Nerve

by Kirsten Krueger

  “When they know, it’ll be because we want them to. How can we get out of these chains?”

  “More important, if they take us from this room, how can we turn the Affinity-suppressing gas off?” Avner asked. “And do you know where the exits are?”

  Jamad tapped his fingers on the metal chains, letting it cool his agitation. “We can’t wait for them to haul us out of here. We need to free ourselves and surprise them.”

  “There’s no way we’re getting out of these manacles, J. Even someone with a magnetic Affinity hasn’t been able to break loose. Our best bet is to go along with this until we can form a tactical—”

  “So, we’re just gonna let them cut us up?”

  “No—”

  “Better think of a plan fast then,” Zeela said, fidgeting to sit in a more defensive position. “Someone’s outside the door.”

  Indeed, a moment later, a key clicked in the door before it flew open. Cold fury spiked in Jamad’s chest as two men in tinted helmets entered, invoking memories of their kidnapping. They wore the same dark, impenetrable suits, though now, with all the Affinities stripped of their abilities, the suits probably served as more of a barrier against the toxins in the air than as a means of defense. Beyond the men, the corridor was too dimly lit for Jamad to make out the details, and he doubted Zeela could glean much, either.

  “Samiya will enjoy her,” one guard said, his voice distinguishing him as the one who had wrecked the Solbergs’ front door. If his parents hadn’t been the reason they were in this situation, Jamad might have craved vengeance for how these men had charged into their home; now, however, he focused on the guards’ future offenses as they stepped toward Zeela.

  Avner tugged on his chains in an attempt to shield her body with his. “Don’t you dare touch her!”

  “That’s not a very malevolent threat,” Naretha said, her words pausing the men. “How about I’ll shove salt down your esophagi and he’ll electrocute you both to death afterward if you touch her?”

  The door-destroyer chuckled and the other shook his head. “Our suits are designed to resist all Affinities. Besides, the air has rendered you harmless. You’re no match against us.”

  Naretha and Avner kicked their bound feet at the men and Jamad willed his body to produce some type of ice, but all efforts were futile. His body felt unusually hot—perhaps with nervousness or anger or despair—as his childhood friend struggled against the Reggs. One of the men used a syringe to subdue her while the other unlocked her fetters and hauled her over his shoulder.

  Even as Avner grunted and shouted and wrenched and writhed, the guards didn’t hesitate to depart the room with Zeela, carrying her to some torture chamber. Jamad was thankful when the pipes began to pump out gaseous sedatives to quiet Avner, because the stone walls weren’t as thick as they’d originally thought, and Zeela’s screams snaked through every crack.

  Zeela was blind—again.

  It was as if a vacuum had sucked the universe out of existence, leaving only this hollow void, or as if her eyes had been carved from her skull. With the pain radiating from them, weaving through every fissure of her brain, she wouldn’t have been surprised if they had.

  The two guards had hauled her down the hall ruthlessly, even as she’d thrashed and clawed. Perhaps she could have willed herself into a calm state if she’d been more aware of her surroundings, but one of the men had thumped her on the head two steps into that dirt corridor, disorienting her to the point that what little eyesight she’d regained was again lost.

  Zeela had never been one to scream, but when they’d shoved her into a frigid room and strapped her to what she assumed was a metal table, she’d let her voice reach a volume she’d never thought imaginable.

  “Shh, shh,” a feminine voice had cooed in her ear. Heat signatures flashed around her, but nothing had been coherent. “You don’t want to worry your friends.”

  Zeela’s mouth had clamped shut at that. It was a tactic to get her to shut up, she knew, but it had worked. There was nothing Avner and the others could do to save her, so she took the pain in silence, only crying out when the agony became particularly unbearable. Whatever the researchers did to her wasn’t pleasant.

  The woman and what sounded like a man prodded at her eyes, injected needles in her skin, and scanned her with foreign machines. There was no way to free herself from this table; her wrists ached from trying. Wetness seeped down her cheeks—blood or tears, she couldn’t tell. And her scalp felt unusually cold, as if they’d shaved off her hair at some point and she hadn’t quite noticed.

  If she survived this, she would not be the same. Maybe she should have been thankful to have lost her sight after all.

  13

  The Science of Defense

  “You’re thinking…that you hope Nixie never comes back, so you can have Nero all to yourself,” Eliana concluded, proceeding to gnaw on her lip as she side-glanced at Kiki.

  The blonde girl threw her head back with a groan, curls spilling behind her shoulders. “Why do you have to be so talented?”

  Eliana fought to subdue her rising blush. For the past thirty minutes, she and Kiki had sat on the orange bleachers, waiting for the first day of all-day training to begin. The Rosses and Fraco still hadn’t returned from their hunt for “Adara,” but Nero had, and he and his entourage stood at the center of the mats, Dave groveling at his side while the pink-haired mind reader surveyed the room with boredom. Evidently, the Mardurus twins were absent, which had prompted Kiki’s most prevalent thoughts.

