Chapters:

1. Conspiracy Theory

Cam was fairly sure that the world was conspiring against her. At least insofar as the world consisted of Sensei, the other Rangers, and her own mind. She could remember a time when the world was bigger than just the seven of them, making an unlikely and often desperate stand against the forces of evil. Lately, though, it didn't feel like there was anything else in the universe, let alone the world.

Sometimes the world narrowed to just her and the mainframe and whatever last second code she could throw into the breach, so really, this latest conspiracy theory was something of an improvement.

The conspiracy had started with Sensei, who had inexplicably decided that each of the Rangers could benefit from a training session in which it was them against the rest of the team. Rangers could be influenced, brainwashed, possessed; therefore, they needed to know how to fight each other. That was the argument. It wasn't like they didn't have firsthand experience with the phenomenon, but as their own history proved, it was a lot harder to brainwash five Rangers than just one at a time. And giving that one practice fighting the entire team didn't really seem smart to Cam.

Her opinion didn't make much of a difference in the long run. Sensei had made the decision, and of course, Cam got to go first. She wasn't sure if she should be annoyed or suspicious, given that her day to go one-on-five against the others had ended up being the day their training session was a Ranger short. The Crimson Ranger had been excused this afternoon for community service.

The rest of the Rangers had contributed to her conspiracy theory by arriving early and in force, shouting about some competition that had nothing to do with training and begging to use her video camera as soon as she would part with it. Which was never. The Winds were hard on cameras, and she had no faith that the Thunders were any better. She had agreed to tape whatever they were doing on the condition that her hands were the only ones that touched her very expensive digital camera.

It didn't settle any of them down. They were all convinced that, whatever they were doing, each of them was the best at it and if they could somehow get Cam to agree with them then they would win. Something. She didn't know what, but she was pretty sure that her unwillingness to side with any of them wasn't making her any more popular in this sparring session. She trained as hard as anyone now, but they had at least a year of daily practice on her and she was struggling to hold her own against their combined strength.

On top of that, her own mind was getting her in trouble, distracting her with things that should have been set aside before she'd even stepped into the training room. Her brain insisted on hearing a voice that wasn't there, replaying words that had been stuck on an endless loop in her mind since the night before. Words that had come from her one absent team member.

She was thinking about it. She couldn't stop. She didn't know why she'd bothered to get out of bed this morning, given the amount of work she hadn't gotten done. And she certainly wasn't making up for it now. She should probably be grateful for that community service project this afternoon, considering her lack of focus in the training room, but all she felt was a vague disappointment that no answer would be required of her today.

Well, that and a bruising pain in her right shoulder when she went down and a stinging sensation in her hands as she tried to redirect some of the energy into the mats. The Crimson Ranger's sister still hadn't quite grasped the concept of pulling punches. She tried to roll out of the way, ran straight into bare feet and only narrowly escaped by launching herself backwards over her shoulders. They were closing in and she was--

Sensei's voice interrupted the increasingly tight scuffle, and Cam thought it was over until she heard Dusty being told to switch sides. Suddenly she had an ally in the melee. And an earth ally, at that. Back to back, they both turned their heads at the same moment.

Their eyes met. Dusty grinned. Cam just nodded.

She threw her left hand out to the side, two fingers extended, and Dusty's arm came down on top of hers. The burst of power that rippled out across the floor in every direction left them standing in the middle of a circle of unbalanced Rangers: easy to knock down, harder to keep that way, but then the quiet voice came again, this time calling the halt Cam had expected seconds before.

"Well done, Rangers." The parti-colored cat padded out onto the mats, one ear twitching as she considered the picture they presented. "That was an impressive defense, Cam. And I think the speed of your sync with Dusty speaks for itself."

"Dude, we were on," Dusty crowed, reaching down to help Shay to her feet. "That was awesome! You should have seen your faces; you were all, like, 'earthquake!' and then you--"

"Dusty." The cat speaking with the voice of Cam's mother sounded at once amused and reproving. "There will be no gloating during training sessions. You all performed admirably. I think you will benefit from a run to release any excess energy you may have."

Shay groaned, and Toni muttered, "Thanks a lot, Dusty."

"We don't have to go, right, Sensei?" Blaze asked, with what Cam thought was at least excess something. Optimism, maybe. "Just Dusty? I'm tapped! Cam puts up a good fight. I don't have any energy left after that."

"Oh, yeah," Shay agreed, eyes wide and earnest. "No energy here. No gloating, either."

"All of you," the cat informed them, not without humor. "Three miles. The sooner you start, the sooner you will return."

Cam let out a token sigh, but if it came down to it, running was a lot easier than fighting four Ranger-powered ninjas. She was glad to get out of the afternoon with nothing more than sore muscles and some new bruises. Without people trying to knock her down every step of the way, three miles would be no distance at all.

"Hey," Blaze said, as they went to grab their sneakers. "Cam. That was disturbing."

She shook her head, pulling on one green sock at a time. "I know," she muttered, balancing on the other foot as she toed her running shoes out of the pile they'd left by the door. "I was totally unfocused."

Shay snorted, but it was Toni's incredulous voice that replied, "You're kidding, right? You held off all of us for, like, half an hour!"

She looked up in surprise as Shay added, "Yeah, dude, if you ever go over to the dark side? We're totally screwed."

"Oh, no way," Blaze countered. "Come on. You're good, no lie," she told Cam, "but I could take you if I had to."

Cam rolled her eyes as she jammed her feet into her shoes, preparing to counter, but the comment was met by a wave of good-natured derision from every last one of the Winds. Somewhat to her surprise, they defended her before she could even try. She still wasn't used to being one of the team.

"One on one?" Toni exclaimed. He gave his girlfriend a frankly disbelieving look, like maybe she wasn't as clever as he'd thought. The look was softened by a laugh as he added, "Get real!"

"Even I can't take Cam one-on-one," Shay declared, with a casual confidence that made Toni stop tying his shoes long enough to smack her on the back of the head.

"Besides, even if you did," Dusty added, "she'd just whip out the last second save-our-butts device and you'd be toast."

"Hey, I didn't say I could fight her stuff," Blaze protested. "Just her!"

"Um, excuse me," Toni interjected. "But I seem to recall a certain Thunder Samurai duel that ended in a draw."

Blaze cleared her throat, and Cam pretended to adjust the heel of her sneaker while carefully avoiding anyone's gaze. The two of them had been under one of Lothar's spells at the time. A week later and Toni was still the only one who could get away with mentioning it, since he'd suffered his own share of humiliation during the whole debacle: he had been the subject of the "duel."

"Oh, yeah!" Dusty chimed in, with her usual tactlessness. "Too right! If you couldn't beat her then--"

"It was a draw." Blaze sounded awkward, which was strange for her but it wasn't like Cam had to wonder why. "Okay? Neither of us won. Let's just leave it at that."

"And we're running," Shay said, pushing her friend toward the door. "Come on, guys. Sensei's doing that thing with her nose."

Cam's mom liked Shay for some reason that Cam couldn't completely fathom, which was the only reason the Red Ranger got away with comments like that. But when Cam glanced back at her, the little cat was perched on the stacked mats at the side of the room, watching them go with something just this side of fondness. It figured that it would be a sparring session that drew that expression from her.

Cam got along better with her sensei than her mom, and that might not be the best thing but she'd learned to accept it for what it was. Her mom had always wanted her to continue the samurai tradition at the Wind Academy. Cam preferred more scholarly pursuits in a world where she could be recognized for her name rather than her samurai rank. And she was: her graduate work in Comp Sci had been paying for itself until she'd taken the semester off to take care of her suddenly feline mom.

It was a semester that was quickly threatening to become a year. The middle of the summer, now, and she'd been in touch with her advisor but she wasn't any closer to coming back than she had been two months ago. In fact, now that she had the amulet, the idea that there would be any time at all for academic work was looking less and less likely.

Heather's name penetrated her thoughts as she followed the others out of Ninja Ops. Suddenly she was listening again--an interest that Toni noticed when he glanced back to make sure she was still with them, but she ignored his half-smile as best she could. She was allowed to be curious about her teammates.

"I'm just saying," Dusty reiterated. "Heather and Blaze together might be able to take Cam."

"All of us together couldn't take Cam," Shay reminded her. "I don't know why you think Heather is better than the three of us combined."

"Hey, no, that is so not what I said." Dusty pointed at her, and then at Blaze, who was probably smirking triumphantly at this concession. "I just think they have more experience fighting together than we do, and what's Sensei always telling us? It's the strength of the team that makes the difference. Not the individuals."

So Dusty occasionally paid attention during training. Interesting. Cam hadn't been allowed to join their sessions without strength equivalent to their own, and until her journey to the past had brought her to a power great enough to restore the other Rangers, equivalency had been impossible. She was only now becoming acquainted with the team dynamic as it applied to something other than annoying her at Ninja Ops and breaking her equipment on the battlefield.

"We did it before," Blaze was saying. "Not that Cam wasn't good, and we did kind of take her by surprise, but--"

Cam was startled that she brought it up and annoyed that Blaze thought the incident was in any way comparable. "Wait a minute," she interrupted. Toni and Shay slowed enough to let her into the group as they headed up the stairs. "I hadn't trained regularly for years before you came barging in here to abduct my mom, and if I recall correctly it wasn't exactly an easy snatch and go."

"Plus Cam wasn't a Ranger then," Shay added. "So two morphed Rangers can overpower a civilian. Ooh... there's a shock."

"She wasn't a civilian," Blaze protested. "She's a samurai teacher with enough element training to restructure the entire school!"

Sunlight burst in through the door Dusty had thrown open, and they climbed out of the underground bunker into a late summer afternoon. The crater where the Wind Academy had stood before Lothar launched her campaign to eradicate Earth's defenders had been smoothed over, harsh edges gentled into a sloping valley. Vegetation was growing back and wildlife had begun to return, making the land look more like a harvested logging area than the smoking ruin it had been.

Cam's work. Nothing sophisticated, but the scale had been daunting and she hadn't been willing to let it wait until she and Dusty could learn to work together. She had an earth element. She had no compunction about using it. And she'd been horrified by the thought of walking through that devastation every time she came or went from Ninja Ops.

"Still not a Ranger," Toni was saying. "And she's right, it's not like you kicked her butt and were gone before we could get here."

"Hey, Sensei isn't defenseless either," Blaze retorted. "We were fighting both of them!"

"Could we stop talking about how you broke into the most secure facility on campus, took me hostage, and kidnapped my mother?" Cam demanded. "It's a memory I'm trying to suppress and none of you are helping."

Toni took one look at her expression and suggested, "Maybe we should run now."

"I don't think that'll help." Dusty sounded doubtful. "I mean, she can ninja streak as fast as we can."

Shay gave her an easy shove. "Dude, we're not running from Cam. We're running from Sensei. Three mile jog? Hello?"

"Which is completely your fault," Blaze complained. "Gloating? Even I know not to laugh when you guys fall in the water--and believe me, that's funny."

"She would have made us do it anyway," Cam said with a sigh. "It's today's wrap-up exercise."

"Really?" Shay perked up at that. "So we won't have to sit around and talk about our feelings with your mom when we get back?"

"It's called debriefing," Cam informed her. Actually, it was traditionally called "tea," but the idea was the same. Tea with gossip, or debriefing with refreshments. The latter description was the one that appealed to her scientific side, so that was how she thought of it. "And no, I'm pretty sure we won't."

"Why didn't you say so?" Blaze was doing a backwards dance that was almost jogging--in reverse--without actually leaving them behind. "If we're out of here in half an hour, I can still get in some time at the track!"

"Ten minute miles?" Toni teased, pretending to lunge after her. "Is that lead in your sneakers?"

Blaze skipped further away, smirking at him. "Like you can do better, Mr. Hang Ten."

"Is that supposed to be an insult?" Toni inquired, like he wasn't quite sure. "You do realize it's a surfing term for speed, right?"

"Oh, yeah?" Blaze wasn't deterred. "I thought it was a surfing term for people who tripped over their own toes."

