Valeria leads me to the side of the building where there’s a small porch and a wooden door. We step into a lounge type of area with couches and tables, but no one is in here. The ceiling is low and there is just one small window. The rest of the inside where the light from the window doesn’t reach is lit only with candlelight. It feels kind of homey, but also kind of eerie.
We walk down a hallway and stop at the door at the end. Valeria knocks.
“Come in,” a muffled woman’s voice calls from behind.
Valeria opens the door and gestures for me to go in, so I do. She follows behind me. The office is small. Or perhaps it’s actually big, but it just looks small because it’s crowded with thick books stacked on ceiling-high bookshelves. If there is a window in here, it’s obscured by one of the shelves. The rest of the room is taken up by a large desk with four monitors and even more books stacked on it, filling in the spaces around the monitors.
An East Asian woman with lightly tanned skin stands up, head barely visible above the monitors. Her head has a dark stubble on it, fresh growth on a once-bald head. She smiles, revealing a wide gap between two of her front teeth. She has the kind of genuine smile that makes her whole wide, squarish face stretch and crinkle.
“Valeria!” She steps out from behind the desk to greet us. She’s short and a little stout, wearing a white tank top and pale blue jeans.
“Li,” Valeria says, “we’ve returned.”
Li nods. “Any news?”
“The giftists don’t seem to be making any moves.”
“Good, good.” She gestures to me with one hand. “And who is this?”
“I’m Chrys,” I say before Valeria has the chance, “with a y.”
“Chrys-with-a-y,” Li says, “nice to meet you. I take it you’ll be joining us?”
“Yes,” Valeria says, “and she has a request.”
Li smiles once again, like a mother anticipating exactly what her child wants. “Let’s talk then. Valeria, you may go.”
Valeria nods and leaves, closing the door behind her.
Li goes to a spot of wall between two bookshelves and opens a door I didn’t notice before.
“Follow me,” she says. “My office is kind of stuffy, isn’t it?”
I just laugh awkwardly, not sure how I should respond, and follow her through the door. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken to an adult, an authority figure. Li doesn’t look that old—maybe late 30s, early 40s—but I feel nervous around her.
We enter an even smaller room. It’s in the shape of a hexagon, bright from the light streaming in from two floor to ceiling windows that face some sort of garden. The only things in the room are an armchair and a three-seat sofa facing each other.
Li sits down in the armchair and gestures for me to sit. I sit down at the edge of the sofa, back slightly on an armrest, not wanting to sit directly in front of her.
“So,” Li says, “tell me a little bit about you. Family situation?”
“Um, I was in foster care. Ran away.”
She nods and rests her chin on her hand. I haven’t met that many gifted people but the ones I have met so far all hold this sort of look in their eyes, like a deep, poorly suppressed inner turmoil. I suspect I have that same look. But Li, she has none of that. Either she’s managed to overcome her suffering, or she just never suffered. It makes her even more uncomfortable to look at.
“And how did you hear about us?” Li asks.
“Well, I used to read a lot about people like us. I came across a forum talking about the camp. Those people were actually talking about how we’re plagues to this Earth and the camp needs to be destroyed and whatnot, but seeing that, it gave me hope I guess.”
“Ah yes, giftist propaganda. I monitor it as well.”
“I, um, I also found another forum talking about how the camp has someone who can remove gifts…”
“Mhm.” Li looks at me as though she knows exactly what I want to say, yet she doesn’t continue.
“Well, I heard from Valeria that it’s true,” I say.
“It is.” Another pause.
“Valeria said you can do it.”
“I can.” Still nothing more.
It frustrates me. She knows what I want. She can just tell me if it’s possible or not. Instead, she’s forcing me to say it, forcing me to say it out loud to her.
I sigh. “Well, I was wondering if you can remove mine.”
“Yes, if that’s what you really want.”
“It is. I’d do anything.”
“Oh, I’m glad you said that! You see, the thing is, Chrys, removing a gift—it’s very serious business. If I remove it, not only is it gone from you, it’s gone from circulation. No one can ever have that gift again.”
I sit up straighter. That’s perfect.
To become gifted, it’s like winning a lottery that you didn’t even know you entered. The person with that ability dies and if you are one of the few babies born in that exact same moment, congratulations, you just might catch it. No two gifts are exactly the same. That’s why they started calling us gifted in the first place. Not because normal people think what we can do is some awesome, world-saving thing—quite the opposite, in fact—but because it’s special, unique, one of a kind. And that’s it.
If mine could be “gone from circulation,” as Li put it, that’d be perfect. Perfect.
“And so,” Li continues, “because it’s serious business, I don’t just remove them willy-nilly. You have to take some time and think about it.”
“I have thought about it my whole life. I really want—”
She puts up a finger, not in a menacing way, but like she’s telling me she wants to speak.
“Chrys, there are requirements. Tasks. Successfully complete my tasks to prove you’re ready. And then, I’ll remove it for you.”
“Tasks? Sure. I can do that.”
