by W. J. May
Oliver shot her a bracing look. Brawls weren’t uncommon in the cafeteria, even amongst childhood friends, and Aria had started more than her share. Furthermore, he seemed to have decided that karma had punished her enough.
“So what’s up?” he asked casually. “I heard Fodder set you on fire.”
“Finally,” Benji threw up his hands, “someone who knows the real story.”
Jason flashed her a twinkling smile, a lot more curious than he was letting on. “Having an interesting morning?” he asked privately.
She met his eyes for a brief moment before quickly turning away. “You could say that...”
“I know what will cheer you up,” Benji said with an innocent smile, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “You have Mr. Dorf next period.”
Oliver let out a quiet curse, casting a dark glare towards the school. “Don’t talk to me about that guy.”
“Why not?” Lily asked curiously.
At that moment the bell rang again, ending the passing period, and they all pushed to their feet. Instead of answering the question, Oliver slouched away with a scowl.
“He’s failing history,” Lisette whispered in a gossipy voice. “Dorf is threatening to disqualify him from PC consideration if he doesn’t pull his grade up. Make him do it all again.”
Benji shuddered, glancing up at the school.
“Could you imagine not graduating?” The mere possibility seemed to terrify him, and he pushed to his feet. “Come on—we have him next. Let’s not be late.”
Aria nodded and grabbed her bag, but Lily caught her quickly by the arm.
“Actually...I wanted to ask a favor.” Looking even shier than usual, she stepped away from the others and lowered her voice. “I have my-my orientation in the infirmary. I know you have class, but I was wondering if you’d go with me.”
In an instant, Aria forgot her own troubles and softened with total sympathy. ‘Orientation’ was a palatable word the administration had come up with for the cataloguing of tatùs. Despite all the progress the school had made in terms of joining the twenty-first century, it was still a cold and clinical procedure—one that left even the toughest students shaken to the core. They’d tried to amend it in recent years after getting complaints from the parents, but the essence remained. It was bound to be even worse than usual, since Tristan was still away on business and couldn’t supervise.
“Of course I will,” she said quickly, shoving her bag into Benji’s chest and linking her arm through Lily’s. “And it’s not going to be that bad. I promise.”
Half-promise.
She remembered her own orientation. The only reason it had been remotely bearable was because her mother had insisted on being there as well.
With a quick wave at the others, they headed across the grass to the infirmary—where the blessed ceremony was to take place. The breeze picked up and the leaves crunched beneath their feet as they walked in silence—each thinking about what was to come.
“So you really took your shirt off in front of some guy?” Lily finally asked, shooting a glance from the corner of her eye. “Did you not see he was standing there?”
Normally, Aria would have shocked her. But the girl needed a distraction. She obliged.
“I was wearing this super-tight corset that Aunt Molly put in my closet. It looked great on the hanger, but the second I put it on it started squeezing the life out of me. Benji was trying to help me take it off, but then the whole thing caught fire...you know how these things go.”
Lily grinned. Strangely enough, she did know how these things went.
But it still begged the question.
“A corset, huh?” Her eyes lit with mischief. “Shame Jason wasn’t in your first class.”
Aria glanced down coldly at the royal jewels dangling from her wrist. “That’s a lovely bracelet, Lily,” she answered innocently. “Where did you get it?”
At that point, both girls wisely decided to stop talking.
A few minutes later, they were at the infirmary. It looked exactly like the rest of the building, except for a giant swathe of stone that looked newer than the rest. Rumor had it, when the school caught fire several years before someone had blasted right through the wall trying to get to safety.
Details were always sketchy. Aria just assumed it was her mom.
“Okay,” she paused with her hand on the door, “you ready for this?”
Lily bit her lip, fidgeting nervously with the strap of her bag. “I wish we could wait,” she murmured. “I wish your grandpa could be here.”
Students rushed past on every side, hurrying to get to class. Aria pulled her a step closer, taking her hands and staring reassuringly into her eyes.
“Hey—this is no big deal, all right? A few little tests, then it’s done forever.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “The most important thing to remember is this is getting me out of Dorf’s history class. So take your time, okay? Remember the big picture.”
Lily shot her a withering look. “So glad I asked you to come with me...”
Together, the two girls pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The place looked deserted. There were rows of tightly folded hospital cots, each separated by a cloth curtain for privacy, a stack of skeletons in the corner that the med students used to scare the freshmen every year, a row of cabinets that no doubt held all sorts of nefarious medical tools, and a calendar on the wall dating back to 1984. It was a place frozen in time.
Then one of the skeletons moved and they let out a shriek.
“Oh good, you’re here.”
In the old days, the headmaster of the school was required to be present for every student’s evaluation. Now, the entire thing was managed by Albert Hidgens. A man dating back to the late Cretaceous Period, with gnarled fingers. An ancient monocle was permanently affixed to one eye.
He walked forward with open arms and his best approximation of a smile.
“Miss Decker...we’ve been waiting a long time for you.”
Lily shivered, while Aria folded her arms tightly across her chest.