Toni raised his eyebrows, sounding more amused than annoyed as he announced, "Oh, now it's on!" Blaze just laughed, Toni made another lunge, and the two of them took off.

"O-kay," Shay drawled, watching them go. "I don't know about you, but that kind of makes me not want to run at all."

"That?" Dusty said, studying her fingernails as they strolled up the slope of the steadily greening valley. "Try anything."

That was an easy one. "Lothar," Cam replied.

"Well, yeah, but only if she was, like, right here," Dusty argued. "And threatening us with some kind of, I don't know, giant space gun or something."

"She's a ninja," Shay said, rolling her eyes. "She doesn't need a giant space gun."

"No," Dusty allowed, "but don't you think that would make her job a lot easier? I mean, she wouldn't have to keep sending all these space freaks and weirdos to go around blasting things. She could just do it herself from the comfort of her own ship."

Cam, who thanked their luck every day that Lothar's ship wasn't armed, didn't manage to get in a cutting remark before Shay disagreed. "Wouldn't work," the leader of the Wind Rangers said. "So she blasts us to pieces, so what? New Rangers step up in, like, a day. If you don't destroy the Power, you don't destroy the Rangers."

"And you can't destroy the Power unless we're morphed," Cam added. "Hence the 'space freaks and weirdos,' as you call them. To force us to morph."

"Making us even harder to destroy!" Shay finished. "And that, my friend, is why we will always win."

Dusty didn't seem impressed. "I still say it would be easier with a space gun."

Cam wasn't convinced either of them would run if she left them behind, but Shay seemed happy to argue this particular point with Dusty indefinitely. And at the end of the day, it wasn't her job to ride herd on her younger teammates. She didn't feel really like running, it was true. But she felt like listening to their inane discussion even less.

So she started running, and she made it to the holographic entrance before she noticed anything out of the ordinary. Actually, she made it through the holographic entrance. It was on the other side that a flash of black moved in the trees and she stopped where she was. Guard up, she circled slowly, scanning the branches and negative space as best she could.

Not good enough to catch a ninja. Heather dropped out of thin air at her side. Cam managed not to flinch, but it was a near thing. She used to be good at seeing through shadows. Obviously she needed to get back in practice.

The Crimson Ranger's eyes flicked over her, taking in her ponytail, workout clothes, and probably the bruise on her right arm where she'd missed a block, all before she opened her mouth. "How's it going?"

"I thought you were meeting your little sister this afternoon," Cam said, off-balance from not only the look and but also the return of Heather's voice in her head. "We're pretty even in a fight, and hey, I'm a lot faster than you on a bike... just think about it, okay?"

"Yeah." Heather shrugged, like it was no big deal. "Charlotte. Cute kid. We went down to the park, but she didn't want to hang afterward, so."

"So?" Cam repeated. "You decided to come skulk around the holographic entryway instead?"

"Hey." This time a grin accompanied the shrug. "I got out of training fair and square. Just because the kid bailed on me doesn't mean I have to come work out with you guys."

Cam was pretty sure Sensei wouldn't see it that way, but she refrained from pointing that out. Instead she remarked, "Yet you can't think of anything better to do than watch us. With hobbies like that, why even bother with free time?"

"I didn't come to watch them," Heather countered. There was a telling gleam in her eyes, and suddenly Cam knew that she'd been here long enough to see Blaze and Toni emerge--and to let them go by. Biding her time, no doubt. "I came to watch you."

Cam folded her arms, trying very hard not to smile. Because it wasn't funny. She was being stalked. She was being stalked by a cute, curt, oddly captivating girl who was several years her junior. "Who says I want you to watch me?"

"Well." Heather didn't seem fazed. "You don't usually go easy on the criticism. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted me to get lost, you would have told me by now."

"Maybe I just don't want to hurt your feelings," Cam told her. "In the name of team relations."

Heather smirked. "That'd be a first."

There was an unfortunate amount of truth to that. "So, what are you saying?" she challenged. "You're not afraid of me?"

Heather's expression softened, but her smile didn't fade. "Nope."

The holographic entrance flashed open behind her, casting its bright light over them both and momentarily turning the lake into a mirror. Heather stepped into her, arms wrapping around her before she could protest, muttering something ridiculous: ninja shadow battle. Instead of disappearing the light intensified, overwhelming everything around them until they were standing in the middle of pure white, something solid and featureless under their feet and more of the latter stretching off in every direction.

"What--" Disconcerting didn't begin to describe it. She knew the principle, she could make it work, but she couldn't... not so casually. It wasn't easy, not the way Heather made it look.

"Sorry." Heather really did sound apologetic, but she let go slowly, carefully, like she wasn't sure Cam could stay in the setting without physical contact. She kept her hand on Cam's wrist as she added, "I should have asked, but--you know, the entrance, and... well, I wasn't done."

"Dusty and Shay," Cam muttered. So they'd decided to run after all. She and Heather would be invisible from the holographic entrance now. In fact, from anywhere in the vicinity of where they still, technically, were--

Cam blinked. "That's how you're doing it," she blurted out.

Heather gave her a curious look.

"The invisibility thing," she tried to explain, aware that the fact she had been looking for Heather at every opportunity was going to be difficult to hide if she wanted to get this across. "You're always--" She waved her free hand, a little irritated. "Appearing out of nowhere."

Heather didn't make fun of her. Didn't even bother to deny it. "You can see through regular shadows," she said simply.

Cam frowned at her. "Not typically, no. That's why ninjas use them." The shadow battle was an entirely different level of stealth, going beyond the visible to the audible and tactile nullification of a person's influence on their environment.

"I didn't mean ninjas in general," Heather said patiently. "I meant you, in particular. You can see through shadows. That's why I stopped using them."

Cam's frown deepened as she considered this. "Is it that important to hide from me?"

"No." Now Heather looked amused. "It's that important to be able to sneak up on you. You have a bad habit of avoiding us sometimes."

Oh. That was true. She hadn't expected them to notice, let alone care. In the face of some fairly convincing evidence to the contrary, all she could do was deny it. "I don't avoid you," she told Heather.

"Not anymore," Heather agreed. A smug look made her lips twitch. "I've been practicing."

She was being stalked. And it was... sort of flattering.

"I'm fine," Cam said, tugging a little on Heather's gentle grip to show what she meant. She was pretty sure she could stay in any environment Heather could create, contact or no.

"Yeah?" Heather's fingers slid down over her wrist, crawling over her palm to twine through hers. They were holding hands, and Cam couldn't take her eyes off of the picture their fingers made. "Fine enough to go out with me tonight?"

Until Heather asked something like that, which made her lift her gaze instantly. She searched that inquisitive expression for something more than had been in the words. It was the same question Heather had asked last night, albeit with a more specific timeframe, and her reasoned response was--as expected--exactly the opposite of the instinctive one she'd wanted to give at the time.

That didn't make her reasoned response better. Just more... reasoned. There was still something to be said for instinct, after all. And her instinct said that Heather was sincere. Serious. Maybe even worth it. Worth the possibility of failure, worth the worry of success... worth the risk of involvement.

Or maybe she was just lonely. Most of the ninjas she knew were gone, imprisoned by Lothar. There was so little she could say to her college friends these days. She spent almost all of her time in the company of the Rangers: high schoolers and minimum wage workers with whom she had almost nothing in common beyond the bond of the Power.

Except, maybe, this. With Heather. Someone who, at the very least, understood why Toni would never be a real source of friction between her and Blaze. Was it such a bad idea to spend time with someone who knew where she was coming from?

"Yes," she heard herself saying. Yes, but. She would do it anyway. She would do it anyway, see what happened, and if that was it then, if nothing else, she would have something new to worry about. They all would.

Her sense of responsibility melted in the face of Heather's very real and startlingly bright smile. "Great. You want dinner or something? I'm going to go home and change, but I could be back here by, say, seven-thirty."

"Yes to dinner," Cam said slowly, considering the situation. She wasn't sure she wanted to explain what Heather was doing at Ninja Ops at seven-thirty in the evening. "No to coming back here. I'll meet you downtown."

Heather shrugged. "If you want. Tide Dyed okay, or you want something different?"

"No, it's fine." Familiar ground. It eased nerves she hadn't even noticed were there, because there was nothing uncomfortable about Tide Dyed. The team had been there together several times: the food was good, the atmosphere was almost excessively casual, and no one would look at them twice. "I'll be there."

"Cool." Heather flashed another smile in her direction, not as bright but just as warm. It was strange to see unguarded affection on her face. Even with Blaze, she always seemed so conscious of other people's eyes, like...

Well. Like she was a 22-year-old girl with no family support, fighting for a place in the male-dominated world of motocross. Like letting on that she cared--about anything or anyone--was a sign of weakness. It wasn't the first time Cam had wondered if Heather's gruffness protected her and her younger sister professionally as much as Blaze's charm ran interference for them socially.

"So," Heather was saying as she let go of Cam's hand. "How far do you have run?" Their white nothingness dimmed gradually into something more recognizable, the forested hillside and holographic waterfall coming into focus again. They were alone beside the lake.

"Three miles." Cam studied their surroundings carefully, like she could tell which way the others had gone just by looking. She might be able to, if she looked closely enough. And if she just happened to go the other way, that might forestall questions about how she had started out in front of Dusty and Shay and ended up behind them.

"Only three miles?" Heather scoffed. "Sensei's going easy on you."

"You weren't the one taking on the rest of the team this afternoon," Cam retorted. "And I don't see you running."

"Might as well," Heather offered. "Maybe it'll mean fewer pushups when Sensei finds out I skipped."

Cam blinked. Was she volunteering to run? And "when" Sensei found out? Why not "if"? "What makes you think I'm going to tell her?" she wanted to know.

"I don't." Heather sounded annoyingly sure of herself. "I just figure it's better not to lie without assuming I'll be found out. Makes it easier to keep my stories straight later."

And she would know. Cam bit her lip to keep from saying it aloud. "I wouldn't turn down the company," she said instead.

"They went right," Heather told her. "Blaze and Toni," she added, seeing Cam's blank look. "If we go the other way, maybe they won't notice we were hiding from them."

Something about the phrasing triggered an automatic protest. "I wasn't--"

"Fine," Heather interrupted, just as the realization dawned that, yes, she was. "If we go the other way, maybe they won't notice I was hiding from them."

"And that I was actually the last person to start running," Cam finished. An awkward almost-apology for her outburst. "Unless we're the last ones back, in which case it's going to be pretty obvious."

Heather gave her a speculative look. "I guarantee that I'm faster than any of the Winds," she informed Cam. "What about you?"

Cam raised her eyebrows. "You do realize that I'm technically a Wind Ranger."

Heather just smirked. "You said it. Not me."

"And," Cam continued calmly, "that I'm at least dressed for this activity."

Heather's sly shrug was anything but casual. "Speed trumps gear," she teased, and suddenly Cam had a vivid mental picture of Blaze dancing backwards, mocking Toni until he gave chase.

"My god," she muttered. "I'm actually falling for the dubious Bradley charm."

She felt herself blushing when Heather laughed. She probably shouldn't have said that aloud. But Heather was just standing there, poised to move... grinning like she'd already won. Waiting anyway.

Waiting for her to accept the challenge, despite its apparently foregone conclusion.

"You're on," she told Heather.

So they circled the academy counterclockwise, and sure enough, they passed Toni and Blaze less than halfway around. Heather took more heckling for her absence during training than questions for her sudden appearance at the end of it. They made it almost two miles before they encountered Shay and Dusty, who were still walking.

"Hey," Shay defended them when Cam asked if that counted as running for first years. "Sensei didn't say how long we were supposed to take. Just how far we had to go."

"Yeah," Dusty added. "Maybe it turns out to be some secret samurai thing where the more time you spend, the more bonus points you get."

Cam couldn't help rolling her eyes. "It's a three-mile run, Dusty. There's no secret to it."

"Says you," Dusty replied, undeterred.

"Hey," Heather called impatiently. She wasn't immediately visible anymore, but her voice came from somewhere farther along the trail. "This is just proving my point, you know."

