"Hold on Kim!" Skye reassured hoarsely, once he had recovered enough to find his voice "I'll teleport...oh..." the communicator on his wrist was smashed. Of all the stupid things to do!. He should have just grabbed Kimberley from the fight and teleported straight away as Tommy had said, not tried to join in. He was sweating, in extreme discomfort as Kimberly unknowing pulled on his bad leg. The sapling was bending alarmingly and they heard the first ominous crack as it began to give way under their combined weights. He glimpsed the sheer only slightly less than vertical cliff beneath them, his skin going cold and his mouth dry with fear at the height. Kim looked oddly calm as she looked up at him, her brown hair flickering across her face in the breeze.

"Cassie gave her morpher to Kerone." TJ's voice was flat, as though his own opinion was irrelevant. Which it was, Zhane supposed. Still, while he wasn't surprised by Cassie's decision, he wouldn't have thought Kerone would go along with it.

"Well," Carlos said, after a moment's pause. "I suppose that makes this more fair. Two votes from Earth and two from KO-35."

"So?" Zhane demanded impatiently. "Are we voting or not?"

"All in favor of splitting the team," TJ declared. "Zhane, Andros, and Kerone become Kerovan Rangers, and Carlos and I continue as Earth Rangers. Ashley decides for herself later. Raise your hand to vote yes."

Zhane lifted his hand, leaving his elbow propped on the table. They knew where he stood. TJ and Carlos raised their hands too, but Kerone shot an uncertain look at Cassie. The other girl just folded her arms, giving Kerone a reassuring smile. After a brief hesitation, Andros' sister slowly held up her hand.

"It won't support us both" She looked down at the rocky precipitous slope below. "Maybe it is better this way..""How do you deal with it? What's it like?"
          "Well- they'll stop lying to you, which would seem to be a plus. Of course, there will be days when it doesn't seem that way. When they tell you that they got their clothes dirty while mud-wrestling a mutant alligator, you might wish they would lie. They'll be running out of the house at all hours, and you'll worry, which you didn't before. They'll stop obeying you- but they'll start listening instead. In short, your children have jumped from fourteen to twenty-five, in terms of maturity. You just have to start seeing them as rational adults a little earlier than most parents do."
          Joyce sighed. "I always told myself that I wouldn't let anything happen to Drew and Jo. After I lost Harry- I guess I got a little paranoid. And now they're spending their time chasing monsters, and there's a triceratops-thing which has quite basically sworn to kill my son!" She looked up. "I saw one of the fights on the news. It's no secret to Charterville that Nukus and Chromium Gold can't stand each other. There's a pretty nasty vendetta between them."

Skye felt her fingers loosen their grip and was horrified as he realised what she intended. He scrabbled desperately to reach her with his hands without a hope of succeeding.