  “I’m not that good… I can barely read the Rosses’ minds,” Eliana added, hushing her tone so none of the other students would hear. Of their primary friends, they were the only two attending training, but a group of tertiary boys sat within hearing distance, and she didn’t want them to guess what they suspected of the Rosses. In some selfish, twisted way, she didn’t want anyone to know what they assumed about Artemis because, if it were true, Eliana wanted to be the one to exact justice. Her demeanor might have been as docile as her Affinity, but she would make an exception for this.

  “I don’t care about that,” Kiki dismissed, craning her neck to scowl at Eliana. “I care about me. How can I block you?”

  “I…I’m not really sure.” Eliana combed some of her blue hair behind her ear. It was such a vibrant shade now, so different from the black color she’d been born with, that she was often shocked when the brightness fell before her eyes. “I know you need to build a wall around your mind, but…it just comes to me naturally now. Hastings was the most skilled with it. He would have been able to explain it better, but…”

  Kiki’s pout morphed with a tinge of sympathy. “You really miss him, huh?”

  Fiddling with one of the pockets of her purple cargo pants, Eliana said, “He wasn’t part of my life that long, but…yeah. It still feels surreal—like he’ll walk in here any minute and sit down without saying hello, biting his nails and silently judging everyone…”

  “Do I even wanna know what he thought of me?”

  “Probably not.” She smiled softly when Kiki scoffed. “We were similar in a lot of ways, except…in that he never really liked you. Hastings never wanted to be close with anyone. It was a struggle for him to open up to even me… I’m selective, too, I guess, but I like to have people I’m close to, even if it’s just one person. I read enough minds to know people are inherently evil, but…”

  “Am I evil?” It sounded more like a challenge than a question.

  Eliana barely suppressed a wince. “You did bully Adara for most of your life…”

  Straightening with dignity, Kiki huffed, “I’m not bullying her now.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Don’t get so technical. I wouldn’t bother with Adara even if she were here. She can have Seth—she can have this whole damn town! I just want one person.”

  Hesitating, Eliana studied the way the other girl glared out at the gymnasium, pointedly avoiding her eyes. When she followed Kiki’s g
aze and found who it was trained on, she exhaled with dejection. “Nero?”

  Kiki’s glossed lips parted, but before she could confirm or deny Eliana’s assumption, the gymnasium’s double doors burst open for the Pixie Twins. They stalked in with a dramatic gait, Nixie’s short pigtails bobbing as she smirked at everyone and Calder’s dark eyes narrowing as he glowered at everything.

  “Stromer’s still in jail,” Calder announced, quieting all conversation and drawing all attention. “The girl running around town was…Ruse Dispus.”

  Eliana sensed his reluctance in divulging that fact, but she couldn’t decipher his thoughts well enough to know why he wouldn’t want to incriminate Ruse. Perhaps it was the glimmer of giddy sadism in Nero’s eyes at the sound of the shapeshifter’s name that provoked Calder’s desire to protect the other boy. Anyone who received such malicious attention from Nero earned Eliana’s pity.

  “Dispus,” Nero growled, cracking his knuckles. “If I find that kid, I’ll pummel him.” After scanning the bleachers, he must have decided that, even if Ruse were here, he would be too well hidden amongst the other students, because instead of weeding through the crowd to find him, Nero clapped his hands and said, “Let’s begin training then, shall we?”

  “I believe we should wait for the Rosses to arrive,” the history teacher, Than, piped up from the edge of the mats, where all the teachers stood. None looked particularly thrilled at the prospect of Nero leading training—nor the fact that their classes had been indefinitely canceled, making them irrelevant.

  “And I believe that I was given authority here,” Nero snapped, causing Than to wither slightly. At his side, Aethelred sighed, but he seemed to think this was inevitable, so he kept his mouth shut as Nero addressed the students. “Most of you have pathetic, incompetent Affinities, like doing math problems and growing plants and ‘seeing the future.’” Kiki expelled an affronted hiccup that Nero didn’t acknowledge. “Since most of your Affinities will be useless in battle with the Wackos, we’re gonna work on a little hand-to-hand combat. That way, when the terrorists outmatch you, at least you’re not crying your way to the grave.” Murmurs of trepidation danced through the audience, at which Nero’s lips spread with wicked glee. “We’ll start with a simple punch.” He jabbed the air with such force that Eliana swore she felt a breeze. “Who wants to help me demonstrate?”

  Unsurprisingly, no one volunteered. Calder looked ready to sacrifice himself just so Nero wouldn’t pick some unfortunate kid out of the crowd when the doors were again thrust open, this time granting access to the new principals and their vice.

  “Well?” William prompted without greeting, his expectant attention fixed on Nero and his posse. The Rosses both appeared calm and composed, but Fraco panted profusely, doubling over to prop his hands on his knees. Based on the state of his brain, some severe nausea was building within him.