“Good.” She smiles again, but this one doesn’t reach her eyes. “Tell me what your gift is.”
“Is that the task…?”
“Not quite.”
“Then why do you need to know?”
“Don’t you think I should know what your gift is, if I’m to remove it from circulation?”
“Just trust me, it’s something you’d want gone.”
“So you haven’t told anyone.”
My shoulders drop. I have a sense of where she’s going with this and I really really hope I’m wrong.
“Tonight we’ll hold a camp meeting after dinner to welcome you. Come up on stage and introduce yourself. That’s your first task, Chrys.”
“Okay, that sounds doable.”
“And in your introduction, tell everyone what your gift is, and your focus too.”
I ball my hands into fists as tight as possible to stop them from shaking, but instead my fists vibrate on my lap. I fold my arms tightly.
“Uh,” I breathe out, “Li, is it possible to get a different first task?”
“No.”
She stands up and points to another door opposite the one we came in. “That’s the way out. Go to Cabin 10. That’s where you’ll be staying. You’ll hear a bell announcing dinner time in a couple hours. The others in your cabin can show you the way to dinner.”
She goes through the door we came in.
I get up as soon as the door closes and bolt out of the room. The door opens up to the hall. I run down the hall, out the main door and straight into the forest.
Chapter 5
I slow down once I reach the forest and trudge a bit further in. I sit at the base of a tree so that I can still see the camp. I sit there alone for quite some time. Maybe an hour. Maybe two.
I try to contain my thoughts by focusing on my immediate surroundings. The tree against my back is rough. The ground beneath my pants is a little damp. The air under the shade of
the forest is cool.
Still, the thoughts break through. I have to tell everyone what my gift is. No amount of focusing on my surroundings can remove this constant sense of dread. Should I just leave now and go back to Ron? I wonder how she’s doing, where she went in town. I want to go back to her but the thought of living with my gift for the rest of my life weighs as heavy as the dread.
A twig snaps. I jump, thrown out of my thoughts, and look toward the camp.
A ghostly pale teenage boy is approaching. I glare at him, trying to get him to go away, but he continues to come. He has chin-length jet black hair with about an inch or so of dirty blond roots. He’s in a long sleeve black t-shirt and black skinny jeans that make me feel hot just looking at him.
He sits down beside me, propping his arms up on bent legs. He’s just an inch or so taller than me, but he looked way taller than that as he approached because of his slender frame and long legs.
“Hey,” he says. He has a husky voice. “Depressed?”
I bury my head in my arms. “I don’t wanna talk, okay? Just leave me alone.”
I don’t know who this weird guy is but I decide to ignore him.
What am I supposed to do? Telling everyone my gift is the last thing I want to do. This must be how Li weeds out the unworthy ones. I’m not worthy, right? Is that what she’s trying to tell me? Well, I already know that, but dammit, it hurts like hell.
Slowly, some sort of… happiness creeps into my body and then into my mind, pushing away my thoughts and doubts and self-loathing. It feels foreign, wrong.
I snap my head up toward the boy. “What the hell are you doing?”
He shrinks away, eyes wide. “I just—I was just trying to help. Sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I was wrong.”
“Just leave me alone! I already told you that!”
The feeling starts to creep its way in again.
“Stop it!” I yell.
“Don’t be angry, or depressed. Please.”
“What’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me?” he says bitterly, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand. “Your feelings are too strong, okay?” He looks at me and shakes his hands in front of his chest as he talks, gesturing wildly. “I could feel them all the way across the camp, cutting through everyone else’s! Even Valeria’s! Just let me help you. I-I can make you happy for a bit.”
“So you can make people happy? Congratulations. Why don’t you make yourself happy then and leave me alone?”
“You know damn well that our gifts don’t work on ourselves.”
I sigh. I did know that. I figured it out myself, a couple years ago. Back then, the darkness was so much stronger. It was the hardest time for me. It was—
“Ugh, please stop,” he whines.
I stretch out my legs, rubbing the back of my legs against the dirt and leaves and moss below. It doesn’t feel pleasant but it’s something tangible, real.
I love myself.
I breathe out slowly, letting that sole thought flood my mind.
“Wow,” he says, “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“The feelings. They’re gone. Or well, dulled at least.”
“It’s called grounding. You know, focusing on your bodily sensations and the present moment and all that self-help junk? Gets me out of my head.”
“Hmm, I’ve never heard of that. But thanks. I feel a lot better now.”
“You feel better?” I say, my voice rising.
“Look, it’s just that if you feel better, then I feel better. That’s how it works.”
“That’s how what works?”
“My gift.”
“So you try to make others feel better so that you can too?”
“Maybe. I mean, that’s part of it, I guess. But it’s also like… Like… You know, when someone goes through something and they’re having a hard time, and you’ve been through that thing too so you know what it’s like and you want to help them because you’ve been there? Anyway, sure I guess it’s partially selfish but I also don’t want you to feel bad, you know?”
