by Ruby Brown
“Thea...” Mal croaked out when she saw who was in the middle of the circle. The robot girl raised her head at the mention of her name. Out of everyone here, she seemed to be least affected by the battle. In fact, she seemed stronger, more defined. But it wasn’t just her that people were surrounding. In fact, Mal believed that the majority of people had come to see the spectacle of Blaise make a big fuss over his wounds as he was treated by a nurse who looked like she’d rather just let him die.
“What happened to him?” Rose asked.
“This idiot...I mean, this upstanding member of society,” Thea said quickly, looking nervously as the people around her, “almost got himself killed. He tripped over when he was trying to leave the building. I saved his life.”
“Should have saved your energy,” Dallas muttered.
“He was trying to leave?” asked a green-haired girl with a scar running down her right cheek.
“I think so,” Thea said. “I saw him running towards the door before he fell down.”
“You didn’t stay to fight?” said a tall boy with curly brown hair, looking down at Blaise, who avoided his gaze and refused to speak. His response made everyone around him break into talk. They were clearly angry that the man who was supposed to be their leader had attempted to completely abandon them in the middle of a fight. Mal noted that Cass was in a corner of the room helping one of the doctors tend to the wounded and spreading sheets over the dead.
“So, if Thea saved your life, does that mean she’s pardoned?” Mal asked Blaise. He looked up at her with fury and embarrassment in his eyes.
“Of course not!” he said loudly. “She’s still a trespasser and dangerous and...”
“I think we should put it to a vote,” said a girl with a shaved head. “Who thinks Thea should be allowed to live?”
Mal’s hand shot up into the air so fast that she almost slapped Rose in the face. Several others followed her lead and put their hands up immediately, while others took a bit longer to decide. Mal realised that she had forgotten how to breathe as she looked around the group with pleading eyes, begging for more hands to stretch towards the ceiling, and then she allowed herself to relax. The girl did ask if anyone wanted Thea to be executed, and several people raised their hands, but there was a clear majority. Thea was going to be okay.
That night, Mal had a long shower with water so hot it was almost painful. She let the water run over her aching muscles and wash the filth from her body. The water turned red. Steam flooded the room and fogged up the mirrors until Mal had difficulty breathing. She used almost all of the soap and scrubbed at her skin until it was red and scratched. She only left when the water started to turn icy, but she still didn’t feel clean. She had hoped that the memories of what had happened during the fight would disappear down the drain along with the blood, but she was wrong. She could still hear the shouting, still see the bodies, and still feel her skin crawling with disgust. She stood in front of the mirror for a second and studied herself. She didn’t look any different, but she felt unbalanced, as if something was missing, or something had been added. She turned up the collar on her clothes to hide the bruises around her neck as best she could. Although the people around her seemed to wear their wounds with pride, she felt no inclination to do the same.
She went to her room and tucked the blanket around her as tight as it could go, but she couldn’t stop trembling. She faced the window and let the moonlight cast shadows on her anxious expression. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have drifted away at one point because only a few hours later, she awoke to the sound of screaming. Her first thought was that the Aril had come back and so she launched herself out of bed, smacking her head on the top bunk in the process. Barely conscious, she staggered out of her room and threw herself down the corridors, blindly following the source of the noise. She clenched her fist around a ball of magic just as she burst through the doors into the main corridor and looked around wildly.
That’s when she saw her. Dangling at the front of the room, ropes tight around her neck. Her clothes were ripped and stained. Her body was broken. Blood dripped from her wounds and pooled underneath her in a thick, red puddle. The only colours on her pale and cold skin are the bright blue and purple bruises. People were attempting to cut the rope with their daggers, but Mal wished they would stop. As the rope moved, so did the body, swinging back and forth like a broken puppet and it made her feel sick. Mal recognised it as the body of the girl with the shaved head, the one who had asked everyone to vote. Mal remembered Blaise’s face when he realised that Thea was going to be allowed to stay alive. The shock, the fear, and then the fury that destroyed everything else like an atomic bomb. She knew instantly who was responsible for this.
