Disclaimer: These characters, along with their world and their story, are based on the characters and premise of Power Rangers Ninja Storm. Buena Vista Entertainment owns PRNS, and I make no claim on, nor receive any profit from, their copyrighted material.

Note: In this universe, christened "girl!NS" by mysty kitty, all of the PRNS characters happen to be of the opposite sex, with the notable exception of Sensei Miko and Mayu (Lothar). Rather than gender swapping Kanoi and Kiya, Cam's mother and her fictional twin sister fill those roles. No particular reason. Also, pretty much everything I write is an open universe, so if for some reason you want to use these versions of the Ninja Storm characters you're welcome to do so.

Conspiracy Theory
by Starhawk

Cam was fairly sure that the world was conspiring against her. At least insofar as the world consisted of Sensei, the other Rangers, and her own mind. She could remember a time when the world was bigger than just the seven of them, making an unlikely and often desperate stand against the forces of evil. Lately, though, it didn't feel like there was anything else in the universe, let alone the world.

Sometimes the world narrowed to just her and the mainframe and whatever last second code she could throw into the breach, so really, this latest conspiracy theory was something of an improvement.

The conspiracy had started with Sensei, who had inexplicably decided that each of the Rangers could benefit from a training session in which it was them against the rest of the team. Rangers could be influenced, brainwashed, possessed; therefore, they needed to know how to fight each other. That was the argument. It wasn't like they didn't have firsthand experience with the phenomenon, but as their own history proved, it was a lot harder to brainwash five Rangers than just one at a time. And giving that one practice fighting the entire team didn't really seem smart to Cam.

Her opinion didn't make much of a difference in the long run. Sensei had made the decision, and of course, Cam got to go first. She wasn't sure if she should be annoyed or suspicious, given that her day to go one-on-five against the others had ended up being the day their training session was a Ranger short. The Crimson Ranger had been excused this afternoon for community service.

The rest of the Rangers had contributed to her conspiracy theory by arriving early and in force, shouting about some competition that had nothing to do with training and begging to use her video camera as soon as she would part with it. Which was never. The Winds were hard on cameras, and she had no faith that the Thunders were any better. She had agreed to tape whatever they were doing on the condition that her hands were the only ones that touched her very expensive digital camera.

It didn't settle any of them down. They were all convinced that, whatever they were doing, each of them was the best at it and if they could somehow get Cam to agree with them then they would win. Something. She didn't know what, but she was pretty sure that her unwillingness to side with any of them wasn't making her any more popular in this sparring session. She trained as hard as anyone now, but they had at least a year of daily practice on her and she was struggling to hold her own against their combined strength.

On top of that, her own mind was getting her in trouble, distracting her with things that should have been set aside before she'd even stepped into the training room. Her brain insisted on hearing a voice that wasn't there, replaying words that had been stuck on an endless loop in her mind since the night before. Words that had come from her one absent team member.

"Look, I know I'm not as smart as you. But we're pretty even in a fight, and hey, I'm a lot faster than you on a bike. So." That cocky smile had flashed at her beneath blue eyes that were wryly self-deprecating, inviting her to share the joke--and more. "Just think about it, okay?"

She was thinking about it. She couldn't stop. She didn't know why she'd bothered to get out of bed this morning, given the amount of work she hadn't gotten done. And she certainly wasn't making up for it now. She should probably be grateful for that community service project this afternoon, considering her lack of focus in the training room, but all she felt was a vague disappointment that no answer would be required of her today.

Well, that and a bruising pain in her right shoulder when she went down and a stinging sensation in her hands as she tried to redirect some of the energy into the mats. The Crimson Ranger's sister still hadn't quite grasped the concept of pulling punches. She tried to roll out of the way, ran straight into bare feet and only narrowly escaped by launching herself backwards over her shoulders. They were closing in and she was--

Sensei's voice interrupted the increasingly tight scuffle, and Cam thought it was over until she heard Dusty being told to switch sides. Suddenly she had an ally in the melee. And an earth ally, at that. Back to back, they both turned their heads at the same moment.

