The Marked Girl

by Lindsey Klingele

  “Is that it?” Emme’s voice broke through the still night. The others came through the door after her, panting.

  “We cannot honestly be considering this,” Merek said.

  Cedric darted across the courtyard, lifted the box off of the ground, and tossed it aside. Hovering there an inch above the grass was a thick, swirling black mass roughly the size and shape of a man.

  “It . . . it is real,” Kat breathed.

  A clatter of footsteps echoed from the tunnel.

  “If we are going through, we must do it now,” Cedric said in a hushed voice.

  But he didn’t move. No one did. All four of the royal children stared wide-eyed at the portal. Its whirling mass was mesmerizing. It seemed as though it was actually sucking in the darkness of the night, leaving all traces of moonlight behind.

  “I am absolutely not going in there,” Merek said.

  “Stay behind and get skewered by wraths if you like,” Kat replied.

  “No,” Cedric said. “We are all going.” He held Merek’s gaze for a moment before the other boy finally looked away.

  “I do not think I can,” Emme whispered to Cedric.

  “It will be all right,” Cedric replied.

  “Promise?”

  Cedric opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the noise of the wraths pushing into the courtyard. They were followed by Malquin.

  Malquin’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight. He turned to Cedric. “I would not recommend going that way, young prince.”

  Cedric held up his sword. “That seems enough reason to go.”

  With an air of complete calm, Malquin reached into the pocket of his trousers with his good hand. He brought out a small, metal object that glinted in the moonlight as it moved. Cedric had never seen anything like it before. Part of the object was shaped like a small tube, cut open at one end and attached at an angle to a handle that vaguely resembled a sword hilt.

  “Step away from the portal.” Malquin aimed the device at Emme while the wraths formed a circle around their group, closing them in.

  Cedric gripped the edge of his stolen sword’s hilt, but didn’t move.

  Malquin shrugged. “Or have it your way.” His finger moved slightly against the device in his right hand. Moving on instinct, Cedric dove and knocked Emme to the ground just before the night air was filled with a loud bang that reverberated off the stone walls.

  A wrath standing just behind Emme crumpled to the grass, a black stain growing on his chest.

  “What . . . ?” Cedric stared at the creature on the ground, then to Malquin’s device. “What is this magic?” He got to his feet, directly between Malquin and Emme. The circle of wraths tightened around them, though some looked down at their fallen comrade, expressions of confusion flashing briefly across their gnarled faces.

  Malquin merely smiled and raised the device again. Cedric shot a panicked look to Kat, who nodded once. Kat grabbed Merek by the arm and jumped into the swirling dark hole, pulling him behind her. One moment, they were standing on the solid, moonlit grass. The next, they were gone.

  Emme gave a little scream as the pair disappeared into the portal. Malquin’s eyes fixed on the empty, dark mass, his mouth a small O of surprise. Even the wraths looked stunned. For a moment, no one moved.

  Cedric heard another gasp and whipped around to see that a wrath had captured Emme from behind. It grasped her wriggling form and moved toward the dungeon doorway.

  “Emme!” Cedric shouted.

  Emme wrenched her head in his direction. “Go! Cedric, go!”

  Cedric sprinted instead toward Emme. Two wraths jumped in front of him to block his way, but Cedric swung out wildly with his sword. His blow hit one wrath in the shoulder, cutting through mottled leather and hitting skin. Before Cedric could brace himself, the other wrath swung out with a stonelike fist and hit him in the chest.

  Cedric stumbled backward. He looked up just in time to see Malquin aim the small, dark device directly at his face. He took one more step backward and prepared himself for another loud bang that would shatter the night, and likely his skull. But he never heard it. Instead, his momentum kept him reeling backward until he no longer felt grass beneath his feet. He was only falling, falling, falling . . .

  At first, Cedric felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. Once he realized he wasn’t dead, he turned to look for the others, but he saw only black. He tried calling out to them, but no noise would escape his throat.

