Chapter Two: Cell Phones and Circuit Breakers
Later, it would seem ironic that her first thought on waking was that she shouldn't have left Cam alone. Especially since it was Blaze who woke her up, shoving her door open and saying her name sharply in the darkness, and the urgency brought her awake with a gasp. Something was wrong. Something that probably involved them. And her first thought was for Cam.
"Heather, come on, we've gotta go," Blaze was saying. She hadn't even bothered to come all the way into the room, well aware that her sister didn't need any more incentive than her voice. Or maybe not so aware, because then she added, "It's Cam."
Heather was already out of bed, grabbing for her morpher when she heard those words. Blaze was on the phone. Heather had left her phone at Ninja Ops with Cam when the power outage meant the Green Ranger had no way to call out, so anyone trying to reach her would have to go through Blaze. Anyone like Cam.
"Give me that," she said, slapping her morpher on her wrist as she joined the shadow in the doorway. Blaze handed over the phone without a word, and she pressed it to her ear. "Cam?"
"Heather, you need to get out of there right now," Cam's voice told her. "Get out of the apartment. Hang up the phone and just go. Now."
Heather nodded at Blaze and they headed for the front door. She grabbed her backpack off the floor by the couch as they passed, realized Blaze already had hers over one shoulder when it caught the orange glint from a streetlight outside, and demanded of Cam, "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine!" Cam exclaimed, obviously impatient. "They're in your building, Heather, go out the side door!"
"Whoa!" Blaze slammed the front door shut again and Heather heard the deadbolt slide into place. The chittering noise of kelzaks came through clearly in the quiet, intensifying as they swarmed the entrance on the other side. "Wrong door!"
"Kitchen," Heather snapped, but Blaze was already turning away, heading for the outside exit without having to be told. "Cam, we've got kelzaks at our front door."
"I know!" Cam's voice was laced with frustration. "Why do you think I'm calling you at two o'clock in the morning! Hang up and run!"
"Morphers?" Heather asked tersely. It was a redundant question, maybe, since if they were back online Cam wouldn't be using her cell phone. But she had to ask.
"No go," Cam confirmed. "Just get out!"
"We're out, we're out," she promised, practically tripping over Blaze as they flew down the stairs. She slowed just a little as she heard a crash from the apartment behind them. "Cam, they just broke down our door."
"Don't you dare turn around." Cam's voice was dangerous and angry and maybe a little bit afraid. "They're not out to hurt you, Heather; they're trying to abduct you. And I can't do that again."
"What?" She couldn't totally process that, not and follow Blaze at the same time, but she got that Cam wanted them to run so that's what they were going to do. "Hey, hey, truck," she called, snapping her fingers at Blaze when her sister lifted her hands to streak. "Come on."
Her keys were clipped to the outside of her backpack, but she didn't have time to yank them free before kelzaks appeared on the street in front of them and heavy steps started to clatter down the stairs behind them. "Shit," she muttered. "This is not good."
Blaze was just a few steps ahead of her, but it was enough to make a difference when she dove into the driver's seat and slammed the door behind her. The truck roared to life while Heather swung her backpack around with a speed that hopefully made up for its lack of weight. All she needed was for one of the kelzaks to grab it and unbalance her right now.
The garish red and black soldiers looked almost colorless in the washed out incandescence of the streetlights. They jumped out of the way of her improvised sling, and she used the momentum to counterbalance her kick as she knocked two of them to the ground. The revving of an engine and the sound of jamming gears drowned out their chitters, and wow, they scrambled when the truck came plowing through.
Heather tossed her bag over the side and grabbed the tailgate to help steady her running jump. One foot on the rear bumper, one shoulder over the back, and she winced as she slammed down into the truck bed and rolled, but it was better than being thrown out. "Go, go!" she yelled at Blaze through the back window.
"If you get yourself killed," she heard Cam whispering when she realized she still had the phone against her ear, "I'll never speak to you again. I can't even come help you because I'm too scared to hang up the phone."