Their eyes met. Dusty grinned. Cam just nodded.

She threw her left hand out to the side, two fingers extended, and Dusty's arm came down on top of hers. The burst of power that rippled out across the floor in every direction left them standing in the middle of a circle of unbalanced Rangers: easy to knock down, harder to keep that way, but then the quiet voice came again, this time calling the halt Cam had expected seconds before.

"Well done, Rangers." The parti-colored cat padded out onto the mats, one ear twitching as she considered the picture they presented. "That was an impressive defense, Cam. And I think the speed of your sync with Dusty speaks for itself."

"Dude, we were on," Dusty crowed, reaching down to help Shay to her feet. "That was awesome! You should have seen your faces; you were all, like, 'earthquake!' and then you--"

"Dusty." The cat speaking with the voice of Cam's mother sounded at once amused and reproving. "There will be no gloating during training sessions. You all performed admirably. I think you will benefit from a run to release any excess energy you may have."

Shay groaned, and Toni muttered, "Thanks a lot, Dusty."

"We don't have to go, right, Sensei?" Blaze asked, with what Cam thought was at least excess something. Optimism, maybe. "Just Dusty? I'm tapped! Cam puts up a good fight. I don't have any energy left after that."

"Oh, yeah," Shay agreed, eyes wide and earnest. "No energy here. No gloating, either."

"All of you," the cat informed them, not without humor. "Three miles. The sooner you start, the sooner you will return."

Cam let out a token sigh, but if it came down to it, running was a lot easier than fighting four Ranger-powered ninjas. She was glad to get out of the afternoon with nothing more than sore muscles and some new bruises. Without people trying to knock her down every step of the way, three miles would be no distance at all.

"Hey," Blaze said, as they went to grab their sneakers. "Cam. That was disturbing."

She shook her head, pulling on one green sock at a time. "I know," she muttered, balancing on the other foot as she toed her running shoes out of the pile they'd left by the door. "I was totally unfocused."

Shay snorted, but it was Toni's incredulous voice that replied, "You're kidding, right? You held off all of us for, like, half an hour!"

She looked up in surprise as Shay added, "Yeah, dude, if you ever go over to the dark side? We're totally screwed."

"Oh, no way," Blaze countered. "Come on. You're good, no lie," she told Cam, "but I could take you if I had to."

Cam rolled her eyes as she jammed her feet into her shoes, preparing to counter, but the comment was met by a wave of good-natured derision from every last one of the Winds. Somewhat to her surprise, they defended her before she could even try. She still wasn't used to being one of the team.

"One on one?" Toni exclaimed. He gave his girlfriend a frankly disbelieving look, like maybe she wasn't as clever as he'd thought. The look was softened by a laugh as he added, "Get real!"

"Even I can't take Cam one-on-one," Shay declared, with a casual confidence that made Toni stop tying his shoes long enough to smack her on the back of the head.

"Besides, even if you did," Dusty added, "she'd just whip out the last second save-our-butts device and you'd be toast."

"Hey, I didn't say I could fight her stuff," Blaze protested. "Just her!"

"Um, excuse me," Toni interjected. "But I seem to recall a certain Thunder Samurai duel that ended in a draw."

Blaze cleared her throat, and Cam pretended to adjust the heel of her sneaker while carefully avoiding anyone's gaze. The two of them had been under one of Lothar's spells at the time. A week later and Toni was still the only one who could get away with mentioning it, since he'd suffered his own share of humiliation during the whole debacle: he had been the subject of the "duel."

"Oh, yeah!" Dusty chimed in, with her usual tactlessness. "Too right! If you couldn't beat her then--"

"It was a draw." Blaze sounded awkward, which was strange for her but it wasn't like Cam had to wonder why. "Okay? Neither of us won. Let's just leave it at that."

