The three of them listen intently. No one says anything after I finish. Instead, Taeyo silently releases my water shackles, while Sora swings open the white wooden door with a flick of her hand. With that, the three of them walk toward the exit, and Sora says, “Follow me.”

The door leads straight out into fresh air, and to my surprise, I’m in the upper branches of a tree. The room is suspended up here. It’s a windowless rectangular tree house with a wooden staircase spiraling down to the forest floor.

When my feet land on the soil and I look back up, I frown. All I see is a leafy canopy.

“Wait, where did the building go?” I ask, confused.

“All the campus structures have camouflaging mirrors on the outside,” explains Austin, “so they blend in with the forest.”

“The campus? Is this a school?”

Austin nods. “That and more. The campus is what we call our entire network of tree houses. The water-training room is merely one of the buildings. We have offices, dorms, cafés, restaurants—everything you need to live, study, and work here.”

I raise my eyebrows. I don’t want to admit it, but I’m low-key impressed. I wish Emmett could be learning this, too. I look around for him, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Sora had said he wouldn’t get far. What did that mean? I hope he’s okay, wherever he is.

“I have some business to attend to,” Austin says, turning to leave in the opposite direction. “But Sora and Taeyo will give you the grand tour.”

He hurries off, and Taeyo smiles at me shyly. “Come on, we’ll show you around.”

Sora and Taeyo lead me through the trees until we get to a sparser part of the forest that opens onto a lake. Sora rubs her wrists and chants some incantations, and a nearby fig tree stretches and morphs until it transforms into a staircase up to the canopy.

“Can you see the building?” Taeyo asks, his eyes sparkling.

I squint and look up. Now that I know the walls are covered in mirrors, I can just make out the edges of a structure above us. This one is much larger than the one we were in earlier.

Sora twists her wrist, and leafy green vines wrap around the staircase’s banister, weaving themselves all the way to the top. I admit it’s a nice finishing touch, giving it a fairy-tale look.

“When the council excommunicated us, we had to reestablish ourselves from the ground up,” Sora explains, as we climb the newly built stairs. “We and all the other Horangi clan chapters around the world lost our Gi, our access to the temple, and with it, our library and source of knowledge. So we had to adapt. It was the only way to survive.”