis stopped at a golden door. There was nothing else around it. The corridor it was in had no other doors, no windows, no nothing. Parker couldn’t believe Alexis was even able to find her way back to it, assuming that it was where she’d come from.

“What is this?” Parker asked before Alexis could open the door.

She gave him a smile that made his heart race. “You’ll see.”