"And we're running," Shay said, pushing her friend toward the door. "Come on, guys. Sensei's doing that thing with her nose."

Cam's mom liked Shay for some reason that Cam couldn't completely fathom, which was the only reason the Red Ranger got away with comments like that. But when Cam glanced back at her, the little cat was perched on the stacked mats at the side of the room, watching them go with something just this side of fondness. It figured that it would be a sparring session that drew that expression from her.

Cam got along better with her sensei than her mom, and that might not be the best thing but she'd learned to accept it for what it was. Her mom had always wanted her to continue the samurai tradition at the Wind Academy. Cam preferred more scholarly pursuits in a world where she could be recognized for her name rather than her samurai rank. And she was: her graduate work in Comp Sci had been paying for itself until she'd taken the semester off to take care of her suddenly feline mom.

It was a semester that was quickly threatening to become a year. The middle of the summer, now, and she'd been in touch with her advisor but she wasn't any closer to coming back than she had been two months ago. In fact, now that she had the amulet, the idea that there would be any time at all for academic work was looking less and less likely.

Heather's name penetrated her thoughts as she followed the others out of Ninja Ops. Suddenly she was listening again--an interest that Toni noticed when he glanced back to make sure she was still with them, but she ignored his half-smile as best she could. She was allowed to be curious about her teammates.

"I'm just saying," Dusty reiterated. "Heather and Blaze together might be able to take Cam."

"All of us together couldn't take Cam," Shay reminded her. "I don't know why you think Heather is better than the three of us combined."

"Hey, no, that is so not what I said." Dusty pointed at her, and then at Blaze, who was probably smirking triumphantly at this concession. "I just think they have more experience fighting together than we do, and what's Sensei always telling us? It's the strength of the team that makes the difference. Not the individuals."

So Dusty occasionally paid attention during training. Interesting. Cam hadn't been allowed to join their sessions without strength equivalent to their own, and until her journey to the past had brought her to a power great enough to restore the other Rangers, equivalency had been impossible. She was only now becoming acquainted with the team dynamic as it applied to something other than annoying her at Ninja Ops and breaking her equipment on the battlefield.

"We did it before," Blaze was saying. "Not that Cam wasn't good, and we did kind of take her by surprise, but--"

Cam was startled that she brought it up and annoyed that Blaze thought the incident was in any way comparable. "Wait a minute," she interrupted. Toni and Shay slowed enough to let her into the group as they headed up the stairs. "I hadn't trained regularly for years before you came barging in here to abduct my mom, and if I recall correctly it wasn't exactly an easy snatch and go."

"Plus Cam wasn't a Ranger then," Shay added. "So two morphed Rangers can overpower a civilian. Ooh... there's a shock."

"She wasn't a civilian," Blaze protested. "She's a samurai teacher with enough element training to restructure the entire school!"

Sunlight burst in through the door Dusty had thrown open, and they climbed out of the underground bunker into a late summer afternoon. The crater where the Wind Academy had stood before Lothar launched her campaign to eradicate Earth's defenders had been smoothed over, harsh edges gentled into a sloping valley. Vegetation was growing back and wildlife had begun to return, making the land look more like a harvested logging area than the smoking ruin it had been.

Cam's work. Nothing sophisticated, but the scale had been daunting and she hadn't been willing to let it wait until she and Dusty could learn to work together. She had an earth element. She had no compunction about using it. And she'd been horrified by the thought of walking through that devastation every time she came or went from Ninja Ops.

"Still not a Ranger," Toni was saying. "And she's right, it's not like you kicked her butt and were gone before we could get here."

"Hey, Sensei isn't defenseless either," Blaze retorted. "We were fighting both of them!"

"Could we stop talking about how you broke into the most secure facility on campus, took me hostage, and kidnapped my mother?" Cam demanded. "It's a memory I'm trying to suppress and none of you are helping."

Toni took one look at her expression and suggested, "Maybe we should run now."