The man had said the same thing to her when she’d come to the infirmary two and a half years before. Ever since she was a child, the supernatural world had waited with bated breath to see what kind of ink the child of Rae Kerrigan and Devon Wardell was going to get. She was surprised they didn’t video-document the whole thing to run on a loop in the tunnels beneath the Oratory.
“I brought someone,” Lily said nervously. “Is that okay?”
Hidgens’ eyes swept over Aria before dilating with a manic glow. “Ah, yes...Miss Wardell. It seems like only yesterday you were here yourself.”
She flashed a sweet smile. “Such fond memories. Can we get this over with?”
The man let out a rasping laugh, then spun on his heel and headed to the back of the room, motioning for the two girls to follow. When they got to the wall he gestured carelessly to the nearest cot, turning routinely to the cabinets.
“Put on the gown.”
Lily’s eyes shot to the hospital dress in panic, while Aria folded her arms with a sarcastic glare. “The gown? Really? Can’t she just roll up her shirt?”
Hidgens turned around with a look of astonishment, as if the thought had never occurred to him. He was holding a clipboard in one hand, a camera in another. Lily looked at both with dread.
“Oh, yes, well...I suppose that would be all right.”
Aria looked on quietly while Lily set down her purse, silently vowing to show as little skin as possible. The old man was completely oblivious, of course, muttering into a tape recorder.
Guys have it so easy, she thought with a bit of resentment. There’s no weird dressing gown, no old man telling them to take off their clothes. They just roll up their sleeves.
“Today we have Lily Decker,” he croaked into the tape. “Sixteen years of age, seventeenth generation psychic. Father is acclaimed Julian Decker, a clairvoyant. Mother is Angela Cross, origins unknown
, power to freeze. The child is a hybrid.”
He looked over his spectacles at Lily, like she was some kind of experiment.
“All right, my dear. Now if you’d turn around—let’s take a look at that ink.”
With a bracing breath Lily did as she was told, facing the wall and rolling up her blouse just enough for the tatù to be seen. There was a flash of the camera. Followed quickly by many more.
“Extraordinary,” Hidgens murmured, kneeling down and getting close enough to document it from every angle. “A unique design—the first of its kind.”
Without asking for permission he whipped out a tape measure and pressed it to her skin, recording the precise dimensions for posterity. She flinched as the cold metal made contact but kept her eyes on the ceiling, counting down the seconds until it was over.
“Hold still.”
She let out a quiet gasp as a dripping paper was laid over the ink, magically absorbing the outline of the design, before drying instantaneously. Hidgens lay it carefully upon the counter. It took Aria a moment to realize it was the actual sheet of parchment that would be added to the book.
One final picture snapped, then Hidgens leaned back with a satisfied expression.
“All right. You can roll down your shirt.”
Not a moment too soon.
One of the main reasons the supernatural community kept their existence a secret was the fear of what would happen if the common world was to find out. They might have been powerful but they were drastically outnumbered, with countless non-magical family members who could be held hostage and leveraged against them. They would be rounded up. Experimented on. Treated as lab rats in an endless series of dehumanizing tests until they were eventually used or locked away.
Aria wondered sometimes if the Council realized they did it to their own kind. There was a sense of ownership to the way they talked about ink. As if every tatù born under their domain owed some kind of allegiance. As if the magic itself was theirs to be used for the collective gain.
The rarer the ink was, the more fiercely it was coveted.
The camera was clicking away again—this time on Lily herself. Her face, her body, her hands, her eyes. She was asked to lift her hair. To smile, with and without showing teeth. To stare directly into the camera. To look to either side.
When that was finished the man took her by the wrist and dipped her fingers in an acrid-smelling ink, pressing each print carefully on a piece of paper. As it dried, he wheeled out a giant machine and told her to rest her chin on the plastic as a laser made a retinal scan of her eyes.
“Bet you remember that one, don’t you?” Hidgens croaked in Aria’s direction.
She’d been unable to stop blinking—flinching every time the red light made its way towards her eyes. Eventually, her mother had to freeze her just to get her to sit still.
“Loved it,” she said dryly. “Are we almost finished here?”
He ignored her completely, pulling out a long cotton swab and jamming it inside Lily’s mouth. Her eyes tightened, but she said not a word—holding perfectly still as he yanked out a strand of hair, then took a vial of blood for good measure.
“Isn’t DNA the same anywhere you take it?” Aria said impatiently, reading her friend’s discomfort whereas the oblivious man did not. “Wasn’t the swab enough?”
Hidgens scribbled something down on the clipboard, his hand flying over the page.
“Perhaps you’d like to wait outside, Miss Wardell.”
She reluctantly fell silent, watching as he walked back to the counter and pulled out a jar of powder—running it quickly under the faucet in the sink.
“All right, Decker—last test.”
With a grand flourish, he ladled a thick blob of what looked and smelled like mud onto a wooden slab, then lifted it expectantly to her mouth. She jerked away reflexively.
“What is that?”