Cam had to work to catch up, and she had to admit that she pushed herself to keep up with Heather's ground-eating lope. The Crimson Ranger had a stride no girl was entitled to. But when they were finally on the downhill stretch--literally, as they reached the academy valley--they saw Blaze and Toni approaching from the other side, and Cam was breathless but somehow she found enough to laugh. She really had been running with the fastest Ranger on the team.

Cam slowed her steps to watch Heather fly down the hill with a reckless abandon that spoke of sprained ankles and bruised everything if she tripped. The only other long-haired Ranger had a braid that hung halfway down her back, neat and wild behind her as she let gravity lengthen her stride. The clothes she'd worn to work, to the park, and now to the academy must be looser than they looked because she acknowledged no constraint.

She circled at the bottom of the slope, throwing her hands over her head as she turned to wave back at them. It was a victorious gesture, and the implication was clear. She had won.

Blaze wasted no time disputing her claim. "Try doing that after a full training session!" she yelled, and Heather threw back a different gesture--one that would get her fifty pushups, easy, if Sensei saw it anywhere on campus.

The walk down the hill at least meant that Cam wasn't gasping by the time she caught up with Heather, but she didn't harbor any illusions. "You were right," she said grudgingly. She was a little dismayed to be saying it in front of their teammates, but fair was fair. "You're faster than the Winds."

Toni immediately protested the idea that it had been a race, saying that none of them had run full-out, but Heather ignored him. "You kept up," she told Cam. And there was an assessing look on her face that gave more weight to her words.

So Cam dropped the comment she'd been about to make and remarked only, "I always do."

This drew a smile, and as they walked back toward Ninja Ops Blaze and Toni spent too much time complaining about the both of them to question what Heather was doing there in the first place. When they found a pot of tea but no Sensei waiting for them underground, Cam decided she'd been right all along. There was definitely a conspiracy at work.

She was starting to wonder, though, if the world might be conspiring for her rather than against her.

2. Curtains on the Second Date

It might have been easier for everyone involved if Toni had skipped his eighteenth birthday altogether. Between the evil zord and the alien bounty hunter, not to mention Shay's disappearance, trying to celebrate the occasion had turned out to be almost impossible. Cam didn't think it was unreasonable to ask, at the end of a long and trying day with a lot of repairs left to complete, whether he wanted to postpone the party until the following weekend.

Toni raised an eyebrow at her over top of the backup cake Dusty had rescued from the freezer in the kitchen. "Camille Watanabe," he drawled, slapping one of Dusty's hands away before she could steal a burnt-out candle. "Did you forget to get me a birthday present?"

Cam sighed. As if anyone could stand between a teenage boy and his cake. Or birthday presents. "I'm not talking about the presents," she said patiently. "Or the cake. Obviously. You're welcome, by the way."

"Yeah, why do you have a spare ice cream cake just lying around?" Dusty wanted to know. She had gotten a candle anyway, licked the holder off, and was now reaching for another one.

"Because Shay's been distracted lately," Cam informed her, "and I didn't trust her to remember it."

"Hey, I resent that," Shay commented. The protest lacked any real indignation, though, and Cam hoped they weren't going to have to counsel her through the loss of her Carmanian friend. None of the Rangers were really good at that kind of thing.

"I was talking about going out afterward," Cam persisted. "I'm really not going to have time, not with all the work that needs to be done around here. I just thought you might want to... extend your party a little."

"Nope." Toni was now competing with Dusty to see who could pull out and lick off the remaining candles fastest, and he pointed one at Cam to emphasize his words. "We are going out tonight, and you are coming with us. It's my birthday. End of discussion."

"Do you not wish to spend some time with your family, Toni?" A white tail with brown splotches twitched curiously as their sensei regarded the Blue Ranger.

It was a fair question, Cam realized. She had gotten so used to the team's presence lately that she sometimes forgot they had lives outside of Ninja Ops. She didn't, of course, not anymore. But they had other friends, supposedly, and siblings, some of them, and parents who weren't cats.

All right. Again. Some of them.

"My dad's out of town," Toni said, offhand. He was looking around like he wasn't quite sure where to set the cake. Or the candles he was still holding. "And my brother's off on some hiking trip. We're celebrating next weekend."

"Which is why," Heather interrupted, before anyone else could respond, "we have to get in all our partying this weekend."

"Yeah!" Blaze crowed, snatching the cake away from Toni and spinning over to the table. "First things first. We need plates, forks, and someone's gotta bring all those presents over here!"

They had known, Cam realized. Or at least, Blaze had known, and she must have told Heather that Toni's family wasn't around. For whatever reason. Now the all-day beach party, and maybe even his disappointment over Sensei's spontaneous retreat, made more sense.

"Plates," Heather announced. She was digging through the pile of beach stuff that had been unceremoniously dropped on the floor in between trouncing the kelzaks and destroying the evil zord. Brandishing a box of plastic utensils, she added, "And forks!"

Shay clapped Dusty on the shoulder. "Guess that leaves us with the--"

She paused briefly, pointing at Dusty, and they both exclaimed, "Presents!"

Cam sighed as the two of them cheered with entirely too much enthusiasm. "Just try not to drop any of them, okay?"

Predictably, they ignored her completely. But they were walking in one direction while Heather was walking in the other, and luckily for them, her eye followed the girl in the skintight crimson exercise top. She'd actually worn a bikini to the beach, and, cutoffs notwithstanding, that was an image Cam would have a hard time forgetting.

"Bonus utensil," Heather told Toni as she dropped everything she was carrying on the table beside the cake. She handed over some sort of spatula-like serving thing, with edges that were apparently sharp enough to slice through ice cream.

Sharp enough when Toni was wielding it to make the ice cream look half-melted, which it couldn't possibly be. Cam couldn't tell if that was Ranger strength or something else, but she wasn't the only one to notice. Blaze was watching the initial cake-cutting with disturbing intensity, and it was hard to tell whether the cake or the person cutting it was the cause.

"So, that's my piece, right?" Blaze cajoled, holding out a plate as Toni lifted the first piece free.

"You wish," Toni told her. He tipped the cake onto the plate and pulled the plate away from Blaze at the same time. "My cake, my piece. You can have the next one."

"All right, but don't make it too skimpy," Blaze warned. "I don't mess around when it comes to ice cream cake."

"Happy birthday to you," Shay was singing, as she deposited the two biggest presents on the table. "Happy birthday to you..."

"Hey, do you want these presents arranged in order of size or, you know, awesomeness?" Dusty interrupted. "Because, if it's awesomeness, mine has to be first."

"Ooh," Shay teased, apparently happy to abandon her song in favor of stirring up trouble. "Are you dissing the girlfriend?"

"Dude, I have two words for you," Dusty said. She was moving the presents around on the table so that hers was closest to Toni, apparently oblivious to the look she was getting from Blaze. "Socket wrench set."

Toni cut off any response from Blaze by shoving a piece of cake at her and telling Dusty, "If you bring up that love spell one more time, you'll be getting exactly none of this cake. Clear?"

"Whereas you are allowed to mention it as often as you want," Shay observed.

Toni pointed at the cake, giving Shay a meaningful look. Shay held up her hands in surrender, and Toni turned to smile politely at Cam. "Can I interest you in some cake?" he inquired.

She inclined her head, partly in formal thanks and partly to hide her smile at Shay and Dusty's obvious dismay. "Don't mind if I do," she agreed. She knelt down on one of the cushions opposite Toni, resting her hands on her knees while she waited.

A soft touch on her head made her look up, and Heather gave her a half-smile. The Crimson Ranger was standing right behind her, stroking her hair once before she dropped down to sit cross-legged on the cushion beside Cam. "I'm not giving you my cake," Cam informed her.

Heather's face lit with a genuine grin, and only then did it occur to Cam that she had just allowed a full-out caress in front of the rest of the team. "Well," Heather replied, obviously pleased with herself even as Cam accepted a plate from Toni with thanks. "Maybe I'll give you some of mine anyway."

Cam just stared at her, because what was that supposed to mean? Heather pouted prettily, wide pleading eyes replacing her smile with a speed that made her insincerity theatrical, and Cam sighed. Apparently it was supposed to mean, give me some cake or I'll embarrass you in front of all our friends. Cam handed her a fork without another word.

"Okay," Toni said, keeping one eye on them as he cut another slice of cake. "Time to put the rumors to rest and tell us what's going on with you guys. Dating or just friends?"

"Yeah, like, the best friends ever," Dusty put in. "I mean, when was the last time you saw Cam share something? Ow!" she complained when Shay cuffed her. "I'm just saying. They're all, you know. With the, and the--" She batted her eyes, pouted, sighed, and generally looked ridiculous.

"I don't sigh like that," Cam snapped.

"Actually," Heather said, taking another bite of her cake, "you kind of do."

Cam frowned at her, and she added hastily, "But, you know, I'm obviously the one pouting, so. No big deal."

Shay was making a completely futile effort to muffle her laughter behind her hand, and Dusty was grinning at them. "So," Toni said, passing Shay the next piece of cake. Possibly in an effort to shut her up. "Dating, then?"

"For almost a month," Heather agreed. Matter-of-fact. Like she had been the one wearing a rainbow necklace on Flag Day, not Cam. No one had asked her about it. But it had made Heather smile, and she'd gotten an extra kiss out of it when no one was looking.

Right now, though, all she was getting was a lot less cake, and that was easier to focus on than everyone else's reaction. "Am I going to actually get any of this cake?" Cam wanted to know, watching Heather steal another forkful.

"I said you could have some of mine," Heather protested. Then she added, as Dusty received her plate, "If Toni ever gives me any."

"You look like you're all set," Toni said dryly. "Sensei? Do you want some cake?"

"Just a little off the top, thank you." The cat had leapt up onto the table and was observing the proceedings from the far end. "I find that chocolate doesn't sit well with cats. To my great regret," she added, with exaggerated disappointment.

"You'll make up for it once you're human again," Blaze said, holding out an empty plate while Toni carved some of the vanilla top layer off and passed it over. Blaze got to her feet and carried the plate around to the other end of the table herself. "Here you are, Sensei."

Miko thanked her, eyeing the ice cream with enough appreciation that Cam didn't feel completely sorry for her. No chocolate, okay. But no ice cream? That would be a nightmare.

"Now can I have a piece?" Heather demanded. Engrossed in watching Cam scoop up some of the melted ice cream with frosting, she didn't bother to lift her gaze as she asked. But Cam did, and she saw Toni's amused look as he eyed the plate between them.

"Don't you mean, can Cam have a piece?" he suggested.

"Do you think Cam would let anyone else eat off of her plate?" Dusty was asking Shay. Cam pretended not to hear.

"No," Heather informed Toni. "I mean, can I have a piece, so I can stop eating Cam's."

"Yeah, right," Shay scoffed. "Cam doesn't even let other people eat off of her plates when she's not using them."

"Cam?" Toni pretended to ignore Heather's indignation. "Want another piece of cake?"

"Yes," Cam told him, just to get him to stop torturing Heather. "And Shay, if you ever washed the dishes you leave in the kitchen sink, you would be as welcome to use them as anyone else."

"What!" Shay exclaimed. "Everyone else gets to use the kitchen dishes? Since when?"

"Since they got them out and put them back without me noticing they'd been used," Cam replied. "There's a sponge by the sink. Put some soap on it, scrub, and rinse. That's all I ask."

"A shared privilege is a shared responsibility," Miko remarked. It was hard to tell exactly whom she was addressing, and they all glanced at her uncertainly. The little cat regarded them in return, her inscrutability marred by the effort to lick ice cream off of her whiskers.

Cam saw Shay nudge Dusty out of the corner of her eye. "Do you get to use the kitchen dishes?" she muttered under her breath.

"Yeah, dude," Dusty said in a normal tone of voice. "Of course."

"This cake is great," Toni declared, when Shay turned to him. "Thanks, Cam."

"Yeah, thanks," Blaze agreed quickly. "And hey, thanks for getting the first one, Shay. Too bad we didn't get a chance to eat it."

Shay seemed slightly mollified by that. Or at least distracted. "Yeah, well," she said with a shrug, "you do what you have to do to stop the bad guys. I get that." Neither she nor Cam had actually been there when they destroyed the cake, and Cam, for one, didn't really want to know how it had happened.