"I don't think that'll help." Dusty sounded doubtful. "I mean, she can ninja streak as fast as we can."

Shay gave her an easy shove. "Dude, we're not running from Cam. We're running from Sensei. Three mile jog? Hello?"

"Which is completely your fault," Blaze complained. "Gloating? Even I know not to laugh when you guys fall in the water--and believe me, that's funny."

"She would have made us do it anyway," Cam said with a sigh. "It's today's wrap-up exercise."

"Really?" Shay perked up at that. "So we won't have to sit around and talk about our feelings with your mom when we get back?"

"It's called debriefing," Cam informed her. Actually, it was traditionally called "tea," but the idea was the same. Tea with gossip, or debriefing with refreshments. The latter description was the one that appealed to her scientific side, so that was how she thought of it. "And no, I'm pretty sure we won't."

"Why didn't you say so?" Blaze was doing a backwards dance that was almost jogging--in reverse--without actually leaving them behind. "If we're out of here in half an hour, I can still get in some time at the track!"

"Ten minute miles?" Toni teased, pretending to lunge after her. "Is that lead in your sneakers?"

Blaze skipped further away, smirking at him. "Like you can do better, Mr. Hang Ten."

"Is that supposed to be an insult?" Toni inquired, like he wasn't quite sure. "You do realize it's a surfing term for speed, right?"

"Oh, yeah?" Blaze wasn't deterred. "I thought it was a surfing term for people who tripped over their own toes."

Toni raised his eyebrows, sounding more amused than annoyed as he announced, "Oh, now it's on!" Blaze just laughed, Toni made another lunge, and the two of them took off.

"O-kay," Shay drawled, watching them go. "I don't know about you, but that kind of makes me not want to run at all."

"That?" Dusty said, studying her fingernails as they strolled up the slope of the steadily greening valley. "Try anything."

That was an easy one. "Lothar," Cam replied.

"Well, yeah, but only if she was, like, right here," Dusty argued. "And threatening us with some kind of, I don't know, giant space gun or something."

"She's a ninja," Shane said, rolling her eyes. "She doesn't need a giant space gun."

"No," Dusty allowed, "but don't you think that would make her job a lot easier? I mean, she wouldn't have to keep sending all these space freaks and weirdos to go around blasting things. She could just do it herself from the comfort of her own ship."

Cam, who thanked their luck every day that Lothar's ship wasn't armed, didn't manage to get in a cutting remark before Shay disagreed. "Wouldn't work," the leader of the Wind Rangers said. "So she blasts us to pieces, so what? New Rangers step up in, like, a day. If you don't destroy the Power, you don't destroy the Rangers."

"And you can't destroy the Power unless we're morphed," Cam added. "Hence the 'space freaks and weirdos,' as you call them. To force us to morph."

"Making us even harder to destroy!" Shay finished. "And that, my friend, is why we will always win."

Dusty didn't seem impressed. "I still say it would be easier with a space gun."

Cam wasn't convinced either of them would run if she left them behind, but Shay seemed happy to argue this particular point with Dusty indefinitely. And at the end of the day, it wasn't her job to ride herd on her younger teammates. She didn't feel really like running, it was true. But she felt like listening to their inane discussion even less.

So she started running, and she made it to the holographic entrance before she noticed anything out of the ordinary. Actually, she made it through the holographic entrance. It was on the other side that a flash of black moved in the trees and she stopped where she was. Guard up, she circled slowly, scanning the branches and negative space as best she could.

Not good enough to catch a ninja. Heather dropped out of thin air at her side. Cam managed not to flinch, but it was a near thing. She used to be good at seeing through shadows. Obviously she needed to get back in practice.

The Crimson Ranger's eyes flicked over her, taking in her ponytail, workout clothes, and probably the bruise on her right arm where she'd missed a block, all before she opened her mouth. "How's it going?"

