“You’ve always had ugly, poop brown eyes,” he retorted, but his nose twitched slightly as he really stared at her for the first time in months. Adara knew why he’d been avoiding her eyes, and it wasn’t because he would become romantically entranced by their beauty—it was because the once dark irises, like pure coffee, were now speckled with hints of red. Her Affinity was developing, and Tray disliked that prospect just as much as she did.
“Hey,” a voice panted, and when she glanced up, she found Hartman had popped up in front of them. His freckles were quivering, as they usually did now that he’d been improving his Affinity, and his gaze was fixed on Adara as he spoke. “Just overheard Nero with his pals… He’s saying he saved you like he’s some hero—some merciful god.”
“That’s unsurprising.” She focused past the younger Corvis to glare at his stepbrother. “He does think he’s the shit around here—the good kinda shit, I mean.”
Tray muttered something about vulgarity that none of them really heard because Lavisa had just stepped up beside Hartman, cracking her knuckles. Since the Wacko attack, she’d been wearing her fighting hand-wraps everywhere, eternally prepared for another invasion. Her yellow hair was contained in two tight French braids that pulled at the skin of her face, giving her a more threatening appearance than usual.
“Ignore Nero, all of you,” she intoned, shooting a pointed look at Adara. “He’s a classic bully with no substance. He’ll be weak and destructible when real calamity hits. Our enemies are the Wackos, not him. I think, if Kiki can get over him, then the rest of you can, as well.”
Adara’s vision trailed across the room to Kiki Belven, who sat alone on the bleachers with no one else within a ten-foot radius. “If you want me to feel bad for her, I don’t,” she said as she unexpectedly stood. “I played a harmless prank on her and now she’s sulking—boo-hoo for her. She harassed me for ten years and never batted an eye. There is no sympathy for people like her.”
Her eyes fluttered briefly toward Seth, but she ignored the impulse and then marched away from the group without a word of departure. She didn’t want to talk about Kiki, and she certainly didn’t want to rehash any unpleasant memories regarding Seth—especially now that everything had been nearly perfect for them over the past month. Kiki was out of the picture, high school was in the past, and since coming here, they’d been laughing and joking like they had in their childhood—like they had in all of Adara’s fondest memories.
As she weaved through the crowd, she noticed Aethelred speaking with Hastings while Eliana stood at an awkward distance from them, staring absently at Kiki. Her hair, which had been as dark blue as Calder’s only a month ago, was fading into a lighter shade, like cobalt, and her eyes had changed with it. The transformation had been gradual and subtle enough that most didn’t see it, but Adara had noticed a slight spike in the rate of its alteration since her roommate had heard her first coherent thought at breakfast on Friday morning. Eliana must have heard Adara thinking about her, because she glanced over with a weak smile that she returned with an eyebrow jump before plunging toward the gym’s exit—toward the Pixie Prince.
He wore a shirt now, fortunately enough, but Adara still noticed the faint yellow bruises on his arms as he warped water with his hands. His focus was trained on the water, his eyes shimmering with its reflection, but he clearly noticed her approach, because as soon as she stepped before him, he said, “Come to badger me about the wounds you refused to heal—again?”
Her jaw shifted as she crossed her arms—partly out of agitation, partly to show off her forearm scabs. “Why aren’t you bowing at Nero’s feet like all your friends? And your sister, for that matter.”
“You heard him in the nurse’s office. We’re allies, not friends—we help each other when it’s convenient. Right now, it does nothing for me to worship him. It only makes me look inadequate, as if I wasn’t the one who knocked out that Wacko.”
Adara struggled to keep her expression aloof. “Was it you who knocked out the Wacko?”
“You were—” he began to say, but then he paused. “You were passed out—right, because you’re incompetent. But yeah, I did knock the Wacko out—mostly because I was pissed that she slashed up my face with her salt crystals.” His left cheek twitched, moving the faint red marks still painted there—the wounds he’d refused to heal. “Also because Nero seemed to think she was more powerful than me, and we can’t have people thinking there’s anyone more powerful than me.”
