Over the next few days, the base became a little more functional.
Not comfortable, exactly. Not normal. But lived in.
Rooms settled into place instead of appearing at random. The kitchen stopped changing shape every morning. The council table remained where it was, glowing softly in the map room like it had finally decided it belonged to them. Even the strange little routines of the place began to feel familiar.
And Bracer trained all of them.
Ray was forced to temper her rage into precision strikes instead of wild swings.
Mezzo was drilled until he could use his speed without crashing into walls, furniture, or unsuspecting teammates.
Arcade had to learn the one thing he hated most—how to recalibrate his logic around chaos instead of control it.
Even Lumina, Skye, and Bonbon had their own sessions, though Bracer disguised them as games, puzzle drills, and fairy-tale duels with rules soft enough not to frighten them.
Celeste wasn’t absent.
Just… distant.
She still trained. She still showed up when Bracer called. She still copied stances, ran drills, and forced herself through the motions.
But after the third day—after the balcony, after the fire, after seeing what she had almost become—she was careful in a way that made everything about her smaller. She held herself back. She laughed less. She watched her own hands too often, as if they might betray her again.
By the fourth day, the Council drones had gone quiet.
No announcements.
No warnings.
No messages.
And stranger still—none of them had seen a single zombie all day.
The silence made the whole city feel like it was holding its breath.
So Bracer trained them harder.
By late afternoon, sweat and sugar-dust clung to everyone in equal measure. The group ran drills across the training floor beneath the Egg Tree’s high candy arches, weaving through marked lines, practicing short bursts of combat and retreat.
At one point Bracer split them into pairs, rotating them fast enough that no one could settle into comfort.
As they jogged their cooldown laps, the talking started.
“Y’know…” Mezzo huffed, jogging backward with his hands behind his head, “I hate to admit it, but all this training? Actually working. I don’t even wheeze on stairs anymore. That’s character growth, right?”
Ray smirked, cracking her knuckles. “Bracer’s brutal, yeah. But it feels damn good when I can actually land a hit on him. Just once. Right on that smug jaw.”
Arcade tugged irritably at his hoodie, scowling. “I’m losing weight. My gloves slip, my belt’s crooked. This isn’t ideal. My outfit was mathematically optimized for both function and style. Now I look like a poorly dressed cryptid.”
“You’ve literally got a belt made of USB sticks,” Mezzo pointed out. “Tighten it, nerd.”
“I did. Three times.”
Ray leaned in with a sideways grin. “Don’t worry, Arcade. I think you look good like that. Mad scientist chic. Budget edition.”
Arcade muttered something rude under his breath, but he didn’t quite hide the flicker of a smile.
“I dunno,” Skye said, jogging to catch up, voice blunt but hopeful. “I can run without blacking out now. That’s… pretty huge.”
Lumina giggled, skipping beside him. “I like the teamwork games! Even Bonbon’s getting scary with her bubble-wand bombs.”
“She called it amser llawn hwyl ffrwydrol yesterday,” Skye added, tilting his head. “No clue what that means. But it sounded… important.”
Celeste ran with them, but quieter than the rest.
Lumina kept trying to include her—little glances, little comments, slowing down to match her pace—but she was careful now. Careful in the way children become when they are frightened of hurting someone they love.
Celeste noticed.
That hurt more than she expected.
Bracer clapped once, sharply, and the group stopped.
“Sparring pairs.”
He looked over them once, quick and measured, then pointed.
“Ray. Celeste.”
The whole room shifted.
Ray’s expression hardened at once.
Celeste stood very still.
For a second no one moved at all.
Then Ray turned and walked away from the training ring.
Not dramatically.
Not angrily.
Just flatly, like she had already made the decision before anyone could speak.
Mezzo straightened. “Oh, come on. Don’t do that.”
Arcade folded his arms. “That’s harsh, even for you.”
Ray wheeled on them both. “Then you do it.”
Silence.
Neither of them moved.
Mezzo glanced away first. Arcade adjusted his glasses as though that answered anything.
Ray gave a bitter little laugh. “Thought so.”
Celeste stooped, picked up the practice blade she’d set down, and without saying a word, turned and walked out of the ring.
Lumina’s face crumpled.
“She’s scared,” she whispered. Her little hands tugged at the ends of her sleeves. “Of herself.”