"I thought you were meeting your little sister this afternoon," Cam said, off-balance from not only the look and but also the return of Heather's voice in her head. "We're pretty even in a fight, and hey, I'm a lot faster than you on a bike... just think about it, okay?"

"Yeah." Heather shrugged, like it was no big deal. "Charlotte. Cute kid. We went down to the park, but she didn't want to hang afterward, so."

"So?" Cam repeated. "You decided to come skulk around the holographic entryway instead?"

"Hey." This time a grin accompanied the shrug. "I got out of training fair and square. Just because the kid bailed on me doesn't mean I have to come work out with you guys."

Cam was pretty sure Sensei wouldn't see it that way, but she refrained from pointing that out. Instead she remarked, "Yet you can't think of anything better to do than watch us. With hobbies like that, why even bother with free time?"

"I didn't come to watch them," Heather countered. There was a telling gleam in her eyes, and suddenly Cam knew that she'd been here long enough to see Blaze and Toni emerge--and to let them go by. Biding her time, no doubt. "I came to watch you."

Cam folded her arms, trying very hard not to smile. Because it wasn't funny. She was being stalked. She was being stalked by a cute, curt, oddly captivating girl who was several years her junior. "Who says I want you to watch me?"

"Well." Heather didn't seem fazed. "You don't usually go easy on the criticism. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted me to get lost, you would have told me by now."

"Maybe I just don't want to hurt your feelings," Cam told her. "In the name of team relations."

Heather smirked. "That'd be a first."

There was an unfortunate amount of truth to that. "So, what are you saying?" she challenged. "You're not afraid of me?"

Heather's expression softened, but her smile didn't fade. "Nope."

The holographic entrance flashed open behind her, casting its bright light over them both and momentarily turning the lake into a mirror. Heather stepped into her, arms wrapping around her before she could protest, muttering something ridiculous: ninja shadow battle. Instead of disappearing the light intensified, overwhelming everything around them until they were standing in the middle of pure white, something solid and featureless under their feet and more of the latter stretching off in every direction.

"What--" Disconcerting didn't begin to describe it. She knew the principle, she could make it work, but she couldn't... not so casually. It wasn't easy, not the way Heather made it look.

"Sorry." Heather really did sound apologetic, but she let go slowly, carefully, like she wasn't sure Cam could stay in the setting without physical contact. She kept her hand on Cam's wrist as she added, "I should have asked, but--you know, the entrance, and... well, I wasn't done."

"Dusty and Shay," Cam muttered. So they'd decided to run after all. She and Heather would be invisible from the holographic entrance now. In fact, from anywhere in the vicinity of where they still, technically, were--

Cam blinked. "That's how you're doing it," she blurted out.

Heather gave her a curious look.

"The invisibility thing," she tried to explain, aware that the fact she had been looking for Heather at every opportunity was going to be difficult to hide if she wanted to get this across. "You're always--" She waved her free hand, a little irritated. "Appearing out of nowhere."

Heather didn't make fun of her. Didn't even bother to deny it. "You can see through regular shadows," she said simply.

Cam frowned at her. "Not typically, no. That's why ninjas use them." The shadow battle was an entirely different level of stealth, going beyond the visible to the audible and tactile nullification of a person's influence on their environment.

"I didn't mean ninjas in general," Heather said patiently. "I meant you, in particular. You can see through shadows. That's why I stopped using them."

Cam's frown deepened as she considered this. "Is it that important to hide from me?"

"No." Now Heather looked amused. "It's that important to be able to sneak up on you. You have a bad habit of avoiding us sometimes."

Oh. That was true. She hadn't expected them to notice, let alone care. In the face of some fairly convincing evidence to the contrary, all she could do was deny it. "I don't avoid you," she told Heather.

"Not anymore," Heather agreed. A smug look made her lips twitch. "I've been practicing."

She was being stalked. And it was... sort of flattering.

"I'm fine," Cam said, tugging a little on Heather's gentle grip to show what she meant. She was pretty sure she could stay in any environment Heather could create, contact or no.