I look him over. This guy talks as though he has to say everything in one breath and gestures with his hands at every word. And yet, when he made me feel happier, I don’t remember seeing him move or touch me or anything like that.
“How do you make people happy? What’s your focus?”
He shrugs. “My mind, I guess? I just imagine someone nearby feeling something and it happens. It doesn’t have to be happiness. Can be any emotion.”
Hearing about his gift takes my mind off of the dinner meeting tonight. Besides, it’s interesting. I finally get the chance to hear about someone’s gift firsthand, and not just from the news or forums. He seems open to talking about it, too.
“What’s your range?” I can’t help but ask him more.
“I could affect everyone in my town. It was a pretty small town though. Never tried anyone farther.”
“You know, your gift doesn’t really seem that bad. I mean, you probably didn’t harm your family or anything. So why are you here? Why leave them?”
“Normies… their emotions are so much easier to manipulate.” This time he talks slower with his hands still on his knees. “You could tell that I was trying to change yours, right? Normies can’t tell, like at all. When I was younger, I took advantage of that a lot. I’d fuck up somehow and when my parents got angry at me, I’d change them to indifferent, like a switch. They never noticed, no matter how sudden it was. And after a while, I started just keeping them happy all the time, even if they weren’t around. And then, I started keeping everyone happy—in the whole town. Because everyone’s emotions… they were just so much for me. If I made them happy, then I could be happy too.”
He takes a deep breath and after letting it go slowly, he continues, “But then I got really tired, so I stopped. And well, I learned something. I can change how people feel, but I can’t change the thoughts behind it that cause those emotions. Those thoughts will always be there, lurking behind the fake happiness. So when I turned off the happiness, it was like all those dark emotions I had suppressed in everyone came barreling in all at once. And they, uh, couldn’t handle it.”
“So you made them happy again?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t. I was too exhausted.” His lip quivers and his voice shakes as he speaks. “I fell asleep for days. And when I woke up…” He rubs the back of his head. “Have you heard about the town of Foxenfort?”
“Ah.”
Foxenfort. I read about it online, about a year ago when I started looking into people like me in earnest. I would scan the news for strange, impossible events. Foxenfort was a small town somewhere in the middle of America. Almost everyone there committed mass suicide on the same day. Many suspected it was cult related, but the few survivors gave no clues, since they were all whisked away to mental institutions. There was just one boy who wasn’t, and was put into the foster care system instead. I had brushed that story off as irrelevant, but I guess I was wrong.
So even someone with a seemingly good gift can have such a troubling past. I don’t know how to feel about that.
“I’m really sorry,” he says in a low voice, hanging his head down. “I shouldn’t have tried to manipulate your feelings. I said I can help, but that’s a lie. I can’t truly help. All I can do is just delay and compound the feelings.”
His head is down, but I can see it in his posture and the half of his face that’s visible. I know that look, that state of mind. He’s spiraling. Down, down. And my messed up feelings probably aren’t helping him.
I clap a couple times. He jolts his head up, looking at me wide-eyed.
“Hey, what’s your name? I’m Chrys. New here, as you could probably tell. Chrys with a y.”
“Chrys?”
/>
“Yeah. What’s yours?”
“Uh, Hunter.”
“Hunter. Cool.”
His breathing starts to slow. He’s still staring at me. Oddly, being with him is making me feel better, and I don’t think it’s him trying to change my feelings again. I think it’s because he opened up to me so easily. How could he do that—just tell me all of that about his family and his past and come clean about his lie even?
Can I do that too?
“Hunter, uh…” I look away from him, down at my hands, which I’m wringing in my lap. “Do you want to know what my gift is?”
“Is it a secret?”
“Kind of. Only Valeria knows.”
He laughs dryly. “Yeah, you can’t hide anything from her. Difficult to be around, that one. Strong emotions.” When I don’t reply, he continues, “Why do you want to tell me then?”
“Well, I plan on having it removed anyway.”
“Ah you got your first task from Li, huh?”
I look over at him, surprised. “Did you ask her too?”
“Of course. Everyone here has asked at one point or another. It’s no secret. Most come here with that intention.”
“Then…?”
“Why do I still have my gift?”
I nod.
“Because I couldn’t do it. The task.”
“It doesn’t seem like your gift is a secret though.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what was your task?”
He grimaces. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it. But Li, she forces you to confront your gift, your past—everything. There are three tasks. Always three. I did the first two, no problem. But the third.” He inhales deeply and says as he exhales, “I couldn’t.”
“But what was it?”
“Just be skeptical, okay? She probably asked you to tell everyone what your gift is. That’s the first task, right? It’s hard but done. Okay, next. Next one is harder, but done. Then the last one… You probably won’t be able to, honestly. No one has. Few have even gotten past the first, like Valeria. She had the same first task as you, you know. Couldn’t do it. So if I were you, I just wouldn’t bother. You tell everyone your gift but then maybe you can’t do the second task, or the third one. And then, what? Was it worth it—worth spilling the beans?”
Gift of Death (Gifted Book 1) Page 3