When night fell, Sara visited her animal shed.
She cleaned the shed in the mornings, so the only thing for her to do at night was top off the food and water bowls. The reason she stopped by every day was simply to get some hands-on time with her pets.
There was Bernard, the hawk whose unsurpassed valor had ultimately earned him the code name of Insight. There was Aiden, the pigeon whose pudgy figure didn’t stop him from flapping his wings with all his might when he needed to. There was Johnny, the black dog who’d recently grown too big to fit under Sara’s hat anymore. And there were the mice, whose ranks fluctuated so often that none of the other girls could remember them all.
When Sara entered the shed, they all came and nuzzled up to her.
Thankful to be so loved, Sara took a moment to look in the proverbial mirror.
Say for the sake of argument that the average spy had a strength of about ten. If that was the case, then Sara’s strength had to be somewhere around fifty. That was nothing more than a rough estimate, of course, but while she might not have believed in herself, she had faith in Monika’s and Klaus’s abilities, and she had no reason to doubt their evaluations of her. She was, without a doubt, a bona fide prodigy.
The problem was, the strength of people like Heide, Klaus, and Monika was upward of ten thousand.
The gulf there was devastating, but its existence was impossible to deny.
“There are people who compliment me, sure—”
Her quiet murmur filled up the shed.
“—but not even they believe I could ever be better than the boss…”
There was nothing to be done about it, but even though she knew that, waves of frustration and chagrin assaulted her.
What could she do to protect her Lamplight teammates? Not eventually, but now?
As she let out a protracted sigh, she felt something ram into her chest.
“…Mr. Bernard?”
It was her hawk—her most trusted partner. He was flapping his wings around Sara’s belly like a bird possessed. Not just that, but he was hopping up and down as his wings smacked into her.
Then her pigeon, dog, and mice began body-slamming her as well.
“What’s gotten into you all? Come on, Mr. Johnny, Mr. Aiden, Mr. Kevin, and Mr. Colin, that tickles!”
The pigeon plopped itself down on her head, the dog clung to her chest and wagged his tail, and the mice gathered into a group and ran circles around her legs. It was rare for them to dote on her so aggressively.
It was right as Sara smiled and stifled a laugh that she noticed they were all trying to nudge her in the same direction. Her pets were working together and doing everything they could to guide her toward the door.
She cocked her head in puzzlement at their odd behavior. “Where is it you want me to go?”
The moon shone down on the girl and her parade of animals as they marched through the night in a line.
To any onlookers, they would have looked like they just stepped out of a children’s story, but they were fortunate enough not to run into anyone.
Bernard the hawk flew at the front of the procession, and he clearly had a route in mind. Behind him, Johnny the black dog sniffed around for threats while the mice swarmed around Sara’s legs and constantly urged her to go faster. Aiden the pigeon, for his part, didn’t budge from his seat atop Sara’s head.
For once, Sara’s pets were leading her rather than the other way around. The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on her as she continued down the path.
The procession headed away from their base smack-dab in the middle of a port city and toward the mountains. They were moving in the direction of Emai Lake, a popular tourist attraction, though the lake itself was too far away to actually get there on foot.
Buildings became scarcer and scarcer as the animals kept pushing Sara along.
Eventually, Bernard went and landed on the ground.
They’d arrived on an empty plot of land overgrown with weeds. It had probably once been a field, but it had fallen into disrepair from lack of use. There were no buildings on the land, just a wide, vacant space where the vegetation had completely taken over.
“……………It’s a meadow.”
The empty plot wasn’t nearly large enough to be a proper meadow, of course, but Sara intuited what her pets wanted her to see nonetheless. Something unique to her, something instinctual, told her that this was what Bernard had gotten the others together to show her.
They were reminding her of how she got her start as a spy. How she got the code name Meadow.
The man who’d recruited her—the handsome blond one who’d randomly shown up at her parents’ destroyed restaurant—explained the situation. “If you join up, I’ll even pick out a code name for you,” he’d said with a cheerful snap of his fingers.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Trust me, this is way better than letting the academy teachers stick you with one.”
She hadn’t even agreed to join a spy academy yet, but the man wasn’t about to let trivialities like that slow him down.
After crossing his arms and sinking into thought, the man gave her a smug grin. “Wildfire.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“…Nah, maybe that’s a bit much. Field? Prairie? Meadow, maybe. Something that’d burn real well.”
Sara knew the word’s dictionary definition, of course. A wildfire was a flame that burned out of control, like when a grassy plain caught fire.
One thing she didn’t know, though, is what the self-proclaimed scout’s obsession with fire-related words was. Perhaps that was just a schtick he had, but whatever the case, he nodded in satisfaction.