Ch 14

Pain.

That was all that Andros could think about as he opened his eyes to the soft lighting of a ship. He struggled to keep them open as his body lay on the cold floor, dampened all over with sweat and heavy from the fight that he just barely recalled. He quickly tried to remember where he was as he fought against common sense to stay low until he had a chance to see what he was up against. But he slowly got to his feet, looking all around him.

The cold, steel interior of the ship was divided by bars, cages for prisoners, in which he was currently locked, he realized. Andros ignored the lightheadedness that fought to return him to the floor and continued to look around. This had to be Dark Specter's ship, he concluded as a trail of smeared blood leading from his cell caught his eye. He quickly looked down at himself, but he was still morphed. Now he could focus his fear on who the blood had belonged to and where they were now.

In an attempt to keep his mind focused instead of reeling in panic, Andros looked to the other cells across from his, hoping that the other Astrorangers were there. Someone was lying facedown in one of the cells, but he could not make out which ranger it might have been. But his eyes rested on the platinum blonde figure next to the ranger.

"Lyell…" Andros whispered to himself as her lifeless body lay crumpled against the bars of the cell. But he determined that he did not have time to grieve for her now and he looked to the other cells. There were still three rangers unaccounted for.

Just then, the floors and walls shook as a loud thud echoed within the ship, followed by a single scream. Andros gripped the bars that held him back from heading in the voice's direction as he heard a wet thud and footsteps coming toward him. He hugged his body to the nearest wall that cast a shadow and waited silently as he heard the approaching buzzes of quantrons.

Andros watched from the shadows as a body was dragged piece by piece into the cell next to his and was unnecessarily stacked neatly in the corner of the cell. He turned his head as the last quantron brought in the last of five large pieces of the body. But a sob still managed to escape from him as the thick smell of damp flesh and blood overpowered his senses and the quantrons turned to look into his cell. But seeing nothing except shadows or possibly not feeling threatened by the Red Ranger, the quantrons did nothing and left, their robotic voices fading as they walked away from him.

"Fuso," Andros said softly, lowering his head in shame that he no longer had the stomach to look at the remains of his friend. "You won't die in vain… none of you will."

"Andros?" he heard Zhane whisper to him weakly. "You're… okay?"

"Zhane," Andros breathed as he frantically looked around for him. "Where are you?"

"With my sister," Zhane replied, as Andros looked across him to where Lyell's body had been and where the now conscious Silver Ranger sat stroking her hair. "We're all going to die here, aren't we?"

"Keep it together, Zhane," Andros said firmly. "We have to get out of here."

Another loud scream echoed through the ship and the Silver Ranger cradled his sister in his arms even tighter. Andros quickly checked his holsters for his blasters, which he assumed were gone. They were and he twisted at the bars in front of him, hoping to catch a break somehow. But the bars did not move and Andros ran his fist into them in frustration.

"Zhane, I need your help," Andros said. "You have to put Lyell down and think. Throw some ideas at me, please."

"We have to get the key to the cells from the quantrons," Zhane answered distantly. "Or we wait until they open the doors and fight our way out."

"Do you think you can handle that right now?" Andros asked.

"As long as you don't expect me to leave my sister here," he replied.

"I promise we'll get her out of here." But Andros really did not feel as though he were in a position to promise anything. He could not even guarantee that he would get himself out alive, but Zhane was just barely holding on and needed to hear something positive now. Telling him that they might die in a few minutes was not quite the booster that Zhane would benefit from.

"Have you seen any of the others?"

"That was Jishai screaming a minute ago," Zhane said softly. "But I haven't seen Aeden since –" He stopped as his voice broke and looked down at his sister, shaking his head. "We should have just –"

"Zhane!" Andros shouted, forgetting their current situation for a moment. "There's no time to think about what we should have done. We have to get out of here right now."

The sound of quantrons filled the ship again, followed by the sound of footsteps quickly making their way to the cells. Within seconds, a figure stopped in front of the cell, gripping the bars as he struggled to catch his breath.