So she picked up the second piece of cake Toni had slid across the table to her and offered it to Heather with only a slight mental wince. They'd gotten one tiny step away from the "we're dating" conversation, and here she was inviting commentary all over again. "Happy?" she asked Heather.

Heather waved her fork around in a way that was probably supposed to mean something. Then she swallowed her mouthful of ice cream and added, "Help yourself."

"Okay," Dusty said as Cam put the second plate down again. The Yellow Ranger was pointing her fork at Heather like she was using it to mark her place in the conversation. "You're dating Cam? So you're, like, gay or something?"

And they were back to this. The tradeoff for avoiding the cake destruction story was a team review of their relationship. She supposed it had been coming on for weeks, and maybe that was why she'd resigned herself to letting it happen now. She was getting tired of wondering what the others thought of Heather's constant presence, the obvious flirting, and her own growing acceptance of it.

"Or something," Heather was saying with a shrug.

"The word is 'lesbian'," Cam snapped, casting a warning look around the table. "It's not that hard to say."

She'd been talking to Dusty, but it was Heather who responded, "I like 'dyke'. Can I be a dyke instead?"

Cam blinked, and their eyes met. A slow smile spread across Heather's face as she offered another shrug. "I'm just saying, I've given it some thought," she remarked. "I'm not gonna go around introducing myself as a lesbian. But dyke sounds bad. Dangerous, you know? I like it."

"Very street," Blaze agreed unexpectedly. "I can work with that."

"Yeah, totally." Shay elbowed Dusty, who seemed to be more interested in her cake than their conversation right now.

"What?" Dusty looked up, glancing around. "Yeah? Hey, what's it like dating Cam, anyway? Is it all, you know, rules and being on time and stuff? Cause that's what she's like with everything else."

"A shock to your system, I'm sure," Cam muttered.

"You know, I'm glad we met you," Toni informed her. "I mean, obviously, but. You took my place as the responsible one. I should have thanked you for that a long time ago."

"The responsible one?" Blaze repeated. Her tone was utterly skeptical, and Toni leveled his fork at her. Blaze just smirked, smacking the fork out of the way with her own and initiating a brief fork skirmish. "Give me a break."

"No, see," Shay began, "in any group there are different types of people."

Dusty was already nodding as she pulled the fork out of her mouth. "Totally true."

"Here we go," Toni said, rolling his eyes.

"The responsible one?" Heather murmured, nudging Cam with her elbow. "You, with the...? You want that I should tell them how it really is?

She had lowered her voice, but the question hadn't gone unnoticed by the rest of the table. "Oh, yeah, I get it," Dusty complained. "Special treatment for the, uh, person you're dating."

"Girlfriend," Toni put in. "The word is girlfriend." He caught Cam's eye, offering a commiserating look as he added, "It's not that hard to say."

"Knew Cam had a wild side," Shay gloated, paying no attention. "No one is that perfect."

Cam considered the situation. The Winds were riled, and Sensei was pretending to be entranced by a spot of light on the far wall. Blaze was shaking her head as she did her best to scoop up melted ice cream with a fork. Heather was smirking. All despite the fact that Cam really hadn't done anything to justify the fuss.

There was only one conclusion that made sense. "You just deliberately tried to make them think I'm some kind of delinquent," she said, turning to Heather. She got a wink in return, and she felt a smile tugging at her lips. "Thanks."

"Anytime," Heather promised. "So, Toni," she added, gesturing with her fork again. Cam made a note never to let the Rangers have real knives if the way they were throwing those forks around was any indication of what they'd do with them. "You gonna open those presents, or what?"

"Oh, is it still my birthday?" Toni feigned surprise. Quite well, unfortunately. "I thought this was your coming out party."

"Ha ha," Heather said. "Minus ten birthday bonus points for you. Open your presents so we can go get some real food."

"I'll put the rest of the cake away." Cam offered, pushing herself to her feet. The ice cream wouldn't survive present opening, no matter how fast Toni could be when motivated. "Don't wait. I'll be right back."

On her return, she decided she might have underestimated Toni. In the amount of time it had taken her to put the cake back in the freezer, he had opened his present from Sensei and was working on the one from Shay. The former was a scroll with a single Japanese character on it: Attention. The latter turned out to be a jar of surfboard wax, which made Toni crow in delight.

"The best kind!" he declared, and Shay rolled her eyes.

"I know," she reminded her friend. "You tell us every time!"

Cam handed Heather a luna bar as she reclaimed her cushion, receiving a grin of thanks in return. Heather made no effort to be subtle, tearing the metallic wrapper and munching happily on the peppermint-flavored granola bar. This prompted complaints from both Dusty and Blaze that they hadn't gotten any food, and Cam rolled her eyes but agreed to make another trip to the kitchen if they couldn't survive without it.

"Wait," Toni interrupted. "Let me open your present first."

Cam paused, settling back on her heels as she watched Toni tear off wrapping paper and ribbon with the carelessness of someone who recycled before reusing. It didn't bother her as much as it might have, once. And when Toni blinked at the transparent plastic box underneath, clearly startled, it didn't bother her at all.

"Cam," Toni said, glancing up. Amusement lurked in his tone. "Did you get me a watch?" It was a fair reaction, given that he and Blaze were the only people on the team who already owned watches.

"Either that or something that looks exactly like one," Dusty commented, leaning over Shay to see. "Hey, look, it's all that funny color that glows in the dark!"

"It's blue," Shay said, giving her a weird look that Dusty totally missed.

"Yeah, but it's like that glow-in-the-dark blue!" Dusty insisted. "Seriously, turn out the lights or something!"

"It glows in the dark," Cam admitted, before anyone could get any ideas. "More importantly? It's waterproof."

She saw comprehension dawn, and the amused look turned to one of appreciation. "Oh, hey," Toni said, studying the new watch with more respect. "That's great. That's perfect, I mean, it's not like I can tell time by the waves. And 'water resistant'? Yeah, it turns out that's not as true as you'd think."

He was already pulling his old one off, sliding the surfers' knots on his right arm down to his wrist and fastening the new watch above them. It was a habit Cam had never understood, since it made the watch more like a bracelet than anything else, but somehow Toni made it work. Maybe it helped that he had classic surfer looks and, as far as any stranger could tell, a seemingly endless supply of girlfriends.

"Happy birthday," Cam answered when Toni thanked him. "I suppose you want a luna bar too," she added, getting to her feet again.

"One of your girly power bars?" Toni said, rolling his eyes. Then he flicked his gaze sideways, like he was gauging the effect of his expression. "Got any coffee-flavored ones?"

Heather snorted. "Gee," she said, "why would you think that?"

"Anyone else?" Cam asked, ignoring her. "Dusty? Blaze?"

"Yeah, thanks," Dusty said absently. She was knocking on the biggest present, apparently trying to figure out what it was by echolocation.

"S'mores, if you have it," Blaze said. "Anything chocolate if you don't."

"Done," Cam agreed. "Shay?"

"Surprise me," Shay told her.

She sighed, turning to the cat at the end of the table. "Mom?"

"No thank you, Cam." Sensei's voice sounded more like teasing than reproach. "Perhaps next time, you will remember the consequences of favoritism."

"Perhaps next time, people who are hungry will mention it before I go to the kitchen instead of after I come back," Cam countered.

"Perhaps next time," Shay called after her as she headed out of the room again, "you'll read our minds!"

It would have been more obnoxious if it hadn't been such an obvious joke. Which left Cam to wonder how she had gotten so used to the Rangers that she occasionally understood what they meant. It wasn't knowledge that she had expected, or even sought, back when they'd first started working together.

By the time she'd collected the requested snacks and made it back, Toni was working on the present from Blaze and Heather. Cam distributed luna bars as appropriate, not quite as surprised as the others when the box turned out to contain a bright blue motocross helmet. "Nice," she agreed, when all the Winds were exclaiming over it.

She sat down next to Heather again, studying the flurry of inspection and compliments for a long moment before she turned to the older Bradley sister. "So?" she whispered, when she caught Heather's eye. "Did he need a new one?"

"You're supposed to replace 'em after every crash," Heather murmured back. "But they're pretty expensive without a sponsor, so. Toni's taken a couple of hits on his old one."

Cam nodded her understanding. Flashy and practical, then. No wonder Blaze was bragging, eagerly pointing out the "latest features" on a helmet that Cam felt shouldn't have as many features as a laser pointer, let alone a laptop computer. Apparently, though, crash protection was a competitive business, and this helmet was supposedly superior in every way to the one Toni had been wearing before.

Heather reached across the table and snagged something from the pile of wrapping paper and presents. The action went mostly unnoticed by the motocross admiration society, but Cam gave her an inquiring look and Heather passed the object to her. "Check out Dusty's present," she said under her breath.

It was a keychain. Very Dusty, Cam thought, before she realized it was a keychain in the shape of a dolphin tail. She smiled faintly, turning it over--and she frowned. Really? Looking closer, she realized, yes. It really was a picture of the entire team, outside in their workout clothes with Sensei, posing for a camera on a timer after the whole city had caught Yellow fever.

"Yeah," Heather said, obviously catching her expression. "Nice, huh?"

"How did she do this?" Cam blurted out. She could print a digital image onto almost anything, but this keychain looked like enamel and plastic--sturdy enough to last years. Decades, maybe. This could be around through a lot of different keys.

"Oh, dude, it's easy," Dusty interrupted. "There's this mail-order catalogue, right, and they'll make any picture into a keychain or a mug or whatever you want--"

She kept going, but Cam had stopped listening after "catalogue." Leave it to Dusty, possibly the last person in the state to still use mail-order catalogues, to trust a friend's birthday present to one. And, true to Dusty's luck, it had worked past any reasonable expectation.

"Hey, so, can we eat now?" Shay was asking. "I don't know if anyone noticed, but I was lost in the woods all day meeting aliens and fighting evil fish. I'm starving."

Her luna bar was already gone, Cam noticed. Shay could put away food almost as fast as Toni. Her own metabolism had spiked alarmingly the day she first used the amulet to morph, so it wasn't like she could blame them, but it still sometimes surprised her how much value the sports world put on eating.

"I hear that," Heather said, setting one empty cake plate on top of the other and pushing them both toward the center of the table. "Let's stack 'em up and wash 'em off."

"Like the rest of us had such an easy time fighting kelzaks," Blaze added, tossing her fork on top and putting her plate on the bottom of the pile. "We didn't get to hide in a little zord, or get an extra power boost from some passing do-gooder."

"Oh, because destroying Zurgayne's zord was no work at all," Toni scoffed. He passed the pile down the table.

"Hey, we helped with that," Blaze insisted, pulling the wrapping paper off the table.

"Yeah, and we scored eleven kelzaks to your six at the beach that first time," Toni retorted. "Don't think I didn't notice you guys slacking over there."

"We took out fifteen kelzaks," Heather informed her.

Toni gave her a skeptical look. "After we left to take on Zurgayne, maybe."

"We went eight and three the second time," Blaze pointed out.

"While Dusty was fighting a general," Toni shot back. "She was a little distracted!"

"Chooba's not a general," Blaze said with a smirk. "She's comic relief."

Cam was watching the progress of the dishes, and she saw the moment when Shay realized the only person left to pass them to was Sensei. Who, as a cat, had a perfectly valid excuse for not washing dishes. Cam smiled when Shay looked around and caught her eye. "Consider this your chance to redeem yourself," she suggested.

"Oh, hey, I'll help," Dusty offered, when she realized what was going on. "Sensei, can we take your plate, or do you want to, you know, lick it off or something?"

"I suspect I've consumed enough ice cream for several cats," Sensei admitted, her tail swishing slowly over the end of the table. "I will wish Toni a happy birthday and then retire for the evening."

"Thank you, Sensei," Toni replied, immediately polite. As though he hadn't been arguing with his teammates over who fought the hardest only seconds before.

The parti-colored cat inclined her head gravely in return. "Enjoy your evening, Rangers." She turned and leapt down from the table without a sound, ghosting silently across the floor toward the residential hallway.