"Cam?" She braced one foot against a bike support and the other against the tire well as she pushed herself into a sitting position. "You still there?" There were the kelzaks, chasing after the truck on foot, falling behind as it peeled away. She lifted one hand to wave back at them mockingly.
"Are you?" Cam countered, her voice loud and exasperated again. No trace of a tremble. No sign of the scared whispers that that had tickled her ear a moment before.
"Seems like," Heather agreed, craning her neck to stare into the cab. Blaze lifted her gaze at exactly that moment, catching her eye in the rearview, and she took her right hand off the wheel to flash Heather a thumbs-up.
Heather gave it right back, telling Cam, "We're in the truck, heading... I dunno, into town, I guess. You want that we should turn around, meet you somewhere? What's going on, anyway?"
"No, keep going," Cam's voice said after the briefest hesitation. "I'll meet you--outside the shop. We're going to have to get the others too, but I can't alert them without waking up their families."
"Dusty's got a cell," Heather told her, leaning forward to knock on the back window. "And Toni's alone this weekend, remember?"
"Which would be great, if I had power to the mainframe and I could access their records," Cam snapped. "All of that stuff is offline right now."
Heather held the phone away from her face as the window slid open, and she yelled to Blaze, "Cam's gonna meet us outside Storm Chargers!"
Blaze gave her another thumbs-up. She left the window open, though Heather doubted she could hear much of the conversation. The turned right at the next stop and Heather switched the phone to her other hand as she was pressed up against the side of the truck. "We're on our way," she told Cam.
"Any sign of kelzaks?" Cam wanted to know.
"Nah." Heather glanced back automatically, but it was just lights and empty sidewalks and the occasional car. "We left 'em in the dust."
"All right." There was a momentary pause. "I'm going to hang up and streak to the shop. I'll call you when I get there."
"Hey, Cam, wait," Heather said quickly. It would only take her a minute to get down the mountain, but if her warning was any indication, seconds could matter. "You've got Dusty's number. It's in my cell. And Blaze has Toni's--hang on."
She couldn't check Blaze's "phone book" while she was using the cell, but when she banged on the window again and asked Blaze rattled off the number like she was reading it from the back of her hand. Heather repeated it for Cam, then added, "You want me to call him?"
"Yeah." Cam sounded distracted. "I'll call Dusty before I head to Storm Chargers. Be careful."
"Sure," Heather agreed without really thinking about it. "And hey, Cam? Thanks for the warning."
"No problem," Cam's voice assured her.
There was a long moment where neither of them hung up, and Heather shifted a little. There was nothing not weird about this. Kelzaks in the middle of the night. Kelzaks at their apartment. Running from kelzaks instead of fighting them. No morphers, no instant communication, no way to know what Lothar was up to.
Cam's voice whispering in her ear the whole time, barely heard, almost subliminal until she hit the truck bed and realized that Cam was telling her not to die. Great. Just great. Now she and Blaze couldn't even take a few foot soldiers?
"They're not out to hurt you--they're trying to abduct you. And I can't do that again."
All she knew to say was, "I'll see you at the shop."
"Right." The word came back like there hadn't been a pause. "Bye."
"See you," Heather repeated. She hung up with a frown, but she didn't waste any time finding Toni's home number and hitting the "call" button. If they had time to figure out what was going on, Cam would have told them already.
"Hey," Heather said when Toni picked up. He'd beaten the answering machine by a couple of rings and he sounded totally awake. "It's Heather. Our morphers are offline and the kelzaks are acting weird. Cam says to get out of your house."
"Get out of the house?" Toni sounded startled. "Why?"
"They just broke down the door of our apartment," Heather informed her. "We're on our way to Storm Chargers. Cam's gonna meet us there."
"Are you guys okay?" From the background noise Toni was at least moving, and that had to be good. "Why aren't we meeting at Ninja Ops?"