"Aeden?" Andros asked, running to the bars.

"Hey, guys," Aeden said, gasping for air, looking over to Zhane. "Been… looking for ya… Glad you're okay… The others… are not."

"We know," Andros said, studying him carefully. "Where's your morpher?"

"Dark Specter… no time… being chased," he replied, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a key. Aeden fumbled with the lock until the cell opened and Andros stepped out.

"We're bringing Lyell with us," Andros said while Aeden opened Zhane's cell lock.

"Fine," Aeden said, putting Lyell on his shoulder. "But we have to go right now."

"Where?" Zhane asked. "How do we get out?"

"Um… back the way I came," he replied. "That's the only way out that I saw."

"Didn't you say something about being chased?" Andros asked.

"By about fifty quantrons, give or take," Aeden said with a nod. "Think we can take em?"

Andros looked to him with a sigh and finally looked up ahead to the hallway that steadily filled with the shadows of quantrons.

"Let's find out," he said.

"Andros?"

Andros raised his head at the sound of Ashley's voice and the incessant ringing of a bell. He looked around him, having forgotten where he was. He just barely remembered walking into a classroom, sitting down at the uncomfortably small desk in which he currently squirmed.

But he was not surprised that he finally tuned out the droning voice of the morning announcements and slipped silently into a world of his own. It was a world that he hated, of course, and one that he had relived many times since it had happened, but anything seemed better than listening to the unenthused buzzing of the school's secretary as she read the lunch menu. Finally he turned to Ashley, hoping to shake away the past for the next six hours.

"Andros, Mr. Young was just asking if you would introduce yourself to the class," Ashley said.

"Oh, okay," he said in a daze as Mr. Young motioned for him to come to the front of the room. He walked silently past three rows of students, finally reaching the front of the room. Andros stood before the seated students, many of whom did not seem interested in him or anything that he might have to say.

"I'm not really sure what to say," Andros said quietly, already beginning to take interest in his own shoes.

"Tell us your name, where you're from," Mr. Young suggested with a smile. "You can't go wrong with the basics."

"Okay," Andros sighed, looking back up at the students. "My name is Andros and I'm in my nineteenth year –"

"Of high school?" a boy in the front row inquired and several people in class erupted into giggles.

"First warning before second period?" Mr. Young asked him. "Are we setting a record today for fastest detention, Sam?"

Sam rolled his eyes as Mr. Young nodded to Andros.

"I'm… nineteen years old," Andros began again, having forgotten proper Earth phrasing for a moment. "And I'm from K –"

"Kayoria!" Ashley interjected loudly, nearly jumping out of her seat and every head turned to her.

"Ashley, I don't think that Andros needs any help telling us where he's from," Mr. Young said.

"Sorry," she replied softly.

"But I must admit that I've never heard of Kayoria," Mr. Young said, walking behind Andros and pulling down a map of the world over the blackboard. "Where is it exactly?"

"You won't find it," Sam said with a smirk. "There's no such place."

Andros turned to the map, silently cursing these unnecessary lies, as he quickly skimmed the colorful countries before him. Finally, he turned back to the class, nothing plausible enough coming to mind. His mind was a complete blank as he looked to the other rangers, who seemed to be just as lost.

"Just point to Loserville and sit down," Sam called out, the classroom filling with the snickering of his friends.

Ashley watched nervously as Andros closed his eyes and let out a breath, bringing a hand up to his head. No, not just his head, she noticed. His fingers ran along the edge of the scar –the scar that he had gotten on Omni-8, the very same scar that he had not mentioned to any of them so far.

Please, please, please, Ashley thought, hoping that he was reading her mind. Please control your temper.

But Andros simply opened his eyes again, his eyes glazed over as they had briefly been on the Simudeck two nights ago and allowing his hand to leave the scar before reaching behind him to grab the pointer by the map.

"Actually," he began, twisting the pointer in his fists. "It is very unlikely that anyone would have ever heard of Kayoria… seeing as how it doesn't exist."

