Tala Phoenix and the School of Secrets

by Gabby Fawkes

  My breath was already coming in and out in efficient gusts. My heart beat vibrated at the same breathless pace.

  We were doing it. We were actually honest-to-John no-shit doing it.

  “Quick!” Kian yelled. “They’re close!”

  Behind us, the guards swarmed out of the school’s back entrance. Their uniformed bodies merged into a terrifyingly fast white blob as they advanced. Even if my friends and I were nearing the forest with every step, any mistake would get us caught.

  Reaching the trees, the thick underbrush enveloped us and the sharp diagonal path we cut through it. Behind us, there was no sign of the guards. Had we lost them? Was it too thick for them to spot which way we’d gone?

  All around me, a sharp hissing sounded and the forest exploded into light.

  I staggered, my gaze flailing up.

  “Lights…” Demi gasped, out of breath. “On the trees?”

  Were there ever. Skillfully concealed in bushy boughs, propped up high and hidden so they’d be invisible on our class trips, but now, unmistakable. Now the whole place was lit up for the guards to find us easily.

  As we crashed through the trees and undergrowth, Demi let out a sudden cry. She’d fallen. Running back, I helped her up, although her face was stricken.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “My plants,” she moaned.

  “Yeah – no,” I said, yanking her along.

  No way was I letting Demi get caught just because she was mourning a couple of freaking irises.

  Further off, there was an unmistakable crashing noise. That of the guards getting closer and closer…

  And we were so goddamn close. Already, around us the trees were thinning to reveal…

  “Aerwyna wasn’t kidding,” Kian yelled, first to reach the fence. “Is that….”

  She trailed off. Probably because the fence ahead of us was exactly how Aerwyna had described. Barbed wire-d. Electrified.

  Basically, the kind you didn’t get past.

  A defiant shudder went through me. No – fuck no. We’d come too far, risked too much –made it all this way. Only to be stopped by this freaking bullshit?

  No, not after all the lies over all the years, all the pills, all the unexplained shit, Jeremy being transferred, this couldn’t be it. Wouldn’t be. BURN THEM ALL.

  My friends yelling my name was just dust in the tornado of rage flinging me at the fence, sneakers smashing into the grass-dirt, clawed hands extended. BURN THE LIARS, BURN IT, BURN EVERYTHING.

  I jolted into the fence. Heat erupted through my palms as a terrific fizzing sound ripped through me.

  Time slowed to a crawl. Coalesced into my inhale… my exhale. Gasping, pitiful. Burning. My very lungs burned. My heartbeat had crawled into my head, was all I could hear. Thump… thump… thump… My vision blurred. My knees buckled. Thump… thump… thump… Someone was screaming. Something smelled like smoke. Thump… thump… My vision went black.

  Thump… thump…

  thump…

  “Tala? Tala?!” Someone was shaking me.

  My eyes fluttered open. Demi.

  She shook me again. “Tala– What did you just-?”

  I followed her shocked gaze. A portion of the fence was gone, lying singed on a desert plain twenty or so feet away.

  A desert plain…

  “Tala?” Demi gasped, running up beside me. “What-?”

  “No time. We gotta go!” Kian yelled, grabbing my arm and yanking.

  She was right. The guards couldn’t be far behind now. And if I started to think about what I’d just… the fence… No, we had to go.

  “How the hell are we in a desert anyway?” Kian yelled as we ran.

  “Just a bit farther!” I said. “When we lose them…”

  Then what? Somehow find the nearest sign of human life? As far as I knew, the school was supposed to be located on an island, not in the middle of the desert. And what the hell had just happened with that fence and my hands?

  What I’ve been trying to get you to do for ages.

  -Okay, ignoring that and moving on… I answered in my head.

  There is no ignoring what you are.

  -True, crazy seems to be catching on these days.

  You know that is not what I am.

  -All I know is one thing at a time, and dum spiro spero. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to run for my life.

  As you wish, fool.