Looking down at her hand, Mal realised with a start that it was Akraansir magic she was using, not Praethen. Before anyone could see, she stopped it. She remembered the frantic way she had collected her magic, and realised that her first instinct would have been to use Akraansir energy. Her thoughts danced around her head in a frantic whirlwind of panic and worry. She kept telling herself over and over that she would just be more careful next time, and it wouldn’t happen again.
Then she looked up at the assembled crowd gathered at the body of the girl, and the screaming in her mind stopped all at once, as if it had been shot. She knew that, at least on some level, she should feel sad, scared, anxious, concerned, disgusted...but she felt nothing. She just felt empty and distant, like she was drifting in some kind of grey area, separate from everything and everyone. Things suddenly seemed a lot dull and muffled. Without saying a word, she abruptly turned and walked out of the room, pushing past all the people that were hurrying to the main corridor, barely noticing their presence. They were like annoying bugs, something you might acknowledge but not properly pay attention to. Then she closed the door to her bedroom, turned off her light, got into bed and slept better than she had in weeks.
The next morning, Mal went straight to the graveyard after breakfast. It was hidden in the woods a while away from Tenebar, a strange and silent place that looked twice as eerie surrounded by thick trees so you could never be entirely sure that nothing was creeping up on you.
Mal weaved her way through the gravestones, taking care to keep her footsteps as quiet as possible, until she came to a freshly dug patch of earth that was marked by a cross made out of sticks and tied together with string. Mal almost missed it altogether. She crouched down at the foot of the grave and just stared at the soil for a minute. She had been told by the nurses this morning that the girl’s body had been unceremoniously dumped in a hole that had been hurriedly dug in the graveyard next to the weathered stones that marked her parents’ final resting place. Apparently the girl had no family left, and very few friends.
“Leah...” Mal murmured, running her finger over the name carved into the wooden cross. The date of birth was missing, but the cross bore her date of death, which was something. “Ow,” Mal gasped when she got a splinter in her finger. She inspected her finger for a second before looking back at the grave. She placed one single rose at the foot of the cross. She had plucked it from a bush on her way here. The bright red petals reminded her of the colour Leah’s blood had been. Then she stood up and walked away, hurrying, for she felt as if the trees were closing in on her.
Chapter 28
At lunchtime, Thea came and sat down next to Mal. She seemed a lot happier, more refreshed, although she kept looking at the people around them anxiously, and she was almost always met with a cold, dead stare. No one apart from Mal trusted her. Mal could try to bring her into the group, to get her friends to trust her, but she knew that no matter what she did Thea would always be an outsider. Nothing could change that. Suddenly, a raven flew through the open doors of the hall, amidst cries of surprise and shock, and gracefully landed on Thea’s shoulder, digging its claws into her with a force that would injure anyone else. Thea smiled at it.
“Thea, is that the same bird you took fr
om the office when we were on the island?” Mal asked curiously, reaching out to stroke the raven’s feathers. It snapped its beak at her and drew away, burying itself in Thea’s hair. Thea laughed at it and nodded to answer Mal’s question. “But, it was dead...” Mal said in confusion, tilting her head around to look at the bird. Its beady eyes glowed like amber.
Without saying anything, Thea pulled back her left sleeve to show that she was missing half of her arm. Her forearm ended in a tangled mess of wires and metal. Some of her ‘skin’ had been stripped away to reveal more of the machinery that made her function. “I used the pieces from my arm to make him alive again.”
“Him?” Mal asked.
“Yeah, his name’s Echo.” Thea sounded just like a proud parent.
“Why did you save him?” Mal asked.
