by K. Gorman
“So… Monday, is it?” She stifled a yawn.
“Yep. We’ve got the weekend to prepare.”
The weekend, eh? Perhaps she ought to take Sophia’s advice. It was time to learn her Element.
Chapter 4
The gun felt heavy in Robin’s hand.
She aimed it at the mirror, squinting down the barrel until it pointed, more or less, at a small rip in the reflected wall’s paint, about five feet to the left of her shoulder’s reflection. A soft gray light came in through the window, making the dark spot stand out on the blue-tinted, off-white walls.
The spot had held one of her band posters—until her mom had taken it down.
Robin steadied the shake in her hands and then squeezed the trigger.
“Bang!”
The gun clicked, the sound heavy and leaden in the room. She felt the gun’s mechanism work as it loaded a second imaginary round into the chamber.
She turned her aim to another spot in her room: the physics textbook perched on the edge of her desk.
“Bang!”
Click!
She imagined the recoil slamming into her shoulder, the bruises on her hands if she held it with the wrong grip, the ache in her wrist after firing, the smell of gunsmoke in the air…
Another imaginary round slid into the chamber.
This time, she lowered the gun and rolled her shoulders. It was heavy, and slumping over on the rumpled quilts of her bed hardly made for a professional shooting stance.
But the mirror wouldn’t reach any higher, and she had run out of other things to do.
It was pathetic.
Pathetic and stupid.
Of course, she wouldn’t be here if she weren’t so stupid. Who the hell cared about report cards, anyway? She wasn’t the worst in class. They probably hadn’t gotten grounded.
She lifted the gun again. It only took a few seconds for the tip to waver as she struggled to hold it up.
Pathetic, stupid, and weak.
A slushy rain ticked against the window. Outside, another apartment block shadowed hers. Beyond that, the clouds hung low over Ryarne’s downtown skyscrapers, their bellies blurred by the downpour. Only the bottom part of the mountain border was visible—wet, distant, and dark.
She swung the gun back to the textbooks.
Click! She shot her calculus book, picturing it jump as the bullet smashed through it. No more math for her.
Click! Goodbye, Organic Chemistry.
Click! Language Arts bit the dust.
Click! Click! Click! She shot her way through Secondary Biology II, War and Peace: Pre-Contemporary Westray, and Intensive French III.
And she shot The Theories of Physical Equations again, just for good measure.
She hated Physics.
Only Astronomy was spared. She liked Astronomy. It was pretty cool, reading about stars and planets, black holes, and temporal distortion. Not that she got to see any of it. Even without the city’s light pollution, Ryarne’s long winter made it too cloudy for any amount of stargazing.
And Swarzgard had shot down all the observation satellites.
Fucking war.
Robin rested the gun in her lap again, its heavy, hard muzzle pressing into her knee. The light gleamed along its rounded metallic edges.
In another part of the apartment, a lock turned.
She froze.
“Shit.” She shoved the gun back behind the bed, easing it into the nest she’d made out of T-shirts, blankets, and the occasional bra. She kept a stolen towel in between it and the wall, taking care not to clunk it against the wood like she’d done the first time.
Adrenaline jumped through her. If Mom found the gun, she would be in for a lot more than a grounding. Her mother would take it away, for sure.
And then, she would have to go to Roger empty-handed.
The thought made her heart freeze.
It didn’t matter that he’d probably replaced the gun by now—they’d made a deal. And she was already late on that deal. If she showed up without it…
Roger was a scary dude.
She shoved her pillow over the gun’s nest and retrieved her astronomy book from across the room. Briefly, she considered moving the other books into different spots—that way, at least, it would look like she’d picked them up during the day.
No, her mom might hear her moving them about.
Instead, she crawled back into the bed—on top of the gun nest—opened the astronomy book about three-quarters of the way through, and pretended to read.
Her mom’s footsteps were soft. Was she still in her work clothes? Robin followed the sound down the hallway and into the kitchen. A set of keys jangled down on the table, followed by the hiss of a plastic bag. Groceries?
The bag rustled again, then stopped. She heard her mother sigh.
Then, the footsteps headed for her door.
Her mom knocked lightly and paused. A moment later, the door opened, and her mom poked her head in.
“Robin?”
Her mother had come straight home from the hospital. She’d worn her new forest-green scrubs today, though they had lost their crispness after the split shift, and her hair, the same black as Robin’s, was pulled back into a tight ponytail.
Sometimes, when her mom came back from the hospital, the skin around her cheeks and neck seemed sallow—a sick-looking yellowish tinge that reminded her of the sheep’s eyes she’d dissected last year.
It looked like that now.
A faint smell of antiseptic soap accompanied her into the room.
Her mother glanced around, taking in the clothes on the floor and the untouched books on the desk. Then, she took in Robin. Her lips tightened.
“Different PJs. I suppose that’s an improvement.”
Robin met her eyes, unflinching. Her mother’s gaze flicked back to the stack of books on the desk.
“Did you make an improvement on your studies, as well?”