  I only got in a few seconds of sprinting before I heard the whirring. Looking up, I staggered, fell. There, I stayed on my knees. There was no running away anymore, anyway.

  In the helicopter hovering above us, machine guns trained at us, were several soldiers.

  “Hands up!” one of them yelled.

  My friends and I did as we were told. All I could do was gape as the helicopter landed and several army men strode out purposefully. It seemed ridiculous and yet…

  Our school hadn’t actually called the army to get us, had they?

  The man who seemed to be in charge – and also seemed a dead ringer for G. I. Joe - pointed his gun at us, one by one. “Explain.”

  I gaped from the impassive black hole of his gun to his bald head with its several planes of no-nonsense features. Explain what? That the guards would be here any second? Why our school was located in the middle of the desert? Why there was a singed section of an electrified fence a few feet behind me? We were the ones who needed things explained.

  The others patted me and my friends down, until one said, “They’re clean, Sergeant.” As if we had been stuffing our bras with secret Uzis or something.

  G.I. Joe didn’t lower his gun. Although his Windex-blue eyes above his camo face mask looked like they had a mind to.

  “Hey,” he said, a bit kinder now. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, up to you. What are you three doing here?”

  I glanced to Kian, then Demi. But their faces looked as uncertain as I felt. I wasn’t good at crack lying, but telling him the truth didn’t seem a viable option. If we told him about the School for the Different, he’d probably take us right on back. Then again, didn’t kids get rights once they turned eighteen, which we were?

  “We ran away from our school,” Demi said, deciding the matter for us.

  When his gaze swung to hers, it looked no more convinced than before. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. They were going to have us transferred who-knows-where.” She nodded. “We’re from the School for the Different.”

  “School for the Different,” he said, squinting like we’d said Disneyworld. “And it’s around here?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pointing the way we’d come. “It’s through the forest that way.”

  He pulled off his face mask to showcase a set scowl. “Impossible. No schools around here for miles. Or forests.”

  And here I’d thought today couldn’t get any more jacked up.

  “It’s just over there,” I insisted, pointing the way we’d come. It was odd we couldn’t see the electric fence from where we were now, since we hadn’t run far. But maybe if we just went that way for another minute or so…

  “Show me,” G. I. Joe said, and so I did.

  I followed the trail of our footsteps another minute or so. All the way until they ended. Disappeared into thin air.

  “I don’t get it,” I said softly. “We were just there. Our school… The electric fence…” Even the piece I’d blasted was nowhere in sight. And this had to be the same way we’d ran, too. Visible in the sand right before they disappeared, were the crisscrossing lines of Kian’s sneakers, the flat planes of Demi’s flats, the boring pattern of my own runners.

  “Wait!” I held up my wristband triumphantly, careful not to shove it to close to his face, lest he think I was stupid enough to try to attack him. “There, don’t you see?”

  “That from your school?” he said, examining it dubiously.

  “Yeah,” I said, tapping my finger on it, intending to trace along the words. “It’s right there, School fo
r the….”

  Oh, shit. My finger drooped.

  There was nothing to trace along: my wristband was blank. What the hell was going on? Had I really and truly lost my mind this time?

  A look craned behind me found the other soldiers still guarding Demi and Kian, who looked as spooked as I did.

  G. I. Joe crouched to look at where our footprints disappeared into thin air.

  “Where… are we?” I asked quietly.

  “Area 51,” he said, his gaze where our school should’ve been, where there was nothing but more desert plain as far as the eye could see. “It’s a restricted area. No way in or out.”

  “So how…” I began, but he just shook his head.

  He got out what looked like a walky-talky and told the other soldiers, “I’m calling this in to the Department of Subterranean Affairs.”

  He waved me back to Kian and Demi, who were huddled together. They looked as what-the-actual-fuck-just-happened as I felt.

  “He says he’s calling the Department of Subterranean Affairs,” I whispered to them.

  “Department of what?” Demi’s eyes narrowed, her expression growing thoughtful. “Why does that sound familiar?”