"Me and Blaze are fine." They were in sight of Storm Chargers now, and Heather tried to lean far enough that she could get a good look. If Cam was there already, she was invisible. "Power's out at Ninja Ops. Electra Volt sabotaged your zord. Cam hasn't been able to get the mainframe back up yet."
It finally occurred to Heather to wonder how Cam had known where the kelzaks were if she didn't have any power. She'd gotten so used to Cam knowing everything that she didn't question it anymore. But, seriously... she had known when they were in the building?
"Wait, what?" Toni demanded. "What's wrong with my zord? And how can the power be out? I thought Ninja Ops ran on generator power."
"Would you leave already?" She was starting to get how Cam had felt, before. "If they found us that easily, you can bet they won't have any trouble tracking you. Cam thinks they're out for hostages," she added as an afterthought. For whatever reason.
As the truck slowed to a full stop, Cam appeared in front of the building. Heather happened to be looking in the right direction when she did it, and she smiled at the way light just seemed to find Cam in the shadows. Quiet. Not showy. But she wasn't there and then she was. Totally definitive.
"I'm leaving," Toni was saying. "I'm just getting some stuff. Is this one of the times when we're allowed to streak for the betterment of humanity, or not?"
Heather shrugged. "Cam did," she offered, pushing herself up and perching on the edge of the truck while she swung first one leg and then the other over the side. "I'm pretty sure if it keeps a Ranger from being captured by Lothar, humanity is better off."
"Is that Toni?" Blaze wanted to know. "Let me talk to him."
"Blaze wants to talk to you," Heather added. "Get out of the house, Toni." She handed the phone to her sister without waiting for an answer.
"You all right?" Cam asked as she jumped to the ground. "What are you, an underwear model now?"
Heather stared at her, bemused, before it occurred to her that she was still wearing her pajamas. "Sorry I didn't have time to get dressed," she said, rolling her eyes. "My sister woke me up in the middle of the night with this crazy phone call, debatably intelligent aliens started pounding on our door, and I had a voice in my ear yelling at me to run--"
"Yes, okay, I get it," Cam interrupted, pressing her fingers to her temple. She was still wearing the same clothes she'd worn to dinner, which wasn't really that surprising considering the current condition of Ninja Ops, and Heather put a hand on her shoulder without thinking about it.
Cam dropped her hand and stepped forward to hug her without another word. Heather wrapped her arms around her, rubbing her back gently, aware as always of the tension in Cam's shoulders. She might as well be carrying the entire world. And Heather knew what that was like, because she was an older sister, right? But all she had to do was keep Blaze safe. Cam kept all of them alive.
"I have to go get Shay," Cam murmured, pulling away too soon.
Heather let her go, but she didn't bother to hide her skepticism. "You're the only one who has any idea what's going on. The only thing you have to do is stay here and fill the rest of us in. I'll get Shay."
Cam looked rebellious, but occasionally Heather got it right and this was one of those times. "Fine," she said at last. Then she added, "See if you can get her to loan you some clothes while you're there."
Heather rolled her eyes. "Funny."
She took off before Cam could continue her diatribe against pajamas that were, objectively speaking, perfectly appropriate. So she wore boxers to bed. Girls' boxers, admittedly, which did tend toward the short, but she had on a tank top too and maybe she wouldn't wear it to work but it wasn't like there was anything wrong with it. The real problem seemed to lie in the perception of her pajamas, rather than with the pajamas themselves.
Or maybe "problem" was the wrong word. She could see Cam's apparent conviction that she was half-naked working to her advantage at some point in the near future. Assuming they ever got rid of these supposedly kidnapping kelzaks and managed to lose the rest of the team somehow.
She regretted even thinking the words when she pressed her hands up against Shay's window a few moments later. Peering in underneath, she saw nothing but a rumpled and very empty bed. Not conclusive, maybe. But not exactly encouraging, either.
It took her only seconds to search the rest of the house. Shay wasn't there. That was the bad news. The good news was that her family was there, sleeping the sleep of the uninterrupted, and Heather couldn't find anything to indicate that kelzaks had been and gone, let alone that they might have fought someone there--especially a Ranger--hard enough to win.