Robin rolled her eyes, picking the astronomy book off her lap.
Mom’s light eyes narrowed. “You did astronomy yesterday.”
“It’s a big book. When can I get my phone back? I have friends, you know?”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before failing every class.”
“I wasn’t the worst one!”
“Even on a bell curve, you’re on the lower end.”
She paused. “The bell what?”
Her mother rolled her eyes. “The bell curve. Something you would know if you’d paid attention in class.”
“Whatever.”
“Look, Robin. I don’t like doing this, but it has to be done. School exists to prepare you for the world, and if you don’t do well in it—”
“Other people got shitty grades. Their parents didn’t ground them.”
“I am not other parents. If your father were here, he’d agree with me.”
“But he isn’t, is he?”
Her mother’s jaw clenched. Her jowls tightened, and the tendons in her neck briefly showed under her skin. For a faint second, Robin thought she saw a spark of anger—real anger, not the annoyance or irritation that usually surfaced—flare in the shadow of her mother’s eyes. Her lips thinned, tightened. Robin tensed.
“Why don’t you do your work?” Mom asked.
“What?” This was a new line of questioning. She hadn’t expected it.
“Is it hard for you? Why don’t you do it?”
“I’ve got other things to do—”
“Like what? I took all your ‘other things’ away, and you still don’t do it. Wh—?”
“But I did astronomy today—”
“Don’t bullshit me. You’ve been grounded for two weeks, and you still haven’t hit the big ones—Stop. You know which ones I mean,” she said when Robin held up the astronomy book again. “No math, no bio, no history… why? Is it hard for you? Is it too much? Is it because your friends don’t do it? What—?”
“Meese does her work.”
�
�Good for her. I like her. I bet her father likes her. But that doesn’t answer my question. Why?”
Her mother advanced another step into the room, closer to the natural light provided by the window. Robin could tell the shift had worn away what makeup she had put on in the morning. Her lips, though colored pinker than normal, had lost their pigment around the edges, growing blurred and worn and pale. Her eyeliner, too, had thinned. Instead of accentuating the eyes, her gaze was drawn instead to the bags beneath them.
She shrugged. “It’s boring.”
“Boring? What’s boring about it? Those are a lot of different subjects. Are they all boring to you?”
“I guess.”
“What bores you about them?”
“I dunno. They’re just boring.”
“Right. So—” her mother picked the history book off the desk. “—everything that Ryarnese society has done, that we have done—”
Robin flinched as her mother slammed it down, knocking a CD off the desk. Her mother moved on, jerking the physics book up and brandishing it in her face.
“—all of our ingenuity and progress, language; everything that nature has done, how life works—” the French book, the biology text. “—all of that is ‘just boring’?”
Robin tightened her jaw. Her face felt hot.
Her mother took a step toward the bed. The three textbooks hung at her sides, gripped tightly in her fingers. An iodine stain on her wrist discolored the skin into a sickly yellow-brown. The tendons strained underneath.
“Well?”
Robin let another shrug roll off her shoulders. “I guess.”
She just wished her mother would go away.
A second later, she got her wish. Her mom retreated. She turned her back on her and returned the books to the desk.
“What will I do with you? If you continue like this, then you’re going to flunk out, get a shitty job, and live a shitty life. Do you want that? Do you understand?”
Robin grunted. “It’s a shitty life, anyway. I don’t see how good grades will change that.”
“Do you want to be stupid?”
“I dunno.”
Her mother turned back around. “There’s a point to the grading system, you know. They aren’t just something to achieve to impress parents. You go to school to learn. Good grades mean you’ve learned the material. Bad grades mean you haven’t. You need to learn this. The state doesn’t make school mandatory for no reason.”
Robin kept silent. Her mother met her eyes.
“So, what am I going to do with you?”
The room had darkened slightly—it was probably nearing sunset. Outside, the rain had turned to slush, hitting her window with a heavier sound—tak tak tak. Occasionally, a gust of wind made the glass groan and the slush hit harder.
In the dimming light, her mother’s light-blue eyes appeared almost ghost-like.
“Look, why don’t we make a deal?”
Robin glanced up. “Yeah?”
“You’ll earn one day off each time you finish a book. Finish them all, and you’re free to go.”
“Ungrounded?” She sat up.
“Yes.”
She narrowed her eyes. Calculations raced through her head—how fast could she get it done? Bio would take two days, at least. History? Maybe a day. Physics?
She cringed. Quite frankly, she didn’t want to face Physics.
“What if I’ve done the work already? In school?”
“Show me, and I’ll credit it to your escape.”
She sat back and glanced over to her desk where the textbooks loomed.
Well, what else was she going to do?
“Okay,” she said.
Chapter 5
Mieshka had just come back from her morning run when she received a text message from Robin.
“Wanna hang out on Sunday?”
She frowned, kicked off her shoes, and scratched one foot against the other. Her socks felt hot and damp compared to the hallway’s floor. A clatter came from the kitchen, and the sizzle of frying eggs permeated the apartment’s air.