The playfulness was evident in his tone, but there was that slight hint of acrimony that reminded Adara of why she’d come to speak with him in the first place.
“Well, then you need to show everyone you’re the most powerful, don’t you?”
His unshapely mass of water burst within his fingers, but he regained control of it before it could splatter at his feet. Allowing the water to absorb into his palm, he considered Adara with a mixture of thoughtfulness and leeriness.
“You could show them all now,” she elaborated, pursing her lips. “You could show them you’re to be feared even more than Nero. I’ll let you demonstrate on me.”
“You’ll—what?” he spluttered, his face consumed with undiluted bafflement. It was the first time she’d seen him look so seriously shocked, and it made her lips curve slyly. “What are you—a masochist? You want to let me use my Affinity against you?”
“If it makes you look more deadly than Nero,” she responded coolly, shrugging.
“Why—” He stopped and then started again, his hand now placed pensively on his chin. “Why would you want to help me? In the past month I’ve known you, the only person I’ve ever seen you try to help is that plant kid, and that was only when I tried to drown him.”
“But then you gave him your contacts when he was blind—”
“Because I was tired—and sick of you.”
“Or just because you’re not as evil as you want everyone to think.”
Calder’s lips screwed as he glanced around for signs of other listeners. “I’m…I don’t want people to think I’m evil. I just don’t want to be some greater good hero like your brother. It’s lame, and I don’t really have the patience for it.”
“Neither do I, and I don’t think I’d want to help you if you were anything like my brother.” She sucked in a breath and then unfolded her arms. “I’m ready, Pixie Prince. Drown me.”
A look of pure disgust overwhelmed his face, as if she’d just shoved the corpse of a rodent into his mouth. “Drown you? You want me to drown you?” he repeated, his voice becoming edgier with each word. His demeanor morphed from appalled to manic as he rapidly threw his hands up and created a bubble of water that hugged Adara’s face, encasing her nose and mouth in the liquid.
At first, she was startled and then calm, and then, after a moment, when she tried to breathe, she became instinctively panicked. Though she stood firm and strong for as long as she could, the water seeped through her airways, flooding her mouth, clogging her nostrils, and filling her lungs. Her usual over-confidence diminished into self-preserving alarm.
Any preconception she’d had about drowning—that it was peaceful or painless—vanished from her awareness as the concept of death flashed before her. She’d asked Calder to use his Affinity on her, and now he was going to murder her with it and no one was even watching. Her recklessness was finally going to cause the termination of her life, and Tray wasn’t even here to say, “I told you so.”
“So, if you won’t allow me to speak with Angor, I must have a word with Aethelred,” a female’s voice said from the entrance to the gymnasium.
In her sheer terror, Adara didn’t process its origin until her eyes darted toward the doors, where a purple-haired woman had just entered with Fraco trailing briskly behind her. He was stammering excuses and sweating profuse amounts of oil, but the woman wasn’t listening to him anymore, if she had ever been listening to him at all; her eyes, like two shiny plums, were locked with Calder’s.
Water f
ell from Adara’s face, splashing her entire front and drenching her white t-shirt in the same way Calder had on their first day of meeting. As Adara hacked up fluid, students began to pivot, and upon seeing the purple woman in the doorway, they all adopted Calder’s gaping expression.
“I admire the amount of control and skill you have with your Affinity,” vice presidential candidate Olalla Cosmos said to the blue-haired boy. Her voice, which was smooth and melodic during speeches, was now forced and strained, as though spitting up the words agonized her. “But I do not condone Affinity violence.”
“N-nor do we,” Fraco stuttered, his dark eyebrows now set in a hard line of indignation. “Mr. Mardurus, I would like to see you in my office—”
“S-sure,” Calder said, almost speechless for the first time Adara had ever witnessed. Of course, she was too busy coughing up the water in her lungs to really care about Calder—or Olalla Cosmos—at all, but she would have been mocking him if she’d had the ability. “S-sorry,” he added to Olalla, bowing his head as he scurried past. Fraco shoved him out of the gymnasium, but not quickly enough to prevent the Pixie Prince from gracing Adara with a brief moment of eye contact. Her last gag was, pointedly, the most dramatic of all.