  Kian’s face screwed up, her lips mouthing it a few times before she suddenly exclaimed, “The DSA!”

  As the soldiers looked over suspiciously, Kian leaned in, her face animated, and not in a good way.

  “At the Founder’s Assembly, don’t you remember?” she whispered to us. “Most years one of our ‘special guests’ would be some well-dressed snob from the ‘DSA,’ though none of the teachers would ever tell us what that was.”

  “No,” I groaned.

  “Yes,” Kian said gravely. “Which probably means…”

  She fell silent, not needing to say the rest, as G. I. Joe strode to us. “The Department are on their way. You three follow me to the copter. We’ll wait there.”

  We followed him into it and sat down on the edge, our legs dangling off it. My teeth were clenched together so tight, I almost expected to hear my jaw joints crack. If the DSA had anything to do with our school, then the last thing we needed to do was ‘sit tight’ and wait for them to show up.

  “What do we do?” Demi whispered, looking left then right, her frizzy curls’ limp floundering seeming to ask the same question.

  “Hey,” I said to G. I. Joe, getting up. “About the DSA, is there any way we could-”

  Kian’s terrific sneeze, so hard her hands flew up, interrupted me.

  “Damn,” G. I. Joe said abruptly, rotating away from us. “C’mon, boys! They went that way!”

  What is going on?

  I gaped as, without another look at us, the soldiers took off after him.

  Demi and I turned to stare at Kian.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “All I did was sneeze.”

  “Your hands!” Demi said, pointing.

  With the sun beating down, it was almost too bright to make out, but still– they were glowing.

  “What the hell?!” Kian exclaimed. She waved them frantically, as if the glow was a hideous cockroach she had to dislodge.

  Demi cast me a sidelong look and I nodded, grabbing Kian’s arm. This was no time to have our long-overdue panic attacks.

  “C’mon – we gotta go. The DSA could be here any moment.” I didn’t know exactly who or what this mysterious three-letter organization was, but I knew I didn’t want to be around here to find out.

  Kian didn’t budge, her morbid gaze locked on her hands. “But I-”

  “And I just blasted through an electric fence,” I said, yanking on her harder. “Want the DSA to bring us back to school so they can explain it to us before they transfer us and do God knows what else?”

  That made Kian come to. Grudgingly, she allowed herself to be pulled out of the copter and along, casting nervous glances at her hands, perhaps worried they’d light up again any second.

  After a minute or so, wheezing like she might have an asthma attack, Demi said, “We’re running away from the school, right?”

  I flung a look back at the helicopter to confirm. “Yep.”

  Now wasn’t the time to reflect on how we were in some desert with no clue what way was out. Right now, the priority was not getting caught by the DSA – whoever they really were.

  So we ran and ran and ran. We ran until my legs’ sporadic throbbing became an unending one, until I finally fell, and stayed fallen. Up above, day had given way to a tapestry of red sky.

  My legs twitched with protest as I tried to stand up again, so I stayed sitting. Just for now.

  Beside me, Kian and Demi had parked themselves on the ground too, and looked like they weren’t even thinking of getting back up. At least there was no sound of a helicopter or sign of us being chased.

  Kian was the one who said it first. “So it was all a lie.”

  “Maybe not all,” I said. “But a lot.”

  “We’re definitely not in Vermont, I know that much,” Demi said quietly, letting some dirt flow between her fingers.

  “Grade five geography for the win,” Kian muttered.

  “But all this time…” I trailed off.

  LIARS MUST BE BURNED – LIARS MUST BE BURNED – LIARS MUST BE BURNED, the voice was chanting in my head now, helping to give me a migraine.

  “I don’t even know where the liars are right now, okay!” I yelled out loud.

  Kian and Demi’s WTF gazes shot to me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just the crazy murderous voice in my head.”

  “Which may not even be,” Demi said quietly. “With all the lies we’ve been told, how do we even know if we actually are crazy?”