"All right, let's get this show on the road," Heather declared. "Blaze, you want to at least pretend to separate the recyclable stuff from the trash?"

"Yeah, yeah," Blaze grumbled. "This is me pretending."

"Do we really have to wash plastic plates and forks?" Shay complained. "I mean, it says 'disposable' right on the box."

"Well, yeah, and paper is biodegradable," Dusty pointed out. "But you don't chuck it until you've used both sides."

That was when the the monitor lit up on the other side of the room, warning of yet another alien incursion, and they all turned to stare at it in disbelief. "You've got to be kidding me," Toni said incredulously. "That's six in one day!"

"Yeah, and that's not even counting Skyler," Blaze put in. Shay's Carmanian visitor hadn't set off a single alarm, and Cam still wasn't sure whether that was good or bad.

"Well, duh," Dusty said. "Good aliens don't, you know. Incur. Or whatever."

"Invade," Cam corrected automatically. Dusty was trying to make a verb out of the warning on mainframe, and it just wasn't that kind of word. "But I think it's safe to say this isn't a good alien."

The alien in question was tearing through electrical lines like they were thread. There wasn't any sound on the monitor right now but the alien must have introduced itself at some point because the words "Electra Volt" were flashing at the top of the screen. Charming. Maybe the power companies could get together and sue Lothar for damages.

"This better not take all night," Toni growled, lining up between Shay and Dusty. Their morphers flashed in the bright lights of the underground ninja command center. "Ready?"

Blaze tossed the crumpled wrapping paper aside, and she and Heather exchanged glances as the Winds echoed, "Ready." Three morphers lifted to the ceiling, two aimed for the floor, and one thrust straight ahead as their feline sensei padded back into the room, leaping into Cam's chair to watch them go.

Cam's thoughts were distant as they disappeared, but it did occur to her to be grateful that at least Toni couldn't turn eighteen twice.

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. They 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?

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 pristine 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 happen. 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 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 not to 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 hide 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."

Heather's voice sounded cautious and a little uncertain, but it echoed around the zord bay as she called Cam's name. Why she had to come down here herself instead of using the comm system was a mystery. A message would interrupt Cam just as completely, but at least it wouldn't be as persistent. Cam knew from experience that Heather was a lot more distracting in person.

She tweaked one of the controls on the insect zord, making it twitch in the Crimson Ranger's direction. A mechanical wave. She meant it to be cute, but Heather actually jumped, casting a wary eye over her own zord. "Cam?" she repeated. "You down here?"

Cam frowned out at her from the zord's cockpit. Obviously, or why would Heather be looking for her here? She looked skittish, Cam decided, studying her as carefully as she could at this distance. Not a normal look for Heather. Not by any stretch.

Something must be wrong.

She poked her head out of the insect zord and shouted down to Heather, waving when the other girl's eyes lifted to hers. When she took her glasses off, she could see that Heather was wearing something that definitely wasn't a training uniform... and something that looked suspiciously like her amulet. Cam's hand went to her neck automatically, but sure enough, the amulet was gone.

"What are you doing here?" Heather called, not making any effort to come closer.

"Working," Cam said. She glanced down to make sure she wasn't just missing the amulet, maybe too accustomed to its familiarity to feel it anymore. But no, she really wasn't wearing it. Was it possible that Heather had it?

"What, you don't work on the zords enough in real life?" Heather still sounded edgy, like she was expecting something to sneak up on her deep in the heart of Ninja Ops. "And since where are our zords in your zord bay, anyway?"

Cam raised an eyebrow at that. "Since I needed them close enough to work on. I'm not going all the way out to your holding bay when there's plenty of space right here."

There was a pause, and then Heather said, "Look, could you, uh... come down here for a second?"

"Why?" she wanted to know. She was busy, and Heather was acting strangely. Cam frowned down at her, wondering if those could possibly be pajamas that she was wearing. They definitely weren't anything she could wear to work.

"Because I'm worried about the influence your subconscious might have on heavy machinery," Heather replied. When Cam just stared at her, she added, "Just come down, okay? It's important."

Cam sighed, and oddly, it was that tiny gesture that triggered a memory she couldn't quite pin down. She... sighed a lot. Someone had said she sighed a lot. Or... maybe not a lot, but--in a particular way.

She blinked, shaking her head. Grabbing the railings, she swung down the ladder-like steps two at a time and made her way over to Heather. "What is it?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest. "Because if you just want to make out, it would have been a lot more fun in your zord."

Heather gave her an odd look, assessing her in a way that didn't seem quite right. Then a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "When we get out of here," she informed Cam, "I'm going to remind you that you said that."

Cam eyed her in return. "Isn't waiting until we leave counterproductive?"

"Cam." Heather's smile was gone, replaced by a look of worry that made Cam wonder what exactly she was doing here. "Seriously. Why are you here?"

She would have asked Heather the same thing except that obviously she was here to drag Cam away from what she was doing. As usual. "I told you," Cam responded irritably. "I'm working. And why are you wearing my amulet, anyway?"

Heather considered that for a long moment before she said, "I think a better question is, why aren't you wearing your amulet?"

"Apparently," Cam said dryly, "because you are."

"Yeah?" Heather brightened visibly, like this was an actual answer to her ridiculous question. "Well, that's easy enough." She pulled the amulet off over her head and held it out to Cam.

Cam just looked at her, and Heather frowned. "Not that easy?" She took a step forward anyway, lifting the cord up over Cam's head and letting it settle around her neck. Cam glanced down, saw the comforting green glow of the samurai amulet against her training uniform, and she touched it gingerly.

That must have been what Heather wanted, because she was gone when Cam looked up again.

She didn't see another human being until her mom appeared with the mail later that morning. She must have been down at the post office, since the academy didn't receive regular mail anymore. Two letters for Cam: one from her advisor's department and one from Academic Counseling. She didn't want to open either one.

Luckily, a tentative knock at the door kept her from having to find out what the university thought of her now. Heather popped in before either of them could invite her, and Cam blinked. She wouldn't wear clothes like that out of the house, let alone to work. And to be perfectly honest, she wouldn't have expected Heather to, either.

"Nice place," Heather was saying, just before she caught sight of Cam's mom. After a moment's obvious hesitation, she added, "Um, hi." Like she had never seen Sensei before, Cam thought with a sigh.

Then, for no particular reason, she thought of a cat.

"Hello, Heather." Cam's mom, at least, sounded mildly amused by the odd reaction. "Is there something we can do for you?"

Heather's eyes widened. "Sensei?" she blurted out.

Cam exchanged glances with her mom.

"I mean, uh, no," Heather said quickly. "No, I just... I came to see Cam."

Cam tried not to smile. Cute even when she was confused, and there was probably only one person in the world she would say that about. But Heather was so sure of herself, so together, so quick about almost everything that the times when she did stumble seemed more amusing than annoying.

Her eyes focused on Heather's necklace, and her hidden smile disappeared. Her hand went to her neck, but the amulet wasn't there. Which should have been obvious, since apparently Heather was wearing it. Why was less clear.

"Why are you wearing my amulet?" she asked aloud.

"Oh, no," Heather said, taking a step back. "I learned my lesson about that the last time. I'm keeping the amulet, Cam."

She frowned. "Why?"

The Crimson Ranger didn't usually wear it, she was sure. It didn't seem completely wrong that she had it now, even if she couldn't remember why that would be so. Even if it were a prank, though, it was still Heather. It wasn't like she would let anything happen to it.

"Kind of a long story," Heather was saying. "Why don't we, um, go for a walk or something. I'll tell you outside."

Very subtle, Cam thought. Her mother would never see through that clever ploy. Cam had no compunction about rolling her eyes, letting Heather know exactly how convincing that excuse wasn't. "Right," she said. "A walk. I'll be back later, Mom."

"Have a nice time," her mom replied placidly.

"Okay," Heather said, barely waiting for the door to close behind them. "Here's the thing. This isn't real. You're in Ninja Ops, unconscious, and your mom thinks the amulet's taken over your brain. You can obviously control it somehow, or you wouldn't be seeing..." She gestured vaguely at their surroundings, but Cam just stared at her.

"Are you all right?" Cam asked. She knew what all of the words meant, but put together, they didn't seem to form coherent sentences. "Because you're making a lot less sense than usual."

"I told Sensei about the dreams," Heather said in a rush. "She thinks Lothar might be influencing you through the amulet. Because she had it for a while, before you, right? Sensei thinks maybe you were seeing the stuff she was planning without Lothar knowing it, and now Lothar's trying to make it work the other way so your mind shut off to keep her from getting in."

Cam eyed her. "I really don't know what you're talking about."

"Cam." Heather put her hands on Cam's shoulders and gave her that intent look that usually meant she was about to be kissed. Or cuffed. "None of this is real."

"It feels pretty real to me," Cam informed her.

"Well, I'm real," Heather shot back. "Who else would be stupid enough to touch the amulet while Lothar's trying to use it?"

Oddly, that was what made her hesitate. While the rest of Heather's remarks hadn't taken on any real significance in her mind, that question caught her attention. "What are you doing?" she asked warily.

"Trying to figure out what you're doing," Heather countered. "Sensei didn't realize you were kind of conscious in here until you kicked me out. I told her I could talk to you. Maybe get you to work the problem from the other side."

The only explanation Cam could come up with was that one of them was at least mildly delusional right now. And she knew it wasn't her. "Maybe," she said carefully, "we should go back inside and ask Mom to help us figure it out."

Heather stared at her for a long moment before letting her hands fall. "Wow," she said. She actually sounded hurt, which Cam didn't think was fair at all. "I get that it's weird, but I thought you'd at least... you know. Consider the possibility."

Cam sighed, but she couldn't take that kind of disappointment and maybe Heather knew it. "Fine," she muttered. "Tell me how I can disprove your crazy theory about unconscious realities."

"You were listening." Heather sounded relieved. "Why do you have to disprove it? Maybe you can't. Maybe your mind is creating explanations out of nothing; how do I know?"

"Anything that can't be disproven isn't a theory," Cam snapped, losing her patience with the whole thing. "If there's no possible observation that your theory can't explain, then it's dogma, not science."

"Dogma?" Heather repeated, staring at her.

"You're. Delusional," Cam said, very clearly. "Stop trying to drag me into it with you."

"Okay," Heather said. "I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that to me, because you're under the influence of some weird ninja magic and--hey, I just had an idea." She grinned at Cam, wild and reckless and Cam felt guilty for disappointing her again. "What if I can disprove your theory?"

"My theory?" Cam gave her a blank look. "I don't have a theory."

"Yeah you do." Heather was still grinning. "Your theory is that all this is real. But if this is real, you should be able to hold onto me, right?"

Cam frowned. She was actually starting to worry a little, because Heather seemed really convinced and Cam still couldn't figure out of what. "What?" she asked aloud.

"Seriously," Heather told her. "You're a ninja. Bet you can't hold onto me."

Cam rolled her eyes, reaching out to wrap her fingers around Heather's arm. "Happy?" she asked.

"Come on," Heather urged. Stepping closer, she engulfed Cam in a gentle hug. "Hold on to me."

This Cam wouldn't question. She put her arms around Heather, grip tightening reflexively when Heather's did. She heard Heather whisper in her ear, "I'll be right back." And then she was gone.

Cam lost her balance, stumbling to correct without thinking, and spun around the moment she'd regained her footing. Heather was nowhere to be seen. She shouldn't have been able to just vanish like that. Visually, maybe. But physically? Even Heather's ninja shadow battle wasn't good enough to get her out of a close-up hold with zero warning--and without taking the person holding her along for the ride.

The light around her shifted, making her look up automatically, and dread twisted her stomach. The sky was darkening. The pattern was distinctive. This was the day Lothar had attacked the ninja academies. It might have always been today, or it might have just happened now, but Heather thought Lothar was after her somehow and whatever was going on couldn't be good.

The next time she saw Heather, her face was hidden behind the Crimson Ranger's visor and her voice was distorted by technology Cam didn't recognize. Cam tried to talk to her, tentative with bound hands and kelzaks all around on a ship full of alien technology. But the other Ranger's manner was cold and dismissive in a way she'd only seen once before and with a sinking feeling she knew that Heather was under Lothar's influence again.