  Then the space around him exploded into brightness. He landed, hard, on his hands and knees. Underneath him was a type of strange gray stone. He hurried to stand on unsteady feet.

  Cedric spun around to the portal, which was no longer hanging in the air, but was now a dark circle against a stone wall. It grew smaller and smaller as Cedric stared.

  “Emme!”

  The portal shrank down to the size of a pebble and then blinked out, leaving only the stone behind. Cedric ran to the wall, to the place where the black hole had been, and threw his fists against it.

  “Emme! Emme!” His scream seemed to tear from his throat of its own accord. He beat the wall with his fists until a pair of hands pulled firmly on his shoulders. Cedric turned to see Kat, whose eyes were fixed on the space where the portal had been.

  “It’s gone,” she said, her voice flat.

  “No. No. She is . . . We have to go back!”

  Kat just shook her head, her expression grim. Behind her, Merek looked like he might be sick.

  It was still night outside, but the air felt different, smelled different. When Cedric looked up, he couldn’t see stars, only a frightening orange glow in the sky, and beyond that, a darker, empty blue. He could hear water running nearby, and when he looked for it he saw a small stream flowing over odd-looking stone. He was standing at the edge of a riverbed, only there were no trees, no shrubs, no dirt. Just flat gray and white all around—under his feet, over his head, on the wall behind him. It was cracked in some places, smooth in others, and altogether foreign.

  They had actually made it—the other side of the portal.

  The unfamiliar landscape grew fuzzy as Cedric tried to fight down a rising wave of panic. He gripped the hilt of the sword he’d stolen from the wrath guard, trying to think of a single thing to say, to find someplace solid for his mind to land—

  “Hello?”

  Cedric turned toward the sound of the tentative voice and saw a girl standing nearby. She wore a bright blue shirt covered in strange markings and trousers that fit tightly around her hips. She carried a sword but held it strangely, dangling by her side as if it weighed nothing. Her light brown hair was loose, and strands of it flew across her face in the breeze.

  The girl spoke again, but Cedric could not make out her words. Behind him, he heard Merek shift. One of them would have to step forward, and Cedric knew who it should be.

  “Are you the leader here?”

  The girl’s eyebrows rose, and she was close enough that Cedric could make out her greenish-brown eyes. “Um . . . I’m the director.”

  The girl began to babble then, using a mix of words Cedric recognized with ones he definitely did not. She gestured to a group of people who stood a distance behind her, and Cedric assumed she must be acting on their behalf. He looked again at her shirt, trying to make out what appeared to be a drawing on its front. It was a star inside of a blue circle, with larger red circles outside of that. He was still trying to interpret its meaning when he realized the girl had stopped talking and was looking at him, expectantly. Had she asked him a question?

  “Where are we?” he asked, trying to sound more in charge than he felt.

  “The Ellay River,” she responded, then added a few more of her nonsense words. Could this be hell? Cedric wondered. Would hell have rivers? Maybe his father had been right, and the rumors of the portal land were false. Cedric tried to ask more questions of the girl, and received only frustrating answers in response.

  Then the very ground he was standing on
began to . . . shift. His first thought was that the portal was opening again, but no. The sky didn’t open in a black, swirling mass. The sky stayed exactly where it was. It was everything else that moved.

  How could the ground move?

  “What is happening?” Cedric called out to the girl, who also looked startled. He struggled to maintain his balance. It felt as though someone were roughly pulling the ground back and forth, right underneath him.

  Then he fell. It happened quickly. One moment he was using every muscle in his body to stay upright, and the next he was flying forward, as if he had been pushed. He landed hard onto something soft and realized he’d fallen onto the girl. He had just enough time to register that she felt like a normal human—skin and hair and bones—before he pushed himself away from her, hard.

  Cedric looked around to see Merek and Kat on the ground as well, and that’s when he realized his sword was no longer in his hand. He searched the area beneath him as it continued to shudder. The girl screamed something then, and he looked up. Her eyes were focused on the large piece of stone that ran over their heads—a bridge? It was moving as well. Could it fall on them? Could this whole realm be falling apart?