  “Um, glowing hands?” Kian waved hers around, although they were normal now. “If not, why bother with having us take the pills?”

  I realized it at the same time I said it. “Because they made us groggy, more easily controlled.”

  Demi was lying on her back now like some kind of desert nymph, her expression misleadingly serene. “Maybe Jeremy and the others weren’t even transferred at all.”

  “If - when - we get out of here and figure things out,” I said, purposely switching, “we have to go back for them. For Sammy and the others.”

  “Who would’ve thought it’d be that loco ass Cody who’d stand up to the guards?” Kian was bashing a hole in the sand with the heel of her palm. “And the way the others joined in…”

  My stomach twisted. Never in a million years would I have thought our classmates would help us escape. Not with what was at stake for them. It made me realize something else, too.

  “This whole time, the others must’ve known something was off too,” I said quietly. “You saw how Owen came up to us. And how scared Timmy was. We’ve all just kept quiet, out of fear.”

  Silence.

  Demi’s hopeful voice broke it. “Maybe even the whole orphan thing-”

  “Don’t,” Kian snapped. “You think anyone that cared about us would’ve let us be taken to that shithole? It’s only because we had no one that we ended up there at all. No one to care.”

  Demi continued as though she hadn’t heard Kian, her voice lilting with eager possibility. “Maybe we were stolen, kidnapped.”

  “Not this again,” Kian said.

  When we were little, Demi was no less than certain she had a family out in the world somewhere. No amount of teacher reprimanding (desserts confiscated, detentions doled out, even a ‘Room’ threat waved around and never carried out) had changed her mind. She’d only grown out of the childish fairytale when, after year after disappointing year, no one had come to claim her.

  “She could be right,” I admitted.

  A rush went through me. I glanced down at my symmetrical birthmarks.

  Could there, somewhere out there, be a kind woman who was Mom, a funny guy who was Dad? Part of me had always held on to hope that maybe I’d slipped through the cracks somehow, that maybe out there, there were some people like me, some grumpy old uncle who shared
my weird love of burnt food, anything. But was that just another childish dream?

  “If it’s too good to be true…” Kian said.

  “Says the person who got away from a school we were told was inescapable,” I pointed out.

  “We’re still stuck in the middle of a desert,” she said drily. “Anyway. Instead of make-believing families, we should be resting up. We’ll need all the energy we can get if we don’t want to starve to death.”

  “Dum spiro spero,” Demi murmured, and I smiled.

  Kian was right, but Demi was too. Even if there was no food or shelter in sight, even if we were at risk of dying of thirst and starvation more every passing hour, while there was still air in our lungs, there was still hope.

  13

  I fell asleep to stars and awoke to a plant.

  It was a small green stalk, a pleasant figment from dreamland invading the desert I was still in.

  I reached out, letting my fingertips streak across its rubbery surface, then gasped. “Uh, Demi?”

  “What?” she murmured, stretching luxuriously.

  “Some of us… still sleeping,” Kian grumbled.

  As much as Demi was a morning person, Kian was not.

  I knew the exact second Demi’s eyes opened, because she gasped. “How are there… why?”

  “They were under your hands,” I said, taking the plant between two fingers and squeezing it. “Almost like… you grew them.”

  “Yeah, we totally haven’t lost our minds,” Kian said sarcastically, rolling over and stretching.

  “There’s another explanation,” I said quietly.

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Why can’t magic be real?” I said.

  Good, the voice purred. Perhaps you are not a complete imbecile after all.

  “Hilarious,” Kian said, although the sureness in her voice was ebbing away.

  She was probably right. The whole ‘what if magic was real and we can actually perform it’ was a can of worms I didn’t want to get close to opening. Not while we were stuck in the middle of a desert under threat of capture and starvation.

  “Whatever.” I got to my feet. “We should go.”

  I crouched down and ripped the plant out of the ground.

  “Hey!” Demi exclaimed. But I was already lifting it to my mouth. Starvers can’t be choosers.