Most of them already knew who she was, which surprised her. She’d accidentally made more friends than she’d been aware of. If things hadn’t been so serious, she would have stopped and marveled at that. They all accepted her as a fellow lightning guardian, and they were willing to follow her to hear what she had to say.

Her gang of about a dozen filed after her, into her room, where Pixit and Chauda were curled around Jyx, comforting her. Jyx dashed the tears away from her eyes and jumped to her feet. “Mina!”

Mina put her finger to her lips and herded everyone inside.

Jyx’s eyes grew wider as she saw so many kids crowding into their room, but she didn’t say another word. Mina closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She met the eyes of each person in the room. To her surprise, they were all waiting for her to speak, expectant looks on their faces.

“I am the one who wrote the words and drew the pictures,” Mina said. “I crossed the border, by accident at first and on purpose later. I’ve met outsiders from an outpost on the other side of the mountains. They bandaged Pixit when he was hurt and helped me get home.”

“They fed us tea,” Ferro piped up.

Jyx shushed him. “Mina’s speaking.”

He shut up.

“And they’re going to die if we don’t help them. They aren’t expecting the festival to happen tomorrow, and they won’t have time to evacuate. They’ll try to ride it out, but the outpost’s storm bunkers aren’t strong enough to withstand a ten-year storm.”

“But Mina, we can’t stop the festival,” Kita said. “We tried. Really, really tried. But the school is sealed. We can’t even send balloons.”

“But we can still fly,” Mina said.

“Not everywhere,” Zek said. “Even if we flew as far as we could and talked to as many guardians as we could reach, it wouldn’t be enough.”

“Plus we’d be caught,” Ferro said.

Mina shook her head as everyone began talking at once.

Jyx shushed them again, and they fell silent.

“It’s too late to stop the festival,” Mina said. “And you’re right—​we can’t fly to enough places in Alorria to convince enough people of the truth before the festival. But we can fly to Dern. And we can save those people from the storm.”

She saw disbelief on their faces. “But we can’t stop a storm!” Kita scoffed.

Mina noticed that Jyx, out of all of them, was smiling. “You have another plan,” Jyx said. “I’m in.”

“You didn’t hear what my plan is yet,” Mina said.

“Don’t care,” Jyx said. “I’m in.”