Thea looked down at the bird and raised her remaining hand to stroke his head. “Echo used to come and visit the dungeons. I’m not sure how he got in there, but he’d be there every day. I used to take food and hide it in my cloak so I could give it to him when he arrived, and he started to trust me. I was desperate to tame him and make him my friend. To me, he was majestic and exotic, a relic from the world I had heard about but never seen. He was hope. He was proof that the world outside was a real place full of strange creatures like him, and I promised myself that one day I would join them.
“But then they found us...I’m not sure how, I managed to keep Echo secret for ages. Maybe I had been talking too loudly. I tried to hide him, honestly I did, but they grabbed him and snapped his neck. The sound of his bones snapping was the worst sound I’d ever heard. It was my fault we were found, so I wanted to give him another chance. It’s the least I could do for him.” Echo chirped, as if he knew what Thea was saying. Thea smiled at him again, and Echo stayed on her shoulder for the rest of lunch.
As the day went on, the atmosphere in the building gradually changed until it almost seemed like the building itself was straining to contain all the emotions. Some of the humans that had attacked Tenebar the day before had been captured, and the trial was scheduled for later that night, although from what Mal heard, the trial was just following procedure. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that these people were to be executed, or at least tortured for information. From the gory methods that Tenebar’s torturers were rumoured to use, Mal found herself hoping for their sake that they would be killed.
Dallas became more and more reserved as the trial grew closer, but his eyes shone with malice. Rose tapped her fingernails against the table, murmuring to herself, but she would never tell anyone what she was saying. Thomas got more anxious, jumping at small noises and looking around the room. Mal tried to keep her face as still and unreadable as a mask, but if you looked closely you could catch sparks of emotion flickering like the embers of a dying fire. Thea was the only one who didn’t seem to be affected by any of it.
Mal and her friends took their seats towards the front of the courtroom and waited for everyone else to file in and take their seats. The room was filled with anxious, fearful, excited, bloodthirsty chatter that stopped immediately when the prisoners started walking in. There were five of them, all in shackles that clanked and jingled as they crossed the room, led by three Tenebar guards.
When her eyes fell upon the last prisoner, Mal suddenly felt uneasy. She could have sworn she had seen her somewhere before. Her head was lowered so that her brown hair obscured her face, but she looked suspiciously like...
Claire.
Standing up on the podium, blue eyes frozen on Mal’s brown ones, was Claire. Mal’s best friend. The person she had told everything to since she was six years old. A murderer.
Mal sat frozen for a minute, and then she jumped to her feet. Tears blurring her vision, she tore out of the room, slamming the door behind her as she left. She couldn’t bear to sit in that room anymore. She heard the voices of her friends shouting after her, but Mal didn’t want to stop.
She ran out of Tenebar, without even the slightest idea of where she was going. She just wanted to get out. She leaned against the wall of the building, took a few deep breaths to try and steady herself, and for a second she felt like she had it together, like she was okay and strong enough to deal with this.
Then she remembered the look on Claire’s face as her mask was removed on that podium, and a fresh wave of sadness and pain hit her. Crying out in rage, Mal swung her fist around and punched the wall behind her. Once she started, she just couldn’t stop. She punched the wall until she had bits of it embedded into her skin. The blood trailing from her knuckles stained the wall, until finally Mal gave up. Clenching her bloody hands into fists, Mal slid down the wall, wrapped her arms around her knees, and cried.
When Mal had finished crying, she leant against the wall, feeling tired and oddly numb. Her head was throbbing with a terrible headache, but as she took some deep breaths of the fresh air it started to ebb away. Shakily, she exhaled and placed a hand on her head, trying to comprehend what had just happened. She couldn’t seem to wrap her head around it. She thought of Claire as a kind and caring person, not someone with the blood of thousands staining their hands. Bitterly, she remembered how Claire was always so soft and fragile, barely able to protect herself, flinching away from any kind of violence. Now she knew that it was all an act. The girl that she had grown up with was gone, and Mal was terrified of what had replaced her.