  What sort of world was this?

  Cedric reached for Kat’s arm and pulled her out from under the stone structure. Merek followed as well. The whole world seemed to be shattering around them. And then, without warning, it stopped.

  Cedric was breathless, and his heart was racing. It felt as though he’d just run for miles. He looked around him and saw the ground was intact, and the girl was staring at him with concern. Cedric looked to Kat and Merek, and they seemed unhurt.

  Then the earth jerked again.

  Before Cedric could speak, Merek whirled to face him. His hands were shaking and his eyes were wild with fear and panic.

  Merek directed that panic right at Cedric, who tried not to flinch under his words. “I told you! I told you we should not have come to this hell. We are all going to die!”

  Cedric wanted to say something back to calm Merek down, to contradict him. But wasn’t he right? The king had told Cedric to go through the portal, but in the end, it had been his own decision that pushed them through. And now they had wound up in a place far worse, a place that seemed to want to shake them apart from their own skins.

  They were in hell. Merek was right.

  And then, Merek was gone. His body jerked, and then he was moving, running across the shaking ground.

  Everything in Cedric wanted to stay right where he was and wait for the world to still itself again, but he knew he couldn’t. Merek was his responsibility. He looked at Kat, who seemed to understand. Together, they stood up and ran. Cedric spotted his sword lying nearby and stopped to pick it up by the hilt.

  Cedric and Kat chased Merek across the gray stone, leaving the odd girl behind. Eventually, the earth stopped shaking again, but Merek didn’t slow. He ran wildly, blindly. When the gray stone in front of him reached an end, he pulled himself up a low wall and onto a patch of brown earth. Cedric followed, then Kat.

  Merek only stopped when he reached a point where he could run no farther. A long, low fence spanned the length of the ground in front of him. It looked like no fence that Cedric had ever seen, however. It wasn’t made of wood, but of pieces of iron that shot from the ground and wound around each other, creating diamondlike patterns. Merek clutched at the thin pieces of interwoven iron with both hands, his chest heaving.

  “Merek . . . ,” Cedric started. But Merek wouldn’t look at him. He threw one fist against the fence, which made an echoing, clinking noise in response.

  “You think you know everything,” Merek said, his breath ragged. “But you were wrong. Now look at us.”

  “We will get home again,” Cedric said. “We will find a way to open the portal, go back and take Malquin by surprise—”

  “How?”

  Cedric said nothing. He thought of his father’s words back in the dungeon, something about scrolls. He hadn’t had much time to think about them while escaping through the tunnels, but now he tried to remember.

  The only scrolls he could think of were part of a legend. They could supposedly open new portals from the Old World to Caelum. Cedric had always thought they were myth, but maybe . . .

  “Cedric will find a way,” Kat responded. She sounded confident, sure.

  “My father told me how to get home,” Cedric said, trying to sound just as confident. “We will go back.”

  Merek narrowed his eyes, but he was either out of responses or was too angry to form words.

  A noise like screaming cut through the air and grew louder. Lights shone in the distance, coming from the same direction as the screaming. The lights weren’t from torches, however; at least, they were like no torches Cedric had ever seen. To begin with, they were red and blue. Also, they rotated. As they grew nearer, Cedric could see the lights seemed to be attached to something—something large that hurtled toward them, just on the other side of the fence. It was boxy, big, and moving fast. A beast?

  “What is that?” Merek screamed. “What is that?”

  Cedric said nothing as the beast approached. He could see now that it was black and white underneath the swirling lights. Cedric held out his sword, but it felt off, different. How had he not noticed sooner? The sword wasn’t the wrath’s weapon he’d brought from Caelum. It was lighter, and under the hilt it was wrapped in a dense fabric instead of leather. The blade itself was no blade at all. It was not any kind of metal that Cedric knew—not steel or silver or bronze. Cedric ran his finger easily over the blunted edge.

  It was worthless.

  Cedric’s grip on the nonsword loosened, and it fell to the ground. Again, he wondered what kind of world this was, where everything seemed false and unreal.