She was torn. If Shay had snuck out, she might yet come back home tonight and run into kelzaks without warning. On the other hand, she might run into kelzaks somewhere else, and without power at Ninja Ops they had no way to trace her. Either way, she wouldn't be able to call for help.
If Heather waited for her, though, she wouldn't even be able to check in with the rest of the team to let them know what she was doing. That was what she got for leaving her cell phone with Cam, and that was ultimately the deciding factor. They were going to worry about Shay no matter what. Better not waste energy worrying about Heather too. Not when there wasn't anything she could do here anyway.
She returned to an empty street outside a deserted Storm Chargers.
Her first instinct was to leave, to get the hell out of there before whatever had happened to the others happened to her too. She turned in a tight circle, looking for anything that might catch her eye before she took off--the truck was gone--and she'd lifted her hands to streak when she heard a whisper that made her relax abruptly. Her name. That was all it said and suddenly she was completely here instead of a split second from gone.
"Heather," Cam called again, soft in the stillness, not even as loud as the hum of the streetlights. Heather traced the sound to the side of the building: the same shadows Cam had come from when the truck first pulled up outside the shop. Except that now she wasn't stepping out of them.
Heather went to her instead. It crossed her mind as she did that she might be significantly easier to abduct than she used to be. It must have been Cam's warning about the kelzaks earlier: she was thinking about it, and there had been a time when only Blaze would prompt that kind of unquestioning response from her. Now she would walk into a dark alley at night because a voice that sounded like her girlfriend's had called her name.
It was Cam, of course. If Heather had actually doubted it, she would have been more careful. Probably. But there was Cam, strands of hair escaped from her neat ponytail, a flush in her cheeks, and the vividly bright look she always seemed to get from fighting. Or kissing. Alive in a way she wasn't at the computer, no matter how much she insisted that she liked the work.
"What happened?" Heather demanded, reaching for her instinctively. She took Cam's hands, turning them over and inspecting her skin in the negligible light. Scrapes, bruises, any kind of swelling would make Cam's life at the keyboard hell for days. Heather knew how much she hated to even spar without bracers.
"Kelzaks," Cam said briefly. She didn't protest the treatment or the inspection, but she did offer, "Everyone's okay. Where's Shay?"
"Gone," Heather answered. Finding nothing wrong with her fingers, she let go of them reluctantly. She did lift one hand to brush a strand of hair back behind Cam's ear, and Cam didn't complain about that either. "I don't know where. The rest of her family's at the house, asleep, but she's not there.
"Her bed was made," she added, before Cam could ask. "Wherever she is, I don't think she's been to sleep yet. And there wasn't anything messed up, you know, like she'd been snatched or something."
"I can't believe we don't have any way to contact her," Cam muttered, obviously frustrated. "I should have put the morphers on an independent power supply months ago."
"They were on an independent power supply," Heather reminded her. "How many different circuits do you need at an off-the-grid base, anyway?"
"More than we have, apparently." Cam still didn't look happy, but she wasn't snapping yet so hopefully that meant they weren't totally screwed. "I sent the others on ahead in the truck to draw the kelzaks off while I waited for you. We'd better catch up."
"What about Shay?" Heather wanted to know.
"Maybe one of the others will have some idea where she might have gone," Cam said with a sigh. "If not, we'll just have to hope she's smart enough to head for Ninja Ops when she realizes her morpher doesn't work."
"And that the kelzaks don't get to her first," Heather said grimly.
"Obviously." Now Cam sounded angry, and she felt bad. None of this was Cam's fault, but she would assume responsibility, like always. "Leave it to Lothar," she was muttering, "to come up with a whole new brand of evil on a day when we've already fought off more aliens than--"
Cam stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening as they wandered a little. Seeing something that wasn't there, Heather knew. Turning to look for the idea that had just invaded Cam's brain wouldn't do her any good. "What?" she prompted instead.