Mal felt like she was going to start crying again, but she didn’t seem to have any tears left. She just sat there, feeling a terrible ache in her chest at the betrayal of her best friend. Dimly, Mal registered that it was cold and she was shivering. Gingerly, she stood up, stretching out her muscles, and started to walk back to Tenebar.
She walked back to the main hall and saw her friends huddled together, talking anxiously and glancing around themselves. As soon as Thea caught sight of Mal she came running over. “Mal! What...have you been crying?”
Brokenly, Mal explained to her friends what had happened. When she had finished, Rose surprised everyone by coming forward and wrapping her arms around Mal in a tight hug. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “She doesn’t deserve you anyway. It’s her loss.”
Rose hugged Mal for a few more seconds before stepping away, looking incredibly awkward. She noticed everyone was looking at her and her face hardened. “What the hell are you all staring at?”
Thomas grinned. “She’s back.”
Chapter 29
That night, while everyone else was asleep, Mal crept down to the dungeons. She wanted to see Claire and make her explain. She snuck down the rows of cells, glancing into them every now and then to try and find Claire.
Suddenly, a voice whispered “Mal. It’s me.”
Mal jumped and spun to look at the cell next to her. Claire was sitting shackled to the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at Mal with wide eyes. Steeling herself, Mal walked up to the bars of Claire’s cell and stood there for a moment, staring down at her best friend. Cautiously, Claire stood up and walked up to the bars as well. After a moment, she reached through them to try and touch Mal’s shoulder. “Mal, I’m sorry...” she began.
Mal jerked herself away from Claire’s hands, taking a step away from her. “Explanation. Now,” she said, and was surprised at how strong and harsh her voice sounded. It reflected none of the fear and betrayal she felt inside.
Claire slowly lowered her hand, looking hurt. Then she took a deep breath, shuffling around nervously. “I don’t know where to start...”
“At the beginning,” Mal said angrily. “When did you start working for them?”
“I...I was actually working for them when we met...”
Mal glared at her furiously, not trusting herself to speak. Claire looked at Mal for a few seconds, then when she realised that Mal wasn’t going to say anything, she continued by saying “both my parents are Hell’s Assassins.”
Mal remembered Claire’s parents, how they had always treated her like their own child, and she felt a
horrible sting of betrayal. Claire, who was avoiding looking at Mal, didn’t notice and continued with her story.
“I remember on my first day at school, my parents told me that I had to try and make friends with a girl called Malika James. I asked them why, but they didn’t tell me, just kept talking about how important it was that I became good friends with you. I didn’t know it at the time, but they’d both been told by Akraansir to get me to make friends with you so I could learn information about you and find out if you really were the girl in the prophecy. Every night after I came home from school, my parents would ask me what I’d learnt about you and take notes to show Akraansir.
“When I was 14 years old, Akraansir decided that you were the girl from the prophecy. She wanted you dead and she wanted me to do it because I’d been showing signs of disloyalty to her for a long time.” Claire suddenly paused, taking a deep and shaky breath, tears welling up in her eyes. When she started talking again, her voice was choked with emotion.
“They...said you would be in the park on that day...they asked me to hide behind the trees and kill you when you walked past...I saw Felix from behind and I thought it was you...”
Mal suddenly gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. You...you were the person in that mask...”
Tears flowing freely now, Claire nodded. “I’m so sorry, Mal...”
“You killed him...you killed Felix...” Mal felt sick. Her head was spinning. She leaned against a wall, and after a moment or two was able to speak, her voice raw with anger. “What did you do after that?”
Pure pain showing in her eyes, Claire kept talking. “When they found out I had killed Felix instead of you...they hurt me really badly. I still have scars...”
“Don’t use his name,” Mal growled. “And don’t you dare pretend like you’re the victim here. You killed him.”
Claire took in a sharp intake of breath. “I’m sorry. I really am...they sent me back to you. They still wanted me to kill you.”