BRIGHTON
Emil and Maribelle are glowing like rays of sun. They’re sweating within their gold and gray and dark yellow flames and while words occasionally slip out, I have no idea what’s actually happening. All I know is they must have successfully retrocycled.
I can’t believe this. Emil is meeting my hero, his past life, while Maribelle is with her biological mother. How does it work? Have they become them? Do they have any control? No one thought they would, but we didn’t know any of this was possible before we came along. The rules for a phoenix don’t have to be the same rules for specters with phoenix powers.
Thirty minutes in, Prudencia asks, “What if they’re stuck?”
“It hasn’t even been an hour,” Tala says. “Phoenixes don’t go in and out.”
Wyatt nods. “The only gray sun on record for retrocycling returned from hibernation after two days.”
“I’m not sitting here for two days,” I say.
“Then let’s hope Emil and Maribelle can find their way back sooner,” Wyatt says.
“By trusting their instincts?”
“It’s gotten them this far.”
But how far is that? Truly. They’re limited by what they could do, even someone as special as Maribelle, a celestial-specter hybrid. I’m the Infinity Savior, and the reason I must not be able to retrocycle is because I don’t have all the powers my Reaper’s Blood has promised me. Even if the ghost powers don’t have much to do with my phoenix ones, everything is packaged together within me and is sure to affect each other, just like how Maribelle couldn’t fully fly until she activated her fire too.
I might be left out now, but once I have all my powers, I’ll make their retrocycling and everything else they can do look like child’s play.
Count on it.
An hour passes, then another, and I spend the next three replying to my YouTube comments and answering a few questions on Instagram, but by the eighth hour of waiting around, I’m beginning to wonder if my brother and Maribelle will find their way back to our time.