“She should be,” Ray said flatly.
Not cruel.
Just tired.
“That power she let out? It wasn’t magic. It was unstable. Dangerous.”
Skye looked up, his voice small but firm. “She didn’t mean to hurt anyone. She just… didn’t want to lose control.”
“Yeah.” Ray’s tone softened, but only slightly. “But that doesn’t make her safe.”
The silence that followed was heavier than any shouting would have been.
“So what?” Mezzo asked, frowning. “You think she’s dangerous now? Come on. She’s scared of that toaster we picked up during patrol.” He grimaced. “Although, in fairness, it does make a weird noise.”
No one laughed.
Ray hesitated, eyes narrowing as she looked toward the doorway Celeste had disappeared through. “I think we need to watch her. Just in case.”
No one jumped to argue.
They did not want to.
But the memory of the balcony—the fire, the glyphs, the storm she had nearly become—still lived in all of them now, curled tight beneath the ribs.
“She’d never hurt us,” Lumina whispered again, voice fragile but certain.
Ray glanced away. “I hope you’re right, kid.”
Ray looked up just in time to see Celeste heading up the tree.
She tripped on the root-laced stairs, caught herself, and kept going anyway without looking back.
Ray frowned faintly, lollipop shifting in her mouth, but said nothing.
Up above, the base was quiet.
The kind of quiet that only came once everyone else had finally worn themselves out. No arguing. No footsteps. No shrill laughter from Bonbon. No distant clatter of Arcade throwing tools around. Just the low, living hum of the Egg Tree itself, and at the center of the cookie room, the faint pulse of the great sugar-table.
Celeste slipped inside and stopped.
The room was dim and dreamy, the cookie-table glowing softly at its center as the crystallized sugar bowl projected the holographic map of Clawdiff into the air above it. Districts spun in slow motion, little blips of light flickering like trapped stars. The whole city hung above the table like a ghost too beautiful to trust.
She sat heavily in one of the cookie chairs, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. The shifting light painted her face in soft greens and pinks and pale blues.
She had stayed awake long after the others fell asleep.
She hadn’t dared join them.
Not properly. Not after the balcony. Not after the fire. Not after seeing the fear in their eyes.
Her claws flexed uselessly against her sleeves as the memory came back in jagged flashes—heat, pressure, screaming, the awful look on Ray’s face, the way even Mezzo had gone silent. Her stomach turned over.
She did not know how to face them in the morning.
Her voice, when it came, was barely louder than breath.
“Please…” she whispered to the map, to the table, to the base itself. “I just… I don’t know what to do. If there’s something in here—somewhere—that can tell me what I am…”
The Nommiepedia flickered open at her touch.
Pages of glowing data unfolded into the air in spiralling ribbons—bestiary entries, candy creature evolutions, hybrid notes, fragmented diagrams, cryptic records. Some were clear. Others jittered, blurred, and dissolved into static as though the system itself was refusing to let her look too closely.
She bit her lip. “Come on, please—help me.”
The map shimmered.
Then, slowly, the green dots marking life signs across Clawdiff began to blink out.
One by one.
Survivors. Hybrids. Faint little signs of movement in ruined towers, hidden flats, underground spaces.
Gone.
Until only one dot remained.
Celeste leaned forward, breath fogging the glowing surface. The name above it was smeared, the letters sliding and warping like wet ink. She could not make it out. Could not even tell if it was a name she should know.
But the location was clear.
The Library.
Her chest tightened.
Of course.
Of course it would be there—the one place where answers always hid.
“A library,” she murmured, voice trembling. “Books. Records. Maybe… maybe it knows something. Maybe it knows me.”
She stared at the blinking mark for a long time.
Every instinct told her it was a trap.
That wandering off alone was stupid.
That the city would eat her.
But another thought kept rising louder and louder beneath the fear.
What if that’s the only way I’ll ever know?
She paced the cookie room for the better part of an hour after that, circling the glowing map, testing routes, discarding them, trying again. Sometimes she stopped to stare out at the dark city beyond the sugar-glass windows. Sometimes she came back to the same little green dot and just stood there.
At last, heart pounding, she decided she would need help.
She went looking for Mezzo.
The corridors of the Egg Tree were dim and warm, sugar lamps glowing faintly in the walls. She spotted Hughes in the hallway first and flattened herself against the corner until he passed, not quite sure why she was hiding except that she did not want to explain anything yet.