Her only ally in something she barely recognized as wrong: lost. Maybe it wasn't wrong at all. Maybe she was. Maybe Lothar had been able to capture her because she wasn't thinking straight, because she was more than a little out of it... because she was crazy.

"You're nothing here," the Crimson Ranger snarled at her. "You're only as important as what other people will trade for your release."

"Go to hell." Heather's real voice came from right behind the Ranger wearing her uniform, and her morphed and brainwashed alter ego took a blow to the head that sent her crashing to the floor. Her visor snapped open as she struck the deck, but there was no face behind it. The suit was empty.

"Fuck," Heather muttered, reaching for the glowing cords that held Cam's hands behind her back and yanking on them hard enough to make Cam wince. "We are so going to talk about this later."

"You said you'd be right back," Cam said breathlessly. Her wrists already hurt, and Heather wasn't making any effort to be gentle. The cords felt like they were scraping her skin raw.

Heather froze, and the pressure on her wrists was suddenly less. "You remember me?"

Cam swallowed, because now her hands were starting to ache and this was absolutely the last place in the world she wanted to be. "You're hard to forget," she managed, giving Heather's sleepwear a look that was meant to be pointed but probably just came off as distracted.

"Yeah." Heather sounded so grateful that Cam's hands twitched, wishing she could reach out and touch. That prodded her impromptu rescuer back into action, sliding her fingers over Cam's skin to protect it as she pulled her wrists free. "So how do we get out of here?"

"I thought you were working on that," Cam said, flinching as she moved her shoulders forward and bent her elbows, very carefully, in a more familiar direction. Her wrists were red and wounded and she wondered vaguely if Heather would see them that way wherever she was, too.

"Sensei is." All of Heather's attention seemed to be on her hands, and if her expression was horrified then at least her voice was calm as she added, "I was talking about the ship. A few minutes ago you were at the academy, now you're here, and I have no idea what happened."

Cam frowned at her, somehow more willing to ignore the condition of her wrists if Heather wasn't going to. "It wasn't just a few minutes."

Lothar's voice, unintelligible but thunderous, came from somewhere down the hall. Heather's eyes darted in that direction before settling urgently on Cam. "How do we get out of here?"

"You're the one who used to live here," Cam muttered, unwilling to admit that she had no idea. She still wasn't totally sure what was going on, but she gathered it wasn't good.

"Really?" Heather's speculative look triggered another memory, but she didn't have time to retrieve it before Heather added, "Will that work?"

Luckily, she didn't seem to need an answer. Taking Cam's hand, she pulled her across the deck toward some sort of control interface, and a moment later her grip tightened. "Hold on," she said, and the world disappeared around them.

For one too-brief moment, Cam panicked. She registered the teleport only when the valley outside Ninja Ops came into focus around them. Before she could pin it down more than that--day, date, year?--Heather was picking up her other hand and studying her wrists with obvious dismay.

"Only you," she declared. "Only you could get into serious trouble in your own mind."

"I can't control it," Cam said quietly. "You said I could, but I can't."

Heather looked up, transferring her intent gaze from Cam's wrists to her eyes. "How did you end up on the ship?"

Trying to think, to keep any of this clear in some sort of linear fashion, was like trying to keep herself awake after an entire day of fighting. "Lothar was here," she said at last. That was all she knew.

Heather's eyes narrowed. "Lothar was here," she repeated. "Really here? Or you just thought she was here?"

Cam opened her mouth, but she didn't really have an answer. Finally she just shook her head. "I don't know," she murmured.

"Okay." Heather seemed to accept that. She didn't look happy about it, but she didn't keep asking. "I have to tell Sensei that it's getting worse, that you're getting hurt, that Lothar might even be here. But--"

Cam knew she should keep her mouth shut, let her go, let her do what she thought was right. Cam obviously wasn't going to be much help. But she didn't like this, didn't like how easy it was to forget, how hard it was to be sure of anything. "It wasn't just a few minutes," she repeated reluctantly.

"Yeah, you said." Heather sounded torn, and Cam felt badly for making her doubt. "I don't want to leave you alone here."

Just then, the bunker doors were thrown open and Heather stuck her head out of Ninja Ops. "Hey, Cam!" she shouted, apparently uncaring that her exact duplicate was standing right there. "I thought we were supposed to spar this afternoon!"

Almost exact. The Heather in Ninja Ops had her hair pulled back and she was wearing her training uniform.

Cam looked from one to the other, and she saw the startled look on her Heather's face relax into a small smile. "Yeah, okay," she said, as though that had been the question to which she now had an answer. "That'll work."

Drawing in a deep breath, Cam took that as goodbye and turned away, entrusting her eventual fate to her pajama-clad girlfriend. The less real Heather was still waiting at the top of the stairs, smirking the way Heather always did when she thought she'd caught Cam at something she wasn't supposed to be doing. "Forget your watch again?" she teased.

"Hey!" Heather's voice made her turn, and the amulet glinted above her crossed arms as she told Cam, "Don't make me evil again, okay? I took that kind of personally."

Cam had already forgotten what she was talking about, so she just waved.

"And don't forget your bracers!" Heather called after her as she joined her fellow ninja at the entrance to their underground base. "You can get hurt here, you know!"

"What did you do to your wrist?" Heather asked, catching her hand as they headed down the stairs. She held it up to the light, frowning, and Cam raised the other one for comparison. They both bore deep red abrasions and clearly broken skin.

"I don't know," Cam admitted, staring at them in confusion. There was something she was supposed to remember about that, and it had to do with Heather. But Heather was here and she didn't seem any clearer on what had happened than Cam did, so she put the thought aside.

Her wrists were wrapped in cotton gauze and she didn't wear her bracers because Heather wouldn't let her attack with her hands anyway. They didn't really spar at all, just practiced kicks and minor ninja skills until Heather's morpher beeped and Cam reached for an amulet that wasn't there. She had a brief mental image of Heather wearing it--which was ridiculous, since she clearly wasn't--before it occurred to her that she had never finished the zord repairs that morning.

"Be careful," she urged. "The lateral stabilizers are acting up, and if you push them too hard there's a small chance they'll burn out completely."

"Which means more work for you," Heather finished. "I'll try to duck instead of block."

"Just try not to crash," Cam said with a sigh. "That's all I ask."

She was barely gone when that same voice came from the other side of the control room. "Does it really bother you when we blow stuff up?" Heather wanted to know.

Cam spun, coming face to face with a Heather that was definitely out of uniform. "What's going on?" she wanted to know, reaching for the amulet automatically. Heather was wearing it. She'd been right after all.

"Don't do that." Heather caught her hand before it could reach her, with a quick glance at the gauze on her wrists and maybe a flicker of surprise in her eyes. "Last time you touched it, I disappeared, and I need to tell you something first."

"Okay." This was the Heather she was supposed to trust. The one with the pajamas and the amulet. She was sure of it, even if she didn't know why. "I'm listening."

"Sensei's trying to ward the amulet," Heather said. "I don't know what that means, exactly, but she says things might get kind of weird in here. If she can't do it, we'll have to drain it," she added, "and who knows what that will look like for you."

Cam still didn't understand most of what she was saying. "What do you need me to do?" she asked quietly.

"I need you not to freak out," Heather said. "I'm going to stay here with you as long as I can, but depending on what happens with the amulet, and what happens with you, it might not be very long."

That was when the alarms started going off. Cam didn't take her eyes off of Heather, who held her gaze without flinching. "I don't want you to go," she murmured.

Heather's mouth quirked upward at the corner. "Believe me," she said, letting go of Cam's hand to touch her face gently, "I don't want to leave you here any more than you want to stay."

It wasn't just an alien incursion. The intruder alert howled up and down the audible frequencies, and compromised zord warnings were sounding across the board. The Rangers were in some kind of fight and as usual, no matter how far away it was, Ninja Ops was at the heart of the battle. Cam tried to focus on the person in front of her, but it was getting harder.

"It figures," Heather was saying. "When you're under attack, the first thing you think is that Ninja Ops will fall apart. Kind of arrogant, isn't it?"

The amulet on her chest flashed, the light violent enough to make Cam flinch, and Heather's eyes widened. "I can hear you," she said, apropos of nothing.

Cam lifted her own hand to cover the one Heather still had pressed against her skin. "Hear who?" she asked, not sure she wanted to know.

Heather's fingers twitched beneath hers, but they didn't feel quite real all of a sudden. "Sensei," she said. "She says she can't complete the ward while I'm using the amulet. I have to go."

"No." It was an involuntary reaction, a thoughtless one, and it made Heather take a step closer to her.

"She's still using it too," Heather said. "Why can't you ward both of us?" Only the nature of the question let Cam know that Heather wasn't talking to her anymore.

There was an explosion of sparks from the direction of the mainframe, and Cam could have sworn she heard Lothar laughing. The alarms were drowning out everything else, but somehow she heard Heather mutter, "Oh. I should go, then."

CyberCam was in her chair, shouting instructions at the Rangers, and Cam had never heard her sound so serious. Heather's zord had gone down. No one could pick up the Crimson Ranger on their scanners, or through the network, or get her to answer by comm. She was gone.

Cam felt tears prick her eyes as the ghost in front of her grabbed her shoulders and glared at her. "Cam, I'm right here. Don't listen to that. Don't do this to yourself. Everyone's okay, everyone's fine; we're waiting for you in Ninja Ops. None of this is real."

"I told her to be careful with the stabilizers," Cam whispered, knowing Heather would never hear her over the shrieking of the alert systems. Lothar's voice was in her head, mocking her. "You shouldn't have listened to me. They would have held, they would have been fine--"

"Cam!" Heather let go of her with one hand to toss the amulet over her shoulder, swinging the necklace around backwards as she stepped in to wrap her in a hug. "I didn't crash! I'm right here!"

"I hate your stupid Glider bike!" Cam shouted, trying to shove her away and failing. Her eyes were hot and wet and the Crimson Ranger could be dead for all she knew and what would she do then? "I hate your zord! I hate the way you throw yourself into the path of anything that looks remotely dangerous!"

"I can't leave, Sensei!" Heather sounded anguished. "She thinks I'm going to die!"

"Everyone dies!" Cam cried. "Lothar comes and she puts them into bubbles or she turns them into bugs or perfume or stamps and someday we won't be able to get them back! Someday she's going to win!"

"I can't!" Heather shouted at no one in particular. "Just do it!"

Lothar's voice abruptly vanished and the panic went just as fast, leaving Cam slumped against Heather in a control room that was starting to waver around them. Everything got horrifyingly fuzzy as the alarms started to blend together. Then it was just the roaring in her ears and Heather's arms around her when the entire world went dark.

Voices. She could make out voices again. Heather's voice, whispering something. Her mom's voice, answering a question she hadn't heard. And then Dusty saying, "Dude, I think you broke it."

I don't care, she wanted to say. I don't care what you break, as long as it isn't you.

"Hey," Heather said softly. "We like it when you complain, Cam. That's how we know stuff works, that it's good, because you complain about us breaking it."

The static in her ears was receding but it was still enough to muffle the silence that followed before Dusty's voice asked, "What?"

There was a barely noticeable pause, and then she added, "I mean, yeah. We definitely, uh... like it? When you complain?"

"You never made us doubt," Heather was murmuring, and Cam could feel arms holding her up, propping her against something warm and soft that had to be a person. Heather. Heather was still holding her. "It's never your fault that we get hurt, okay? Not ever."

Cam tried to move, but her legs wouldn't respond and belatedly she realized that she was lying down. On the floor? She managed to get her eyes open, and here she was, still stuck in the control room. Her fingers clenched convulsively, and Heather's soft shirt wrinkled beneath her hands. "You shouldn't have listened to me," she whispered.

"I didn't," Heather told her. "That wasn't real, Cam. You've been here the whole time. You keeled over right after you got the generators back, remember? Using that much power from the amulet for that long must have gotten Lothar's attention--"

"Perhaps explanations could wait," Sensei's voice suggested, and Cam lifted her head enough to see the cat perched on the arm of the couch beside her. Not on the floor after all, then, but the couch beneath the library.