“Are you all right?” someone asked, placing a gentle hand on Adara’s shoulder. She was still doubled over, and she shoved the person off with a violent jerk.
“What kind of stupid—” She paused her caustic question when she stood straight and saw who she was speaking to. Swallowing, she hardened her face and said, “Oh, Future Queen. Glad to make your acquaintance.”
Although puzzlement was her most prominent reaction, Olalla did seem mildly amused by Adara’s greeting. She smiled softly before turning to the rest of the students and clearing her throat. “I apologize for my interruption. Please continue with your training. Most of you are working brilliantly, as far as I can see.”
There was a collective silence before the room broke out in hasty movement, every student diligently practicing their Affinities—even those who had been lounging before. Tray was one of the few who did not move, his nose still in his book as though nothing had happened.
Adara took a moment to scowl at him, even though the rapid beating of her heart was provoking glee rather than grumpiness. No, that hadn’t gone as she’d planned, but there was a sadistic little part of her that reveled in the fact that she’d convinced the Pixie Prince to heed her words, even if it had almost led to her own demise.
Eliana was fairly certain Adara was the only person in this room willing to disrespect Olalla Cosmos. It had just been a silly nickname—Future Queen—but it was more familiarity than Eliana would have been comfortable with. In fact, she felt squeamish simply about the fact that Olalla now sashayed through the crowd, headed directly toward her.
Well, no, not her—Aethelred. Since she and Hastings had been talking with Aethelred until now, though, they somehow found themselves lumped in the conversation.
“Aethelred Certior,” Olalla greeted, extending her hand. The pale gray suit she wore today was shockingly plain beside Aethelred’s paisley, sunset-colored suit. Cordially, he shook her hand, his features remaining pleasantly placid.
“Olalla Cosmos, we meet again. These are two of my students, Miss Eliana Mensen and Mr. Hastings Lanio.”
Eliana gave the woman a shy wave, but Hastings was rigid, even when Olalla’s lips spread into a sympathetic smile.
“Ah, Hastings,” she repeated sadly. “You are the matter which I have come here to discuss. I heard of the recent Wacko intrusion here, Aethelred. Harold and I are aware that young Hastings was the target of their desire.”
“You and Harold do tend to find a way to get involved,” Aethelred said. There was something in his tone that made Eliana want to pry at his thoughts, but she knew not to try. He’d told her once before that he was trained mentally to sense others intruding into his mind, and she didn’t want to overstep her boundaries.
Olalla, though, might not have had that ability, so Eliana focused her inner ear, listening for any thoughts within her mind that might shed light on Aethelred’s mysteriousness. As with Hastings’s mind, though, there was a wall around Olalla’s—one that only a very skilled mind reader might be able to penetrate.
“We wanted to be assured that everything here in Periculand was all right,” Olalla continued, ignoring or perhaps not hearing the minor accusation in Aethelred’s statement. “As you know, we want Periculand to be a place where Affinities feel safe—where Affinities can come and be secure. I wanted to speak with Angor on the matter—”
“Mr. Periculy is a busy man, you can imagine,” Aethelred interjected, “but, if you would like, we could sit down and discuss the details.”
“I would like that, I think,” she agreed, smiling warmly at him before she glanced between Eliana and Hastings. “A pleasure to meet you both. The life of a Mental is not an easy one, but just know that good can come from any Affinity, no matter how insensitive or immoral it may seem…”
That evening, Eliana tapped her pencil mindlessly on the table, staring out the massive back window of the library, just a pane of blackness with the night sky beyond it. Training had ended almost three hours ago, and she and Hastings had been sitting silently in the library since then. Mondays were the only day of the week he didn’t have work at the dry cleaner’s or meetings with Angor Periculy, but Eliana almost wished he wasn’t here today.