“It’s a silicone compound to make a mold of your mouth so we have accurate dental records,” he answered, stirring quickly. “And it’s about to dry, so if you wouldn’t mind...”
She glanced anxiously at Aria, then closed her eyes as the compound was shoved unceremoniously into her mouth, hardening around both jaws before being yanked out again.
“Very nice,” Hidgens murmured, examining his work. “A fine specimen.”
For whatever reason, that was the final straw.
“What if she didn’t want to do this?” Aria asked suddenly as Lily spat into the sink.
Hidgens set the mold on the counter, then looked back at her with a frown. “What do you mean?”
Her blue eyes gleamed as she stared back at him.
“You just took her blood, her DNA, her dental records—all without giving a choice or even asking permission. You had no right to do that. What if she had refused?”
He opened his mouth several times, but couldn’t think of a response. “Well...people don’t,” he finally stammered. “People don’t refuse. This is required.”
“Required by whom?” Aria shot back evenly as Lily collected her purse. “The Privy Council isn’t an official form of government. There are people with ink who don’t adhere to its jurisdiction at all. They just live in the common world—like ordinary citizens.”
Hidgens stared at her a long time, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss Wardell. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
“Just drop it, Arie,” Lily muttered under her breath. “Let’s go.”
But Aria didn’t want to drop it. In fact, she was just beginning to realize that she’d wanted to ask those questions for a very long time. This man was the leading expert, right? The wizened sage that stripped away every shred of privacy and copied it all down like light reading.
The man who asked the questions should have some of the answers, right?
“I’m asking...what would happen if Lily had said no.”
There was a long silence.
Then the man waved them out the door.
“WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT?” Lily exclaimed, slurring slightly as she tried to choke down any remaining bits of plaster. “What would happen if I had said no?”
“Don’t you ever think about it yourself?” Aria demanded, spinning around and bringing them to a sudden stop. “You have what they want, Lily. That tatù is on your back. It’s like they’re laying some sort of claim on it—but they won’t even let us train to be agents!”
She glanced around the empty hallway, making sure they weren’t overheard.
“You don’t know that,” she said softly. “We’re the first generation to go through after our parents did what they did. It postponed things—it didn’t remove them indefinitely.”
Aria shook her head, glaring back the way they’d come.
“Now you don’t know that,” she muttered. “For all you know we’re going to graduate with no job offer, then go off to some common world university. They’ll call us back in a couple years when they’ve developed the technology to copy our ink. Then they can give it to a real agent.”
Lily put her hands on her hips, inadvertently smearing printing ink all over her shirt. “What’s gotten into you? Why are you talking like this—”
“Because they’re not giving us a chance!” Aria interrupted heatedly, getting angrier and angrier the more they spoke. “All those things our parents did, all the lives they saved—we’re never going to get a chance to do it. We’re just stuck at this school, being poked and prodded like lab rats with nothing to show for it.”
Lily opened her mouth, then closed it again—drawing a blank. After a few moments she simply shook her head, speaking in a low, calming voice. “I disagree. Our parents went through this when they were our age.”
“Yeah, because that made sense,” Aria exclaimed. “Do you think our dads minded when they were fingerprinted? Do you think they had any objection to having their dental records put on file? No—because they worked here. Having their blood type on file? It could save their lives one day. But wh
at good does it do us? Nothing.”
She let out a slow breath, trying to slow her racing pulse.
“If they don’t want to train us, then they have no right to study our ink,” she concluded flatly. “You can’t get one without the other. It’s a package deal.”
A teacher wrapped loudly on the glass in one of the rooms, motioning for them to get back to class. They parted ways with a tense farewell, each feeling more upset than before the orientation.
Usually, it would help to talk it out. Usually, tempers just needed time to cool.
But Aria was nowhere close to cooling down.
In fact, she was just getting warmed up...
IT WAS HALFWAY THROUGH the period by the time Aria slipped into Mr. Dorf’s history class. The second she did, she realized that she’d forgotten to ask for a note. He glanced over his shoulder with a sour expression, then continued writing on the board.
“So nice of you to join us, Miss Wardell.”
“I was at an orientation,” she muttered.
There was a hitch in his writing, then he gave a curt nod. “Take a seat.”
The second she turned around to do so, she realized there had been a shift in the seating arrangement. Several desks had been hastily added and Benji and Jason had relocated towards the back. There was an open seat between them, obviously meant for her, while her old desk had been taken by the very last person in the world she wanted to see.
The guy who’d seen her shirt fall off in the middle of the hall.
Her cheeks flamed red and she fought the urge to use an invisibility tatù. He was staring straight at her, a little smile playing on his lips. She wondered if he knew it was her seat.
“Is there a problem, Miss Wardell?” Dorf snapped impatiently.
“No,” she said quickly, heading quickly towards the back, “no problem.”
The class fell back into its usual stupor as she wound her way through the desks, taking care to avoid eye-contact with any of the new students as she settled in the back. The second she set down her bag, Benji leaned forward to catch her eye.