"What if it isn't Lothar?" Cam said suddenly. "What if it's one of our other alien visitors? What if someone knocked her out of the picture, or got on her good side somehow, and now they're calling the shots in her army?"
"Who?" Heather asked, frowning. "Skyler was on our side. And he's gone now, anyway. Shay destroyed Vexacas. Who does that leave?"
"Shay destroyed Vexacas' ship," Cam corrected. "Who knows what kind of survival contingencies she had. Even Lothar's got decent teleportation capability... and this kind of attack definitely isn't her style."
"Maybe she got tired of going big," Heather argued. "She can only supercharge a certain number of people at once, right? Either a general or two, or a giant alien, or a bunch of kelzaks. She's tried the generals and the giant aliens. Maybe she's testing out groups of supercharged kelzaks."
"At night?" Cam countered. "At your apartment? After knocking out all our morphers? That wasn't a random attack to lure you into morphing. That was part of a carefully thought out plan. Not what we usually see from Lothar."
Heather eyed her, considering the possibility. "So you think Vexacas is behind this."
"I think Lothar is crazy," Cam replied, "but oddly consistent. This attack doesn't fit the pattern."
"Yeah," Heather agreed. That, at least, was not contestable. "Okay. Speaking of that," she continued. "How did you know to warn us about the kelzaks at our apartment?"
She expected a brushoff. An easy explanation, something typically Cam, probably involving power at Ninja Ops that wasn't completely gone after all. An independent circuit she'd forgotten to brag about, maybe, or a jerry-rig that had gotten the scanners online at just the right moment. Heather wouldn't put any kind of coincidence past her, not after what she'd seen.
Cam hesitated, though, and Heather's curiosity spiked. Not something typical after all, because when was the last time Cam had been reluctant to reiterate her genius? "Cam?" she prodded.
When it came, the response was the last thing she expected. "You'll laugh," Cam muttered, more petulantly than Heather had ever heard her.
And that was totally unfair, because how could she not grin at that tone of voice? Cam gave her an irritated look, and Heather pointed at her before she could say anything. "You set me up," she informed Cam. "You can't tell me I'm going to laugh and then expect me to keep a straight face."
Especially not with that tone of voice, she added silently. Cam was lucky her first reaction hadn't been, aww. She was disturbingly cute when she let her discomfort show. Where most people just looked awkward, Cam looked charmingly flustered. And if she knew it, if she was ever deliberately seductive in any way, Heather hadn't been able to tell.
"I've been having these dreams," Cam said, not looking at her. "About you."
She didn't sound very happy about it, Heather decided. Vaguely sullen, actually, which was very Cam. Probably not a good time to tell her it went both ways, then. She could remember dreams about Cam that dated back to the week they'd met... not that they'd been particularly good dreams. At first.
"Not good ones," Cam continued, and Heather blinked.
"I had a dream about you fighting kelzaks," she went on. And just as Heather was going to shrug it off--who didn't dream about fighting kelzaks every now and then?--she added, "With Charlotte. At her house."
Heather frowned. Her little sister, whom Cam had only met a handful of times, had no connection to kelzaks beyond a bizarre and still unexplained infestation of alien foot soldiers in her bedroom that one time. So, weird. But relevant? Not so much.
"I had a dream about your grandmother attacking you," Cam said with a sigh. "I dreamed about you being trapped in that stupid lab, and I dreamed about you crashing that bike. I also dreamed about you fighting kelzaks on the beach when you couldn't call your zord."
"Okay," Heather said, eyeing her. So Cam was obsessing about stuff that went wrong. Nothing new there. But... "I didn't think you'd been to bed yet. You fall asleep at the computer again?"
"I haven't slept since last night," Cam told her. "I'm dreaming these things before they happened. Including the way you and Blaze were cut off from your zords today. And the way you were chased out of your apartment tonight."
Heather considered that. "So now you're psychic or something." It didn't seem as strange as it probably should have, all things considered.