Oh no, Ashley thought, dropping her head into her hands.

"Kayoria exists wherever its people do," Andros continued. "Kayorians are a wandering group of people, not certain of their home but very certain of their beliefs. I call myself a Kayorian out of respect for my people, but it isn't a country."

He paused a minute, glad to see that they were buying it so far. "I suppose that I can't call any one country my home," he continued. "Unfortunately, there are very few countries that will accept our people. Even now, there is fighting between our people and other pl – countries because of just that."

"What do you mean 'fighting'?" Sam asked. "Like war or something?"

"Yeah," he answered. "But there aren't that many of us, so we were driven out of the one place that we were finally happy with settling down in."

"Where?" a girl behind Sam asked, leaning forward in her seat, unable to hide her interest.

"Just a small stretch of land," Andros said, glad to find a tiny loophole in this lying thing. Any bit of truth felt good right now. "Land that didn't belong to any country, just us… But when a bigger colony of people decided to take it from us, we didn't have enough people able to fight for it."

"Without weapons, can you really call it a war?" Sam inquired with a scoff. "I mean, what did you do? Did you push each other back and forth over the property line or did you actually kill anyone?" Sam asked sarcastically, leaning back in his seat.

Andros' eyes glazed over again, this time glistening with tears. The screams of his opponents on Omni-8 immediately came to mind, followed by those of the previous Astrorangers, the memory fresh in his mind from a few moments earlier. If only he had taken charge of his team before the attack, they might still be –

"You don't have to answer that, Andros," Mr. Young said as he watched the pointer snap into two pieces in Andros' shaking hands.

"No," Andros said, his tears suddenly gone as he gripped the wooden pointer halves tightly as he suddenly glared at Sam. "Maybe I should answer him… or maybe I should –"

"Andros," Ashley exclaimed, cutting him off, but not breaking the threatening gaze that he continued to give Sam. "Maybe you should let Mr. Young have his class back now."

Andros nodded, acknowledging her voice but not able to look at her as he and Sam continued staring daggers at one another for a moment longer before Andros made his way to his seat. He could feel the eyes of the other rangers on him, but Andros ignored them as much as he could, their thoughts flooding his mind all at once. As he had expected, they were all thoughts of fear –not of him, but fear that he might blow their big secret.

Andros shook his head, trying to replace their thoughts with Mr. Young's hour-long lecture about symbolism and alliteration in the eight poems that he read aloud. But even those thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a very persistent whisper on his right.

"Andros," Ashley whispered.

He ignored her, focusing instead on how a poem about pudding could possibly be a metaphor for how great life can be.

"Andros," she whispered louder, looking up to find Mr. Young and most of the class staring at her.

"Is everything okay, Ashley?" Mr. Young asked.

"I was just trying to tell Andros that he should go to the nurse," she answered.

Andros looked down at himself, his eyes centering in on the dried blood on his hand and the thin stream of it running down his fingers.

Mr. Young nodded, waiting until Ashley and Andros were out the door before resuming his lecture.

"Where's it coming from?" Ashley asked, hurrying down the hallway with Andros, who insisted on taking his time. Finally, she slowed down until he caught up with her.

"I think it stopped," Andros said softly. "I must have bandaged it too tightly this morning."

"Bandaged what?" she asked, trying to recall if Andros had been hurt fighting Darkonda.

"Nothing," he said, though he pushed up his sleeve as he turned suddenly into the boys' restroom.

Without a second thought, Ashley pushed open the door of the restroom and stepped inside in time to see Andros over the sink, removing a wet bandage from his wrist.

"Well, that explains the long sleeves," Ashley said with a sigh, walking up to him and wetting a few paper towels.

"I thought that you weren't allowed in here," Andros said, gently taking the paper towels from her and wiping the blood from his hand and wrist.

"You're bleeding and you're worried about the sign on the door?"

Andros did not answer, wetting another paper towel to bring to his wrist. But Ashley pulled his hand to her, seeing the three short, deep cuts on his arm.