"Yeah?" Heather's fingers slid down over her wrist, crawling over her palm to twine through hers. They were holding hands, and Cam couldn't take her eyes off of the picture their fingers made. "Fine enough to go out with me tonight?"

Until Heather asked something like that, which made her lift her gaze instantly. She searched that inquisitive expression for something more than had been in the words. It was the same question Heather had asked last night, albeit with a more specific timeframe, and her reasoned response was--as expected--exactly the opposite of the instinctive one she'd wanted to give at the time.

That didn't make her reasoned response better. Just more... reasoned. There was still something to be said for instinct, after all. And her instinct said that Heather was sincere. Serious. Maybe even worth it. Worth the possibility of failure, worth the worry of success... worth the risk of involvement.

Or maybe she was just lonely. Most of the ninjas she knew were gone, imprisoned by Lothar. There was so little she could say to her college friends these days. She spent almost all of her time in the company of the Rangers: high schoolers and minimum wage workers with whom she had almost nothing in common beyond the bond of the Power.

Except, maybe, this. With Heather. Someone who, at the very least, understood why Toni would never be a real source of friction between her and Blaze. Was it such a bad idea to spend time with someone who knew where she was coming from?

"Yes," she heard herself saying. Yes, but. She would do it anyway. She would do it anyway, see what happened, and if that was it then, if nothing else, she would have something new to worry about. They all would.

Her sense of responsibility melted in the face of Heather's very real and startlingly bright smile. "Great. You want dinner or something? I'm going to go home and change, but I could be back here by, say, seven-thirty."

"Yes to dinner," Cam said slowly, considering the situation. She wasn't sure she wanted to explain what Heather was doing at Ninja Ops at seven-thirty in the evening. "No to coming back here. I'll meet you downtown."

Heather shrugged. "If you want. Tide Dyed okay, or you want something different?"

"No, it's fine." Familiar ground. It eased nerves she hadn't even noticed were there, because there was nothing uncomfortable about Tide Dyed. The team had been there together several times: the food was good, the atmosphere was almost excessively casual, and no one would look at them twice. "I'll be there."

"Cool." Heather flashed another smile in her direction, not as bright but just as warm. It was strange to see unguarded affection on her face. Even with Blaze, she always seemed so conscious of other people's eyes, like...

Well. Like she was a 22-year-old girl with no family support, fighting for a place in the male-dominated world of motocross. Like letting on that she cared--about anything or anyone--was a sign of weakness. It wasn't the first time Cam had wondered if Heather's gruffness protected her and her younger sister professionally as much as Blaze's charm ran interference for them socially.

"So," Heather was saying as she let go of Cam's hand. "How far do you have run?" Their white nothingness dimmed gradually into something more recognizable, the forested hillside and holographic waterfall coming into focus again. They were alone beside the lake.

"Three miles." Cam studied their surroundings carefully, like she could tell which way the others had gone just by looking. She might be able to, if she looked closely enough. And if she just happened to go the other way, that might forestall questions about how she had started out in front of Dusty and Shay and ended up behind them.

"Only three miles?" Heather scoffed. "Sensei's going easy on you."

"You weren't the one taking on the rest of the team this afternoon," Cam retorted. "And I don't see you running."

"Might as well," Heather offered. "Maybe it'll mean fewer pushups when Sensei finds out I skipped."

Cam blinked. Was she volunteering to run? And "when" Sensei found out? Why not "if"? "What makes you think I'm going to tell her?" she wanted to know.

"I don't." Heather sounded annoyingly sure of herself. "I just figure it's better not to lie without assuming I'll be found out. Makes it easier to keep my stories straight later."

And she would know. Cam bit her lip to keep from saying it aloud. "I wouldn't turn down the company," she said instead.

"They went right," Heather told her. "Blaze and Toni," she added, seeing Cam's blank look. "If we go the other way, maybe they won't notice we were hiding from them."