Cam managed a small shrug. "Only for you, apparently."
"I can deal with that," Heather decided. If Cam was going to do crazy stuff, after all, it might as well be for her. Right?
Cam raised an eyebrow, studying her. "You're taking this very well."
She figured it was safe to smile again. "Like it's so weird compared to the rest of my life. I train in the ruins of a secret ninja academy and I fight evil aliens in my spare time. So my girlfriend has psychic dreams. No big."
Something occurred to her just as Cam finally cracked a smile, and she asked, "Hey, did you dream anything else?"
Cam's expression froze, and Heather added hastily, "I mean, because you were afraid of us getting snatched. You told us not to fight. Why? Was that a dream too?"
"No," Cam said slowly. "Yes. I don't know."
Heather waited a second before commenting, "Well, you've covered all the bases."
Cam's smile actually returned at that, and Heather relaxed a little. "I can't tell," she admitted. "I can't tell which dreams are just dreams and which dreams are... Well. Psychic."
"So yes, then," Heather said, watching her reaction carefully. "You did dream about us getting kidnapped. By Lothar?"
"I don't know," Cam said impatiently. "It's not that... specific. I just saw kelzaks at your door, I knew you couldn't morph, and then I had this impression that you were trapped. Not at the apartment," she added. "Somewhere else. Somewhere dark. That's all I know."
"With Blaze?" Heather wanted to know.
"I don't know," Cam murmured. She was avoiding Heather's gaze again. "I think so."
Damn. That didn't sound good. On the other hand, if this was the first time Cam had actively tried to stop one of her dreams from happening, maybe they didn't have anything to worry about. Maybe her warning had already changed it, kept it from coming true.
"Well," she told Cam lightly. "So far so good."
Cam let out her breath in a huff, though whether amusement or exasperation it was hard to tell. "We should go back to Ninja Ops. The power's out, but at least the kelzaks won't be able to get in. I should be able to get the generators back online in a matter of hours."
"That where you sent the others?" She figured, but with Cam, it paid to make sure.
Cam nodded. "You couldn't have left the truck here anyway. If Kenny comes in early, he'd see it and wonder what's going on."
She really didn't want this to take all night. She wasn't going to say it aloud, since she knew perfectly well that Cam pulled regular all-nighters to keep them from having to deal with shit like this. But she and Blaze had to be at work by seven. They could do it on no sleep if they had to, but they couldn't afford to be late.
"Two hours," Cam said quietly. "Give me two hours to get the generators back up. Maybe less, if the Winds are any help at all. You and Blaze can try to get some sleep at Ninja Ops in the meantime."
"Yeah, right," Heather scoffed. She should probably be disturbed that Cam's psychic-ness now apparently extended to her waking hours, but it wasn't like Cam knowing everything was new. "We're helping."
Or they would be if she ever got over her shock at seeing Ninja Ops undisguised and unpowered, obvious even in the shadows of night. Her streak ended a couple of seconds before Cam's, and for that brief moment she stood alone by a lake that should have been dwarfed by a holographic cliff. The waterfall that typically appeared to feed the lake had fallen silent, and the valley that had once been the Wind Ninja Academy lay spread out on the opposite shore--visible to anyone who cared to look.
"Weird, isn't it?" Cam's voice came from right beside her. "In all my life, I've never seen it like this."
They were barely seeing it now. It was dark, lit only by stars and elements. Cam's element was earth, where Heather's was air... they were probably seeing two totally different scenes right now. Two scenes with one important similarity: the lack of the academy's cloak.
"Okay." Shay's voice came from somewhere to her left. "One of you want to tell me what's going on?"
"Shay?" Not that psychic, then, because Cam actually sounded surprised.
"Hey, you're all right." Heather nodded to the shadow now stepping out of the trees, dark skin and cornrows absorbing what little light there was. "I went by your house, but you'd already taken off."