Leaning heavily on Heather, she finally got her body to shift itself into something like a sitting position. Her face was wet with tears, and when she lifted a hand to her cheek she saw the white cotton gauze wrapped around her wrist. She stiffened, tears forgotten as she jerked her other arm free of Heather's comforting embrace and stared at the matching wraps in horror.

"Yeah, I know, sorry about that," Heather blurted out, her words falling over each other in her haste. "I don't get it either; I mean, maybe injuries you imagine could become real but I don't know how you knew we were bandaging them--"

"You did it," Cam said, her voice harsh in her ears. She could feel herself starting to shake, tears threatening once more as she wondered hopelessly if she would ever be able to trust her senses again. "You bandaged them."

"Um, actually," Toni began, crouching awkwardly in front of her. "That was me."

Cam stared at him, not aware that she was shaking her head until Heather brushed a hand against her cheek and said quietly, "You mean, in your head it was me. When I left you at Ninja Ops with... the other me. She did it."

She turned to search Heather's expression, looking for anything that would prove beyond a doubt that this was actually happening. The cord around Heather's neck caught her attention. It was off-center, pushed back, whatever was on it hanging over her shoulder like she'd shoved it out of the way. Cam reached for the cord, slowly, almost afraid of what it might hold. Heather didn't try to stop her.

It was easily within her mom's reach, Cam noted distantly, as she pulled the amulet forward and stared at it for a long moment. Heather was tall enough that even slouched on the couch as she was, the amulet would have been visible over her right shoulder. It looked normal now, felt a little cooler than she remembered it, and didn't call to her the way it once had.

"You want it back?" Heather asked, reaching up to pull it off before she'd finished the question.

"No," Cam said sharply, halting her mid-motion. Heather gave her an odd look, but she couldn't take it. Not now. Not when it was the only thing that distinguished this Heather from the others. The amulet and the pajamas. They were all she was sure of right now.

"Just... no," she added, when Heather seemed to be waiting for an explanation.

Heather shrugged, but she let her hand fall. "Okay," she agreed.

"So, uh, how are you?" Shay was standing next to Dusty at one end of the couch while Blaze loomed behind Sensei at the other. Toni hovered in between, watching her worriedly, and they all looked like they wanted to ask what Shay had finally said.

"I mean," the Red Ranger plowed on, "after all that... you know. You okay? How do you feel?"

Cam stared up at them, remembering the sound of one zord failure after another. She could still hear the sirens in the background, alarms piling on top of each other, and CyberCam's voice yelling that Heather was gone. It hadn't felt any less real than this moment with the Rangers.

"Alone," she said softly. The room was very quiet now. "I feel alone."

Heather knew what a serious freakout looked like. It looked like Blaze the day their parents died. It looked like the mirror the night after green slime had put her and Blaze on opposite sides of Lothar's little war. It looked like a ninja cat quietly announcing that her only daughter had disappeared into the past with a scroll and a prayer.

It looked like that same daughter sitting outside Storm Chargers with a laptop, a coffee, and an unwillingness to acknowledge anything else. She'd been there since before the shop opened. Since seven, in fact--since the time Heather arrived, because she'd squeezed into the truck between Heather and Blaze and refused to go anywhere that didn't involve both of them.

Okay. One of them. Cam was attached to Heather like she needed her to breathe. And while Heather was all for attachment, she knew perfectly well that this level of intensity wasn't healthy. Or desirable.

She also knew that Cam wasn't stupid, knew all of that as well as she did, and was capable of monitoring her own reactions better than Heather was. Even supercool and confident Cam was entitled to freak out now and then. And having her crazy aunt hold her prisoner in her own head and convince her that all her teammates were dying justified a freakout if anything did.

Especially since, as far as Heather could tell, she wasn't totally convinced that her aunt had let her go.

"Hey." Kenny's voice was gruff but quiet, and it shouldn't have startled her but somehow it did. "How's she doing?"

Heather glanced at her boss, standing beside her and lifting his chin toward the door when she caught his eye. Heather's narrow line of sight to Cam's little setup didn't include Kenny, but he knew perfectly well what she was looking at. Cam had barely moved since Heather and Blaze had taken their lunch break.

"Okay," Heather said with a small shrug. How did she know how Cam was? "Still here."

It wasn't the smartest thing she could have said, given that it was both obvious and easily misunderstood. Kenny couldn't have missed the sparkly wrist wraps Dusty sometimes wore, now bright and glittering on Cam's arms. They covered the gauze on her wrists, but they weren't really her style and anyone who knew her had probably guessed she had something to hide.

"Look," Kenny said, folding the clipboard under his arm. "If you need any help--"

"We're good," Heather interrupted. "Really."

Kenny frowned, but all he said was, "Well, you know where to find me."

Fishing a couple of keys out of his pocket, he added, "Custom parts finally came in; I'm gonna need you to pick 'em up before Dusty starts on the O'Kasik job. You can take a passenger as long as she doesn't drive."

Heather managed a half-smile as she grabbed the keys. "On it."

Cam didn't look up when she came out, which at first she thought was weird but then she realized that Cam was already closing her laptop and sliding it into her bag. She swung it over her shoulder and grabbed her coffee, all before she even glanced in Heather's direction. She didn't say a word.

"I guess asking if you want to come is kind of ridiculous," Heather remarked. Thumb hooked under her shoulder strap, Cam's yellow wrist wrap glinted against her green hoodie. Her eyes were focused on something a hundred miles away.

She came back as Heather watched, raising her eyebrows as her gaze flicked down and back up, taking in Heather's cargo pants and the pajama tank she'd pulled on over a t-shirt to wear to work. That was as close as she could get to what she'd been wearing last night when she'd been Cam's only link to the real world. That and the amulet she was still wearing over her shirts.

"Where are we going?" Cam asked, not like it mattered. Like she was just making conversation. Which was fine, good, Cam didn't make small talk every day and Heather figured she should be flattered she was worth the effort now.

"Pick up some stuff," Heather said, waving her around toward the van. "Shouldn't take long." She didn't bother suggesting that she'd be back in a few minutes and Cam could just wait here.

"Parts for Dusty?" Cam asked.

Heather swung into the driver's seat and eyed her across the small space. Cam put her bag on the floor and climbed in after it, not catching her eye until she'd pulled her seatbelt into place. "No?" she added. "I was just guessing."

"Did you hear me and Kenny talking?" Heather wanted to know.

Cam shook her head, reaching out to fiddle with the window.

"Huh." Heather started the engine, put Cam's window down for her, and laid a hand on the back of Cam's seat as she backed up. "Yeah, parts for Dusty. O'Kasik's got his own mechanic, but the guy's out of town and he wants it done by next weekend."

There was a brief pause, and then Cam asked, "Don't like him?"

Heather blinked. "I didn't say that."

"Pick a number," Cam said, out of the blue. "Anything. Between one and a hundred."

Street traffic was slow and boring this afternoon, and the summer pedestrians made it even slower. No one was ever in a hurry on an August afternoon. Heather was just as happy to go with it, since she'd rather sit in a van with Cam than work any day.

"Sixty-seven," she said, just for the hell of it.

"Yes," Cam said.

Heather let the van coast around a group that had stepped off the sidewalk and then apparently decided not to go anywhere after all. "Yes, what?" she wanted to know.

"That's the number I was thinking of," Cam replied. "Pick another number."

Heather rolled her eyes. "One," she said, mostly to be annoying.

"Yeah," Cam said again. "Exactly."

"Uh-huh." Heather smirked at the lazy street through the windshield. Very funny. "Now I'm thinking of a number."

Cam hesitated. "I said between one and a hundred," she said at last.

"Who says it isn't?" Heather wanted to know.

"It's nineteen seventy-eight," Cam informed her. "There are no values over a thousand that fall between one and a hundred. There are, in fact, a majority of values under a thousand that don't fall between one and one hundred."

Heather was really tempted to pull over and stop the van. Unfortunately, they might be moving at a crawl but they were moving, and with people stepping out in front of them every few seconds, it wasn't worth disrupting what was left of the traffic pattern. "How could you possibly know that?" she demanded.

"I took a class," Cam said mildly. "In first grade. It was called arithmetic."

"Great," Heather declared. "My psychic girlfriend can count. Guess that means you'll be paying the bills. In the meantime, you can read my mind?"

Cam sounded, of all things, amused. "You say that like you didn't guess my numbers just as easily. You've been reading my mind all day, Heather. I'm just trying to catch up."

Heather scoffed. "I don't know what you're talking about."

She felt Cam's hand on her sleeve a moment later, fingers running down her arm and pulling away. "Your shirt," Cam said simply. "My coffee. Pizza for lunch."

Heather raised her eyebrows at the road. "Yeah, so? What does that have to do with anything?"

"I didn't ask you to wear that shirt," Cam said. "You ordered my coffee without even looking at me. And it wasn't black," she added, before Heather could say that she knew perfectly well what kind of coffee Cam drank.

Which was true, actually. She'd gotten Cam mocha with cream, which ordinarily would have had her complaining all the way to work. But it had seemed like the thing to do, and hey, chocolate was a girl's best friend, right? Heather was paying, so Cam could suck it up and drink diluted comfort coffee for a day.

"You suggested pizza for lunch before I could," Cam continued. "And that's not exactly my usual either. Not to mention the way you put the window down when we got in the van."

"I saw you messing with it," Heather protested. "You don't have to be psychic to know when someone wants their window down."

"Except that I usually put it up," Cam pointed out. "So you can turn on the air conditioning."

Heather rolled her eyes. "So I'm trying not to give you a hard time. You had a bad night, okay? I don't have a lot of practice with the whole 'sensitive' thing, but even I know you don't deliberately piss off the girl who got mind-raped by her--"

She stopped, several seconds too late. Yeah. She definitely needed more practice.

"Yes," Cam agreed after a moment. "I can see that."

Heather winced. "Sorry," she said awkwardly. "I, uh... that was really stupid."

She could see Cam shake her head out of the corner of her eye. "I used to think you did it on purpose," Cam mused aloud. "That direct, tell-it-like-it-is thing. A lot of people hide behind that, that... honesty."

She had no idea where Cam was going with this, so she figured it was better to keep her mouth shut. In fact, if she could have kept her mouth shut a little sooner, they both might have been better off. Cam was one of the few people who could make her feel like she'd screwed up by telling the truth.

"But it's not for the shock value, is it," Cam said. "You just don't really think about it."

It was all a giant puzzle to Cam, and for some reason that understanding blunted the sense that she was being used as research. It wasn't her in particular. It was everything. That was just how Cam looked at the world.

"You analyzing me again?" Heather asked, for once more fond than annoyed. After all, if Cam could see her that clearly and still want to be with her, then maybe she wasn't totally a lost cause.

For a long moment, Cam didn't reply. Then, sounding more curious than anything, she said, "Are you analyzing me back?"

Heather grinned. "Yeah, 'cause that's really a strength of mine."

Cam was quiet.

Quiet maybe a little too long, and finally Heather said, "Hey, Kenny's worried about you, you know." He wasn't the only one, but there were only so many times she could ask if Cam was okay before Cam stopped answering.

"I can't imagine why," Cam said wryly. She could see Cam lifting her hands a little, eyeing the glittering wrist wraps that were easily the most stylish thing she had on. Dusty's wardrobe was a weird combination of oil stains and cutesiness.

"Me neither," Heather agreed. "I mean, say the three of us are involved. You're brilliant, Dusty's freakin' adorable, and what am I? I'm obviously the one in trouble."

The incredulous silence that followed this observation made it completely worth it, and she smirked to herself. Not that psychic. The day she couldn't surprise Cam would probably be the day they broke up.

"What?" Cam asked at last.

Heather took a hand off the wheel to wave vaguely in her direction. "You're wearing her wrist things. I'm wearing your necklace. And I dunno if you've seen Dusty today, but she's totally wearing CyberCam's hat." She probably hadn't had time to wash her hair that morning, but Heather kept that opinion to herself.