Then she found Mezzo’s room.
She smelled it before she saw it.
Far too much deodorant.
Something smoky.
Something citrusy.
Something aggressively masculine in the exact way a person only chose if subtlety had once offended them personally.
His door had a traffic sign nailed to it for absolutely no clear reason, and the doorknob bore suspicious bite marks, as though at some point he had genuinely tested whether it was edible.
Celeste stood in front of it with her hand hovering.
Then lowering.
Then hovering again.
“Um… h-hello, Mezzo?” she began, voice barely above a squeak, as if the door itself might judge her. “It’s… it’s me. Celeste. I was, um… wondering if maybe you’d like to come with me to the library later. Not for anything fancy, or, or important, really, just—I mean, books are important, aren’t they? But not important like a council thing, or, oh, never mind, I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”
She pressed her forehead to the wood with a tiny groan.
“It’s just that I don’t want to go alone, and I thought maybe you’d like it too, since you like stories and music and things, and libraries have those, and I—”
She stopped dead.
Then whispered into the door in mounting horror,
“But it’s not a date. Not at all. Not that—oh stars, why did I say that out loud? I don’t mean—I mean, I do like you, just not like, not like—no, wait, I do like you as a friend, I think, but not—oh crumbs.”
From inside came nothing but a loud snore, followed by Mezzo rolling over and muttering something about “extra cheese.”
Celeste froze, cheeks burning hot enough to light the corridor.
“…You didn’t hear any of that, did you?” she whispered hopefully at the wood.
Only snoring answered.
She let out a long, suffering sigh and leaned back against the wall, curling her tail tightly around her legs.
“Right,” she muttered, twisting a strand of hair around one finger. “That was… practice, then. Next time I’ll, um… actually ask louder.”
Her hand lowered toward the handle—
—and the memories hit.
The balcony.
The heat.
The glyphs burning into her arms.
Blue fire roaring out of her mouth.
The shock in their faces—Ray’s guarded stance, Arcade’s pale terror, Skye shielding Lumina, Bonbon hiding behind her sleeves.
The panic.
The calm.
The fire.
The healing.
Her whole body had felt split down the middle, like warring halves trying to tear her apart. And afterward, when she looked at them, she had seen it.
Not relief.
Not trust.
Fear.
Her stomach twisted so sharply she bent a little with it. Her claws retracted hard into trembling palms.
No.
She could not risk bringing him.
Could not risk bringing any of them.
If it happened again—if she lost control again, if she hurt someone for real—then what?
She bit her lip hard enough to taste copper and sugar.
Inside the room, Mezzo stirred in his sleep.
Celeste stepped back.
“Oh goodness,” she muttered under her breath, fumbling with the edge of her sleeve. “Oh goodness, I really shouldn’t go alone, but if I don’t… if I don’t then no one will, will they? And that would be—oh stars, just go before you lose your nerve.”
Back in her room, she came up with what she considered a very sensible plan.
Which is to say: a terrible one, written down neatly.
She sat at the little desk and scratched out a note in careful, nervous handwriting.
Gone to look. Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. At least this way you know I’m alright.
She stared at the words for a long moment, chewing her lip.
“Alright,” she whispered to herself. “At least they’ll know I’m not vanished. Not… eaten or anything. And I’ll be back soon. I will. I just—well, the person who might have the answers is out there, and if I don’t go, then I’ll never know, will I?”
She propped the note against a cup, took one last breath, and crept out through the back roots of the Egg Tree.
Her boots betrayed her immediately.
She tripped once.
Then twice.
And each time she hissed a frantic little “Shhh!” at her own feet as though that would somehow make them quieter.
The night air clung cool against her fur as she stepped into the dark. Candy-grass cracked softly beneath her paws, and every sound seemed far too loud.
The city loomed ahead.
As the skyline of Clawdiff drew nearer, her steps slowed.
Shops that had still been standing the last time she’d passed were shattered now. Windows had been blown out. Walls had caved in. The streets were scarred with fresh gouges and syrup-burned craters.
Her heart clenched. “That wasn’t here before,” she breathed. Which meant someone—or something—else had been. Survivors. Somewhere out there. And the hollow ache of leaving them behind was joined by a prickling spark of hope.