Something about the phrasing triggered an automatic protest. "I wasn't--"

"Fine," Heather interrupted, just as the realization dawned that, yes, she was. "If we go the other way, maybe they won't notice I was hiding from them."

"And that I was actually the last person to start running," Cam finished. An awkward almost-apology for her outburst. "Unless we're the last ones back, in which case it's going to be pretty obvious."

Heather gave her a speculative look. "I guarantee that I'm faster than any of the Winds," she informed Cam. "What about you?"

Cam raised her eyebrows. "You do realize that I'm technically a Wind Ranger."

Heather just smirked. "You said it. Not me."

"And," Cam continued calmly, "that I'm at least dressed for this activity."

Heather's sly shrug was anything but casual. "Speed trumps gear," she teased, and suddenly Cam had a vivid mental picture of Blaze dancing backwards, mocking Toni until he gave chase.

"My god," she muttered. "I'm actually falling for the dubious Bradley charm."

She felt herself blushing when Heather laughed. She probably shouldn't have said that aloud. But Heather was just standing there, poised to move... grinning like she'd already won. Waiting anyway.

Waiting for her to accept the challenge, despite its apparently foregone conclusion.

"You're on," she told Heather.

So they circled the academy counterclockwise, and sure enough, they passed Toni and Blaze less than halfway around. Heather took more heckling for her absence during training than questions for her sudden appearance at the end of it. They made it almost two miles before they encountered Shay and Dusty, who were still walking.

"Hey," Shay defended them when Cam asked if that counted as running for first years. "Sensei didn't say how long we were supposed to take. Just how far we had to go."

"Yeah," Dusty added. "Maybe it turns out to be some secret samurai thing where the more time you spend, the more bonus points you get."

Cam couldn't help rolling her eyes. "It's a three-mile run, Dusty. There's no secret to it."

"Says you," Dusty replied, undeterred.

"Hey," Heather called impatiently. She wasn't immediately visible anymore, but her voice came from somewhere farther along the trail. "This is just proving my point, you know."

Cam had to work to catch up, and she had to admit that she pushed herself to keep up with Heather's ground-eating lope. The Crimson Ranger had a stride no girl was entitled to. But when they were finally on the downhill stretch--literally, as they reached the academy valley--they saw Blaze and Toni approaching from the other side, and Cam was breathless but somehow she found enough to laugh. She really had been running with the fastest Ranger on the team.

Cam slowed her steps to watch Heather fly down the hill with a reckless abandon that spoke of sprained ankles and bruised everything if she tripped. The only other long-haired Ranger had a braid that hung halfway down her back, neat and wild behind her as she let gravity lengthen her stride. The clothes she'd worn to work, to the park, and now to the academy must be looser than they looked because she acknowledged no constraint.

She circled at the bottom of the slope, throwing her hands over her head as she turned to wave back at them. It was a victorious gesture, and the implication was clear. She had won.

Blaze wasted no time disputing her claim. "Try doing that after a full training session!" she yelled, and Heather threw back a different gesture--one that would get her fifty pushups, easy, if Sensei saw it anywhere on campus.

The walk down the hill at least meant that Cam wasn't gasping by the time she caught up with Heather, but she didn't harbor any illusions. "You were right," she said grudgingly. She was a little dismayed to be saying it in front of their teammates, but fair was fair. "You're faster than the Winds."

Toni immediately protested the idea that it had been a race, saying that none of them had run full-out, but Heather ignored him. "You kept up," she told Cam. And there was an assessing look on her face that gave more weight to her words.

So Cam dropped the comment she'd been about to make and remarked only, "I always do."

This drew a smile, and as they walked back toward Ninja Ops Blaze and Toni spent too much time complaining about the both of them to question what Heather was doing there in the first place. When they found a pot of tea but no Sensei waiting for them underground, Cam decided she'd been right all along. There was definitely a conspiracy at work.

She was starting to wonder, though, if the world might be conspiring for her rather than against her.