"Did you do this?" she asked, not able to take her eyes from the wounds.

Again, he did not answer, wondering why people like her and Zhane asked questions to which they already knew the answers.

"So Carlos was right," Ashley said. "Death does stay on your mind a lot, doesn't it?"

"Why wouldn't it?" he finally said, pressing the drying paper towel against his wrist. "I'm constantly surrounded by it."

"No, you're not," Ashley said. "At least, you haven't been for the time that you've been back."

"Yeah, for the two days that I've been here no one has died – the curse is broken," he said sarcastically, rolling his eyes and breezing past her and out of the restroom.

The empty hallway seemed endless as they walked in silence, the two of them unable to avoid glancing at one another. Finally, Andros broke the silence.

"What is it?" he asked.

Ashley waited until his eyes met hers before speaking. "Why did you do it?" she asked.

"I was waiting for that," he said with a sigh. But he did not answer her.

"So, you aren't going to tell me?" Ashley asked.

"I'm not even sure that I know," he replied. "I guess that I just wasn't thinking very clearly."

"Am I going to have to follow you around to make sure that you don't do anything like that again?"

Andros eyed her warily. "Please don't," he said.

"I was kidding," she said with a shrug.

"No, you weren't," Andros replied, shaking his head. "But I have no plans to kill myself in the near future. I'm thinking clearly now and I know where I need to be."

"Here with us, I hope," Ashley said with a small smile that was met with silence.

"For a while, anyway," he determined aloud.

The silence between them resumed for a while longer, the two of them reaching the nurse's office within moments. Andros walked in alone, motioning for Ashley to stay outside the door.

It was not until then that Ashley realized that she had followed him there. The mind reading would take some getting used to, she decided as she stood impatiently outside of the office. He would take some getting used to as well with his secrets.

She still was not sure what had happened back in Mr. Young's class between Andros and Sam. And she was fairly certain that Andros would say little or nothing about it until she and the other rangers shoved words like 'trust' and 'responsibility' down his throat. And even then, he might feel cornered enough to lie to them.

"Lie about what?" Andros asked, closing the door behind him and folding a green pamphlet in half.

Ashley shook her head, waving away his question. "What's that?" she asked instead, flicking the folded pamphlet in his hand.

Andros looked down at the pamphlet and stuffed it in his pants pocket. "Um, the nurse wouldn't let me leave without promising to read something about cutting, so I took one."

"She didn't buy your excuse of not thinking clearly?" Ashley asked.

"No more than you or Zhane," he admitted, starting down the hallway again, a hand on his shoulder stopping him.

"Andros," Ashley said in a voice that was already a little too familiar to him. Maybe not so much familiar as annoying, but likely to be followed by her feelings about something that he did or needed to do. "You wouldn't… I mean –of course, you wouldn't –but you really wouldn't hurt Sam, right?"

Andros closed his eyes and let out a breath as he briefly recalled the incident. If he told Ashley or the rangers that Sam's thoughts were not those of a teenage boy but those of the plotting monster that had kidnapped his sister, they might panic. Besides, there was not much that any of them could do about it as long as their classmates were around except watch him and see what his plan was.

"I don't know," he said, sure that his answer would not help Ashley to trust him. But when he met her eyes, she did not seem too concerned with his response.

"I know that he was being rude, but you looked like you were going to hit him."

"Maybe I was," he said impatiently, turning from her.

"I don't believe that," she said, shaking her head. "And getting mad at me won't make this go away."

He was becoming predictable to her already –not good. But the ground shook violently and Andros quickly abandoned his thoughts. He turned to Ashley, barely seeing her as he felt himself being pulled around a corner and away from the thousands of evacuating students.

"Come on," she was saying over the growing panicked students that suddenly flooded the hallways. "We have to get out of here."

They turned another corner and Ashley pulled him into a room where Carlos, T.J., and Cassie were waiting for them. An explosion sounded followed by the loud, evil laughter that they had become acquainted with and the rangers exchanged glances.

It was him again.

"Let's rocket!" Andros shouted.