Since the events of Friday night, Hastings had been more reserved than usual, which meant he hadn’t said a word at all. His mind had been completely closed to her, but through observational skills alone, she could feel his tension—she just couldn’t pinpoint why he was so tense.
At first, she thought he was scared—scared that he’d almost been kidnapped and scared that they would return for him—but…he wasn’t scared. He was probably the least scared person in Periculand right now, strolling around the campus naively and walking to and from work alone, sometimes in the dark. Hastings had never been particularly emotional in nature, but it was as if the invasion had drained whatever feeling he had and now he was just a shell of a human, living without caution or care.
“You’ve been stuck on that problem for a while,” Eliana finally said, her voice light but threaded with accusation. On the table between them, his algebra homework was mostly untouched, despite the fact that they’d been working on it for an hour. Though he had a pencil in one hand, he seemed more occupied with gnawing his fingernails off the other. “Do you need…help?”
“No,” he answered, glaring down at his homework with vehemence. When he recognized the harshness of his own tone, he glanced up at her briefly and added, “I’m fine.”
“You don’t…seem fine,” she countered in the mellowest way she could. “You just seem… I…well, I can’t really describe it—” Her words came to a halt when she was slammed by the debilitating sensation of his frustration. With her face scrunched almost painfully, she met his steady gaze and swallowed. “You’re frustrated. Because…because the Wackos tried to kidnap you. Because—because everyone’s been staring at you—”
It’s not because of the Wackos, he corrected mentally, his mouth clamped shut. The Wackos saved me.
At this, Eliana blanched, wondering if she was hearing his thoughts improperly. Her eyes darted around to the students sitting at the table behind her and the primaries searching the shelves of books to her left. She whispered to him, “What do you mean?”
I mean… He sighed, leaning forward so their faces were only a foot apart. “You saw how I reacted at JAMZ,” he said aloud, his words hushed and rushed. “I was…I was going to use my Affinity on the acid kid—I was going to kill him. You know it’s true. I heard you tell me to stop, and I didn’t care. That’s why I can’t feel—that’s why I can’t allow emotions to cloud my judgment. I become uncontrollable, even to myself.”
Eliana was biting her lip now, watching the way his reddish eyebrows narrowed and his scab-like eyes shimmere
d with remorse. They’d been blazing with rage on Friday night, feral and violent, yet the mystery of his Affinity still chewed at her curiosity.
“What did you think of Olalla?” Hastings asked abruptly, nearly causing her to fall back in her chair.
“I—um, she was…nice…and pretty?”
“She acts like she knows what she’s talking about. She claims all Affinities can be used for good, but that’s easy to say when she has an Affinity for peace. You can use your Affinity for good—you can tell when bad people are lying and when good people are in danger. My Affinity isn’t like that—not at all. I have an Affinity for destruction, and I have a tendency to want to destroy. I’m an unstable bomb, just waiting for the wrong nudge to set me off.”
Eliana stared down at her hands folded on the table and wished she had an Affinity like Olalla’s—one that could mollify Hastings’s grief. “Even if your Affinity is…evil, that doesn’t mean you have to be evil. You’re not inherently hateful, and…and I think I would know if you were—not just because I can read minds, but…but because we’re…friends, aren’t we?”
His gaze avoided her, glued instead to the towering aisles of books around them. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do. You wouldn’t want to be my friend if you knew what I was capable of—if you knew what I’ve done.”
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,” she implored, grabbing his hand where it rested on the table. He flinched at the contact of her skin but didn’t squirm away, allowing her to encase his rough hand with the softness of hers. “We’ve all done things we regret—some of us worse than others. What matters is what we do now—and what we wish to do in the future. I…I’d mostly like to be an artist, I think, but if I could do something to benefit others, I would—like be a judge, maybe, to make sure guilty people receive punishment and innocent people walk free. It probably won’t happen…I’ll probably just be stuck in this town forever, but…”
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