It made Tate want to clam up and pretend she hadn’t said anything. Trusting Keel wasn’t an easy thing to do. Yet, it was her only option.
“I only show this to you so you know I’m serious.”
Tate withdrew a cube half the size of her fist with geometric designs etched in each side. Originally, it had been bigger but sometime in the last few months, she’d figured out it could expand and contract when she touched certain spots on each of its sides.
This way in its smaller, more portable version, she could always carry it with her.
Tate touched two sides, moving her fingers in a pattern that had become familiar over the last few months. A narrow beam of light shot into the air. Jax suddenly sat before them, his gaze penetrating as if he could see all their secrets and desires.
Keel made a choked sound, his expression frozen in shock. In the next second, he hit his knees, bowing before the image.
She hadn’t anticipated such a dramatic reaction. It seemed she had underestimated Keel. He truly did worship his Saviors. To a point not even she had expected.
“If you do that, you’ll miss the best part.”
“What is this?” Keel asked in a hushed voice.
“A recording he left me.”
“You got this from the pocket dimension.”
Keel sounded steadier than he had seconds before. Already he was beginning to recover his equilibrium. Despite that, his face was still pale when he raised it, and the way he looked at Jax had a bit too much fervor for Tate’s taste.
“You could say that.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone.”
Tate lifted a shoulder. “Jax left the message specifically for me. It’s no one else’s business what he had to say.”
Tate plucked the cube off the balcony, hitting the parts of the geometric design that would turn it off again. Once the image disappeared, she stuffed it into her pocket.
Keel composed himself as Tate waited. It didn’t take long.
“What is it you want?”
“So. Many. Things.” For the dragonlettes to be safe. For Dewdrop and Night to live happy and long lives. To have a chance to enjoy Ryu without the world ending. “But in this case, I’ll settle for your help.”
There was a sense of imbalance in the way Keel watched her. Jaxon’s image and the idea of the message he’d left Tate seemed to have affected him much more than she predicted.
All that talk of learning who the Saviors were as people and still Keel could barely keep his calm at the barest revelation. This wasn’t even the smallest of the multiple bombs she could have dropped, which would have altered his entire perception of history and reality.
Keel closed his eyes and shook his head once. When he opened them again, he was calm. The grandmaster he presented to the rest of the world. Someone who could face anything without the barest flicker of unease.
“What do you need?”
“I’m sure it’s occurred to you by now that your Saviors weren’t quite as thorough in their war as they should have been.”
Keel’s chin dipped as he regarded her from beneath lowered eyebrows with a guarded expression. “I didn’t think you realized that.”
So, she was right. She’d hoped as much.
As the biggest repository and self-proclaimed guardians of the Saviors’ history, they would have access to records that the rest of the world didn’t. Since Jax had left her a message, she’d assumed some of his research would have made it into the guardians’ hands.
“It was in the message.”
Even if it hadn’t been, she would have figured it out. Nathan’s presence, the ancient Keel’s fellow guardians had accidentally woken under the city, pointed to as much.
“Five escaped that Jax knew of,” she confirmed. “He managed to hunt down two. Three remain.”