  The beast with red-and-blue lights moved toward them, and now Cedric could see actual letters along its hide—LOS ANGELES—and smaller writing underneath.

  He looked at his hands, which were empty, open. Exposed. His sword was gone. His last link to Caelum was gone. A fear stronger than any he had ever known gripped Cedric, and he couldn’t move. He stood between Merek and Kat, frozen, watching as the beast grew closer, knowing they had no way to fight it off. They had no backup, no weapons, no knowledge of anything around them.

  They were entirely alone.

  THE ARTIFACT

  Two months later

  Liv pulled the curtains wide to let in the harsh morning light.

  As she crossed her small bedroom, she avoided looking into the cracked mirror above her cheap flea-market bureau. She didn’t need confirmation of the dark circles under her eyes or the knots in her hair. She knew from experience that looking into a mirror in direct California sunlight after getting only three hours of sleep could not end well for anyone.

  Stretched across Liv’s tiny twin bed, Shannon slept on, face smushed against the pillow, last night’s clothes twisted around her body. Liv smiled, grabbed her phone from her nightstand, and clicked open the camera app. She turned on the flash, inched closer to the bed, and lowered the phone until Shannon’s half-open mouth was centered in the screen.

  Shannon groaned as the bright light flashed across her face.

  “What’re you doooinnng?” Shannon mumbled, half turning over and crossing her arms over her face. “Too early.”

  “Actually, we’re late.” Liv smiled and snapped another picture. “Gotta get up.”

  “Ugh, no.”

  “Come o-on,” Liv said in a singsong voice. Then, less quietly, “You promised, remember? You said if I went out with you last night, you’d drive me to my appointment in the morning.” Liv pulled the comforter off of her best friend, causing her to curl up like a worm exposed to sunlight. “And it is now officially morning.”

  Shannon groaned, her eyes still closed. “You’re so not my favorite person right now.”

  “What if I buy you a coffee . . . ?”

  “Hmmgh.”

  “From Coffee Be
an?”

  Shannon exhaled, then opened her eyes. “Fine.”

  Liv laughed as Shannon finally sat up and ran her hand tentatively through her newly shortened hair. It was matted to her head, and its tips—which had also recently been dyed red—stuck up in funny angles around her ears. Her mascara ran from the corner of her eye down to her ear on one side, and her long, dangling earring had left an imprint in her cheek from when she’d slept on it in the night.

  Shannon looked in the cracked mirror and shook her head. “Ugh. This is gonna take some time.”

  “We don’t have time. I’m supposed to meet with the museum acquisitions lady at ten.”

  “Ten a.m. During the last week of summer. Just feels so wrong.” Shannon picked up a limp strand of hair and let it fall back against her forehead. Then she pulled out the tube of red lipstick she’d worn the night before and reapplied it to her lips, smacking them together when she was done. While Liv only really dressed up when Shannon dragged her out to all-ages clubs, Shannon treated every single day like it was a Saturday night.

  Liv slipped a jacket over her shoulders to cover up what Shannon mockingly called the only evidence of her “inner wild child,” an ill-gotten tattoo that she preferred to ignore. She slipped on a pair of Chucks and went systematically through her room, erasing any signs of mess. First, she made up her bed, pulling the sheet into tight hospital corners and arranging the pillows by the headboard. She collected a few stray hair ties from the floor and piled them neatly on her dresser, next to the one decoration in the room that was truly hers—a framed photo of herself and Shannon they’d taken during an excursion to Amoeba Records. Every other decoration in the room had been placed there by her foster mother, Rita.

  The small guest bedroom still had the mothball-smelling floral bedspread and generic framed pictures of kittens on the walls that were there when Liv had moved in a year before. Most of her important belongings were hidden away in the closet—her meager camera equipment, sketchbooks, and photographs. One of the first things she had learned as a foster kid was to keep anything she valued hidden away or locked up. It also helped to know that she could always pack up her whole life with five minutes’ notice.