This was met by another moment of what Cam would call "processing." Then, finally, she said, "Let me get this straight. You think that not only does Kenny notice women's accessories, but the first explanation he'd come up with is that the three of us are dating."

"Ever dated two girls at the same time?" Heather teased. "In all your wild college years?"

"Actually, yes." Cam sounded more amused than scandalized, and knowing her, she might even be telling the truth. "But Dusty would be dating you, not me, and there's no way we'd wear each other's clothes."

Heather fumbled for the amulet around her neck, catching it with her fingers and holding it up without turning her head. She shook it pointedly. Too bad it didn't make any sound.

"Me and Dusty," Cam clarified. "I'd wear your clothes. Dusty wouldn't wear mine."

This was possibly the most entertaining conversation she'd ever had with Cam, and she couldn't keep from grinning. "You're only saying that," she teased, "'cause you wouldn't let her."

At first she thought Cam would let that go, done talking about this, but then she remarked thoughtfully, "I'm probably saying it because I don't think she'd date me. If we assume that as a given, however unlikely, then maybe she would. She wears everything else."

Heather considered that. Dusty usually showed up at the shop in whatever she'd been wearing that morning, which meant that sometimes she looked like she'd just rolled out of bed and sometimes she could have stepped out of a superstore flyer. Not done up, just... cute. Put together. It was sort of disconcerting. Especially since she worked on the bikes no matter what, apparently unaware of what she was wearing on any given day.

"What about you?" Cam was asking. "Have you ever been involved with two people?"

Cam knew by now that she was the first girl Heather had dated, period, so she couldn't take the question very seriously. "Dated, yeah," she said with a shrug. "Been involved with? No."

Cam allowed the distinction to slide, which gave Heather time to wonder if Cam was just humoring her. She didn't seem interested in Dusty, but then, she hadn't seemed interested in Heather either. Until Heather spelled it out for her and asked her, straight out, to at least think about it.

"Would you go out with Dusty?" she asked abruptly. "If she asked you?"

Cam didn't seem surprised by the question. "You mean, if I wasn't with you?"

Heather considered that. "Yeah," she said at last. "I guess."

"You guess?" Cam repeated. "Is this a prelude to asking for an open relationship, or a threesome?"

"What?" Heather blinked. "Neither."

"You'd go out with Dusty," Cam said, with disturbing certainty. "You wouldn't even wait till she asked you, would you. You'd go after her just like you went after me."

"Well, no," Heather said, frowning. The tone was thoughtful, but the words came out sounding like an accusation anyway and she was a little worried about how fast this conversation had turned around. "I wouldn't go after her like I went after you, 'cause I like you better. Obviously."

"If you weren't with me," Cam insisted. "Like you said."

Heather shrugged uncomfortably. "I dunno. Maybe?"

"You said she was cute," Cam reminded her, and Heather rolled her eyes.

"I said she's adorable," she corrected, "and she is. Come on, Cam, she's a moto girl. You don't see that every day."

"Unless you're looking in a mirror," Cam said, and the smile was there in her voice.

"Right," Heather said quickly, relieved. "Or if you're, y'know, you."

She thought for a moment they might be safe. But then Cam remarked, "I'm not against open relationships. Just so you know. But I'm told I do better in threesomes."

Heather opened her mouth, but she had no idea what to say.

"I guess it's a control thing," Cam added after a pause. "Sometimes I don't trust people to tell me what's going on unless I see it for myself."

That she had no trouble believing, at least out of context. "Sometimes?" she echoed skeptically.

She could hear Cam smiling. "So you can imagine trying to explain to me what your date with Dusty was like... It's not that I have to be there," she added. "It's just that I prefer being able to question everyone involved."

"Okay, wait." It was past time to get back into this conversation. "Why are we talking about me and Dusty all of a sudden?"

"You brought it up," Cam said patiently.

"I did not!" Heather exclaimed.

"You said you'd go out with her," Cam said.

"I'm sure I didn't," Heather argued. "I asked if you'd go out with her. I didn't say anything about me."

"Except to suggest that Kenny thinks the three of us are dating," Cam reminded her. "Because we're wearing each other's stuff."

Heather frowned. "You didn't answer the question," she said, not sure how she felt about that. Because the answer was pretty obviously yes, and if Cam didn't want to tell her then what did that say?

"Yes, I'd go out with Dusty," Cam said. "I just don't think she'd go out with me."

"Well, no," Heather agreed, "because she's straight. Pretend she's not: she'd totally date you. She wouldn't ask you first," she added, "but she'd definitely say yes if you asked her."

Something about that made Cam laugh, and she didn't think it was that outrageous so maybe it was just Cam being flattered. She had a tendency to laugh when people said nice things about her. The sarcasm, habit though it seemed to be, was mostly just a cover.

"So how come your gaydar worked on me but not on Dusty?" Cam asked, amusement still bright in her voice. "And why do you think someone who can't even remember the rules would want to date someone who doesn't know how to break them?"

"If I had functional 'gaydar'," Heather said, lifting one hand from the steering wheel to make air quotes, "my life would be a lot more interesting. I had no idea you were gay; I just figured you were too cool to make my life hell if you weren't."

That made Cam pause. "So, no gaydar and no sense of self-preservation?" she suggested at last.

Heather smiled. "It's all about taking chances, Cam."

"And here I thought you were the observant one," Cam muttered.

"Can't spend all your time watching," Heather teased. This she knew. This, the back and forth with Cam, the easy revelations, the feeling that anything she said would be all right... this was Cam. This was her and Cam together.

"I can't believe you spend any of your time watching," Cam countered, "if you've missed Dusty flirting with Shay all this time."

Heather scoffed. "If Dusty's flirting with Shay, then Dusty missed it too," she declared. "Dusty gets cute with everyone who comes through the door. That's just what she does."

"That's what Blaze does," Cam corrected. "Blaze flirts. Dusty's testing the water."

Unfortunately, under her shell of sarcastic arrogance, Cam was remarkably insightful when it came to her teammates. "I really hope you're wrong," Heather said, frowning. She liked Dusty a lot, and she'd hate to see her get hurt by her best friend.

"Don't think Shay can take it?" Cam asked, and she sounded kind of odd.

Heather glanced sideways at her, because the tone was just that weird. "Why'd you say it like that?"

It was gone when Cam asked, "Like what?"

Heather shrugged, her gaze back on the road. "I dunno. You sounded funny."

There was a pause, and then Cam said lightly, "I was going to say, maybe you want her for yourself. But then I... thought you were actually worried."

Heather put on the blinker and waited to turn across traffic, more distracted by Cam's aborted teasing than by how Shay might react. "You really think I want Dusty?" she wanted to know.

"You said you did," Cam pointed out. "If the real question is whether I care... hey." Heather could hear the grin in her voice without even looking. "I just had a really interesting idea."

No way. Cam had not just implied that they should ask Dusty out and see what Shay did. "Did you just say what I think you did?" Heather demanded.

"No," Cam said, weirdly cheerful. "But I thought it."

Heather took the opportunity to turn, then turn again immediately so they would be parking out by the road instead of fighting for a space on the inside of the lot. "Okay, one, I'm not psychic," she said, spinning the wheel around. The van lumbered into the space and rolled right up against the curb. "And two, Dusty's not gonna go for it."

"Mom warned you this would happen," Cam said, waiting until the engine shut off to reach for her seatbelt. "You're the one who insisted on getting stuck inside the ward."

"She said it might happen," Heather corrected. "And so far I'm not hearing any voices, so I figure we're okay."

"What word am I thinking of?" Cam countered.

Telepathy. Heather rolled her eyes. "How should I know?"

"Telepathy," Cam informed her, and Heather blinked. "It's not all voices and card tricks. Sometimes it's just knowing something you shouldn't know because someone else happens to be thinking it."

"Yeah, okay," Heather said. She could disprove this, easy. "Who won freestyle at the X Games this year?"

Cam hesitated, and Heather hid her smile by pretending to be distracted by her seatbelt. Cam knew this, and Heather knew she knew it. Travis Pastrana's name had been flying around for days afterward. Cam couldn't have missed it if she'd tried. And she probably had.

"Nate Adams," Cam said at last.

Heather let her seatbelt go with a snap, lifting her head to look at Cam in surprise. "What?"

Cam frowned a little. "No?"

"No," Heather said slowly, staring at her. "But that's who I was thinking of."

A small smile appeared on Cam's face. "Told you," she said quietly.

"Really?" Heather couldn't take her eyes off of her. "You can really read my mind?"

"Apparently," Cam agreed. "As much as you can read mine, anyway."

Heather considered that. It was oddly reassuring. If they were sharing... whatever this was, then Cam wasn't getting any more from her than she was from Cam. And what was she getting from Cam, exactly? So she could guess numbers. Cute, maybe, but not life-altering.

"Okay," she said. "Well. That's cool, I guess."

"It's bizarre and disturbing," Cam corrected. "But so far it's funnier than it is disruptive, and as far as I know, there's nothing we can do about it either way. I shouldn't have asked you to stay," she added, and now frustration laced her tone.

"Hey, no." Heather recognized the mood for what it was, and she probably should have seen it coming. "That was my choice, Cam. I was the one who had Sensei in my ear; I knew what the consequences were way better than you. And I'm the one who chose to stay."

"Because I asked you to," Cam insisted, still visibly troubled.

Heather raised her eyebrows. "Where did you get this idea that I do whatever you tell me to?" she asked. "That's kind of insulting."

"Insulting," Cam repeated. "Romantic... it's so hard to tell the difference, sometimes."

She didn't have any trouble. Insulting, that she was good at. "I'm not so good at romantic," she admitted aloud. "You might have noticed."

It had the desired effect. Cam's distress lightened in the face of her pretended chagrin, and she actually smiled a little. "I think you're doing all right."

"Good," Heather said, fiddling with the keys as they sat there in the front of the van. "Hold onto that thought, 'cause my next question is gonna be, 'why are you so weird today?'"

Cam laughed.

Heather blinked, but, okay. Laughter was fine. Not what she was expecting, but fine. "I'm serious," she said, just in case that had gotten lost somehow.

"Which is half the humor," Cam agreed, a grin still lurking in her voice. "But if you want an answer, you're going to have to define 'weird'."

"Cream in your coffee," Heather reminded her. "Pizza for lunch." Waving the keys, she added, "Talking about dating Dusty." Because that was absolutely on the same level.

"We should do that," Cam said. "Really talk about it, I mean."

Heather dropped the keys, twisted in her seat, and leaned over to wave a hand in front of Cam's face. "Heather for Spaceship Cam," she said. "Come in, Cam. We have questions down here."

Against all common sense, Cam smiled. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Heather eyed her. "You're... welcome?"

"I didn't expect you to do that," Cam explained. Or she sounded like she thought she was explaining. It was a non sequitur as far as Heather was concerned.

"Everything I saw last night," Cam murmured, almost to herself. "None of it was unexpected. Nothing really surprised me. Even the weird stuff; it all just... made sense, somehow. In my mind."

Oh. She didn't have to finish. Heather got where this was going, no questions asked. "So this is like that episode of Farscape," she said. "Where he tries to prove to himself that he's really on Earth by going into the women's bathroom."

Now Cam was staring at her. "I've never seen Farscape," she said, the corners of her mouth twitching. "Yet strangely I want to say yes."

"Welcome to my brain," Heather said with a smirk. "At least your head is filled with useful stuff. Telepathy is gonna suck way more for you than me."

"Optimism isn't a trait I typically associate with you," Cam observed. "You make it look vaguely threatening."

"Only vaguely?" Heather frowned at her. "Now I know I've been insulted."

"Are you supposed to be working?" Cam wanted to know.

"Are you supposed to be moderately less weird?" Heather countered. "I mean, just as a general rule?"

Cam did smile this time. "I think you like it," she said, with a sort of amusing assurance.

Heather scoffed, because yeah, she thought it was cute, but saying so was probably the fastest way to get Cam to stop. "I'd love to see you and Dusty have a conversation today," she said instead. "It'd probably be like watching people talk in code."

Cam's smile didn't fade. "I'll see what I can do."