The unlit hallway made her phone’s screen especially bright. She squinted, tapping on the on-screen keyboard.
“I thought you were grounded?”
Robin’s icon, glowing in the corner of the messaging app, blinked on almost immediately.
“Only part-time grounded now. Made a deal.”
A shadow passed across the end of the hall. Her dad poked his head around the corner, his glasses askew.
“Mieshka?”
“Coming.”
She flipped her phone closed and shuffled to the end of the hall.
Two eggs, sunny-side up, sat on a plate at her spot. She lifted an eyebrow at them, then glanced at her dad as he plopped the frying pan back onto the stove.
Since when did he make breakfast?
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
She had thought to take a shower first. Sitting around, sweaty, in her running clothes, wasn’t exactly her definition of a good time.
Instead, she sat down and picked up the fork. And frowned.
Hadn’t they run out of eggs yesterday?
She twisted around. Dad had put a second pair of eggs on. As she watched, he added salt and pepper to their tops.
“Did you go out?”
“Are you going to eat?”
He ignored her as she continued to stare. After a minute, she turned back around and dug in.
The table had been cleared off since she’d been gone, and the placemats changed. As she glanced over the cutlery set up on his side of the table, he came around her right and put a chipped mug of orange juice at the top of her place setting.
She eyed it suspiciously.
“What’s up?” she asked as he retreated to the kitchen.
“Cold season. You need Vitamin C.”
She heard him scrape the pan with the spatula. His eggs crackled as he flipped them. The smell wafted in from the kitchen.
She took another bite of her egg. It was already cooling.
A minute later, Dad joined her across the tiny table, thumping a plate of eggs down on his spot. He ignored her as he dug in.
Her phone chirped.
Robin.
“Can you help me find Roger?”
Mieshka choked. That was the last thing she wanted to do, given her newfound job.
Speaking of which…
“Dad, I got a job.”
He stopped ignoring her.
“What?”
“I’m doing something for the Water Mage now.”
“‘Something’?”
“Security or something. I met her. She’s really nice.”
“I’ve met her, too.”
She swallowed. That’s right. Her dad had probably met most everyone when she’d been in the hospital.
“What do you think?” she asked. “It’ll help with the bills.”
“You shouldn’t have to worry about the bills. That’s my job.”
But you haven’t been doing a very good job of it lately.
She bit back the thought with another bite of egg, feeling the yolk run across her tongue. He’d improved since then. He’d gotten better. He’d been trying.
By the look in his eyes, he might have guessed some of her thoughts.
She swallowed. “But I do. It’s not fair that you have to do this alone. Not with the government cutting us off. Let me help. It’s no big deal—”
“What about school?”
“It won’t interfere with school. It’s part of my training.”
“Your Elemental training?”
“Yes.” At least, he wasn’t calling it ‘magic training’ anymore.
Dad took a sip of his mug. She noticed that it was coffee rather than orange juice.
This whole thing was a big adjustment for him, she supposed. How many parents had kids who became Fire Elementals?
None.
As far as she knew, she was the only
one in Ryarne, apart from Aiden, who had Fire powers—and she was a government secret. People like her just weren’t common knowledge. Everyone knew about the Mages, of course, but she wasn’t a Mage.
She was something new.
Even Aiden didn’t know what, exactly, her powers were. She hadn’t always been a Fire Elemental—her Fire magic had only manifested after she’d absorbed one of the Fire crystals.
But that was a whole ’nother story.
Mieshka picked up her juice, giving it a sniff. She hadn’t recalled picking any up at the store last night…
“You did go out.” She stared across the table at her dad. “When?”
He took another bite of his eggs. “After you went to bed. Just to that corner store on the next block.” He glanced over at her. “It’s not a big deal.”
She grinned. “Yes, it is! You haven’t been out in months.”
He pushed the food around on his plate. The light from the kitchen caught on the metal frame of his glasses.
“So, what are you doing today? More training?” he asked, picking another forkful from his plate. “More… shooting stuff?”
Dad wasn’t exactly gung-ho about her current regimen.
“I think Jo’s giving me a break from that today. We’re going to set things on fire, instead.”
“With your Element?”
“Hopefully.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Hopefully?”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve ever practiced with it before.”
Aiden had been too busy to train her. She’d barely seen him since school had ended—winter break, so far, had been spent with Jo. Whenever she did see him, he was either tinkering around on his shield-generating engine, staring at graphs on his computer, or attempting to sleep on the office couch.
The Fire Mage reminded her of Dad sometimes.
He paused, a forkful of egg halfway to his mouth.
“Have you… used it? Since…?”
Since I made a rather spectacular, city-wide shield out of fire?
Hah.
“Just that once with Kitty. Aiden told me not to.”
Mieshka rested her phone on the table, reactivating the screen. She swiped her finger over the touch keyboard, formulating a message back to Robin: “I’ve got his phone number. Shouldn’t be hard to find him. You sure you want to? He was looking for you.”
A fork clinked on the other side of the table.