"Yeah, turns out Skyler can tell when kelzaks are coming." Shay's tone was a weird combination of baffled and seriously smug. "Also? Check this out?"
Just like that, Shay was gone. In her place was a tiny sphere of light, hovering several feet off the ground. It bobbed higher even as they stared, zipped around them in a circle, and vanished just before Shay reappeared. "Cool, huh? I can fly!"
"Where'd you learn that trick?" Heather demanded. She wanted to fly.
"Present from Skyler," Shay said with a shrug. Her evasiveness countered her enthusiasm a little. "So what happened to the cloak, anyway? Why can we see the academy? Or where the academy used to be, anyway."
"Because the cloak needs power," Cam grumbled. "And there is no power. So. There is no cloak, there are no scanners, there are no lights. And also, your morpher won't work."
"Really?" Shay didn't bother with why or how, just latched onto the most important detail. "We can't morph when the power goes out? That seems bad."
"Of course you can morph," Cam snapped. "You just can't use your morpher."
Shay and Heather exchanged glances. Heather knew better, but Shay just had to ask. "The difference being?"
"The Ranger powers aren't electrical," Cam said, in that tone of voice that conveyed a roll of her eyes better than the actual expression. "And you don't need the morphers to access them. The morphers are just a... a prop, a focus tool."
"Concentration aid," Heather remarked, mostly to herself.
"A concentration aid," Cam repeated, and hey, check it out. Cam was echoing her. "They have a very very small mobile power supply that charges continuously off of a signal transmitted from Ninja Ops. Until that signal stops, and they use up their stored power in a matter of minutes. Now the only way to access your Ranger powers is directly, and none of you are trained for that."
"Wait a minute," Shay interrupted. "None of us? What about you?"
"Fine," Cam admitted grumpily. "I'm not trained for it either. But my morpher generates its own power. It doesn't run off of the Ops signal."
"So it still works," Heather surmised.
Cam nodded once, a sharp movement in the darkness.
"Where is it?" Heather asked, before Shay could jump in. She'd been too close to Cam too recently to not know that she wasn't wearing her amulet. She'd written it off as efficiency: why wear something she couldn't use? But if she could use it, well, that was a different thing entirely.
"I left it with Mom." The reply was so matter-of-fact that Heather wondered what she'd missed. Was there some other dimension where that made sense? Then Cam continued, "The amulet can function as an emergency power source if we need it, and there are a couple of systems already set up to interface with it. Including Ops defenses."
Ah. Reinforce the base. She got it now.
"Oh, hey, there you are!" Dusty's voice was loud and careless as it cut through the night, announcing the rest of the team's approach in a way their stealth couldn't disguise. "Whoa, that's really kind of creepy."
"Yes, thank you, Dusty," Cam said with a sigh. She didn't bother to look around as the rest of the Rangers quietly filled the gaps in their little group. "Reduce a sophisticated evil plot with its widespread ramifications and frankly unknown origin to a single word."
"Yeah, sure, no problem," Dusty agreed amiably. There was an entirely predictable pause, and then she asked, "Uh, what did you just say?"
Heather grinned, because Cam completely bought it and only Blaze's interruption kept her from replying with something drastic. "Is it safe to be here?" her sister wanted to know. "Not to be the voice of doom or anything, but if it's not cloaked, aren't we just leading Lothar straight to Ops?"
"Lothar knows perfectly well where the academy was," Cam told her. "And right now, this is the only truly defensible location we have. Well, this or the zords," she amended, "and I can't get half as much done from the inside of a zord as I can here at Ops."
"Speaking of that." Shay sounded weirdly on edge all of a sudden. "Unless you want to get in some extra hand-to-hand combat training, we need to move."
Cam got it before she did. "Kelzaks?"
It made sense even before Shay confirmed it, and Heather didn't bother to hid her admiration. "That's pretty handy."
Shay flashed a grin in her direction. "You're telling me."
"Wait," Toni broke in. "What are you talking about?"
"Later," Cam said tersely. "Let's go."