  “Stromer’s still in jail,” Nixie droned, picking at her dark painted nails. “Ruse Dispus was the culprit, impersonating her to irk you. Don’t fret; we’ll discipline him later today.”

  The Reggs exchanged a mutually pacifying look before pacing across the mats to join the other faculty. Fraco staggered behind them, woozy and disoriented from sprinting around the campus in search of “Adara.” This whole ordeal would have been hilarious to her, and Eliana wasn’t surprised that, even in jail, Adara Stromer had played some part in wreaking havoc throughout Periculand.

  “I was just calling for volunteers,” Nero informed his masters. “Anyone you wanna see me punch?”

  Artemis’s soulless eyes raked the crowd—probably in search of Tray, Eliana realized with alarm. Who else had been so defiant toward them? Since Eliana had been tasked with keeping the others’ absence unknown, there wasn’t a lot of contemplation before she lifted her hand in the air.

  Calder’s eyes immediately protruded, and even Nero looked nonplussed by this turn of events. Her instinct told her to lower her hand—to retract her hasty sacrifice—but as she stood from her seat, the logic of her decision solidified with even more clarity. This would distract the Reggs, and it would also help her determine if their suspicions were valid. If Artemis had allowed Hastings to die for her cause, wouldn’t it be equally as easy for her to let Nero beat Eliana?

  A petty little part of her was also curious as to how Kiki would react to this: Nero, her obsession, versus Eliana, her roommate and future friend. Eliana didn’t want to have to put her in that situation, but she just had to know if Kiki’s “one person” was Nero or…someone else.

  “Each of you will have to face foes like Nero—perhaps even worse,” Artemis said, her deadpan voice echoing through the gymnasium. “The Wackos won’t show you sympathy because you’re small. I have no qualms with this.”

  Because you’re probably a murderer, Eliana thought as rage coursed through her veins.

  For the first time, Artemis met her eyes, and she had to hide the chill that ran down her spine. “You may join Nero on the mats.”

  Throwing up the toughest mental shield she could conjure, Eliana nodded and then began her descent from the bleachers—just as Kiki snagged the hem of her sweatshirt.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed. “You’re gonna get killed!”

  “At least Nero will still be standing,” Eliana said with much more coldness than she’d intended. Kiki’s face contorted in outrage, but Eliana slipped out of her grasp and jogged down to the floor. It wasn’t until she stood on the mats, only feet from the aggressive brute, that she noticed her roommate had followed.

  “Don’t punch Eliana—punch me,” she demanded, pausing her strides once she was positioned between Nero and Eliana, the latter now too paralyzed with disbelief to interfere. “I want to be punched.”

  Nixie’s eye roll was arguably more intimidating than Nero’s monstrous muscles. “He’s planning to punch you with his fist, not his penis, Belven. You know that, right?”

  “Obviously—”

  “Hey, Kiki!” a smug voice called from behind. Eliana barely had to rotate her head to know it belonged to Kiki’s older sister. Lounging at the top of the bleachers, Orla was impossible to miss with hair that shimmered like polished gold and stunning looks that very few were immune to; even Eliana had a hard time concentrating when Orla was in her line of sight. The condescending manner in which she gazed down at her sister was enough to snap her out of the daze. “Stop making yourself look so pathetic by trying to get with my ex and give up already!”

  “Never thought I’d agree with a Belven, but I think I do,” Nixie said, cocking her head to the side.

  “The only thing I want from your boyfriend is for his fist to collide with my face instead of Eliana’s.” Kiki crossed her arms, holding her ground. “Aethelred! Tell Nero he has to punch me!”

  Across the gymnasium, Aethelred squinted at her. “I’m not typically one to condone violence, Miss Belven. If anything, I think the three Affinity classes should be given different drills to perform. For instance, those with a Mental Affinity should congeal in one corner and practice mentally, rather than physically. Don’t you think this would be more beneficial, Mr. and Mrs. Ross?”

  “Not to offend, Mr. Certior,” William said in a tone Eliana found offensive, “but what use would an Affinity like yours be to a soldier? Would knowing the past of a vicious assailant help you in battle? I’m afraid not. Many of the Mentals are at a severe disadvantage, we’re aware, which is why we think physical combat training is vital.”

  “To put it simply for all you bozos,” Nixie drawled, “you’re gonna have to learn to take a punch. So, let’s begin with these two.”

  Eliana and Kiki both tensed, preparing for a blow from Nero, but then Nixie formed a fist of water. As the liquid coalesced in the air with supernatural beauty, Eliana’s jaw dropped in awe. Her lungs were not equipped for the deluge of water that collided with her body and flooded her open mouth, seeping down her throat.

  The force of the torrent launched her back onto the mat, but
she was too focused on drowning to feel the pain. Hacking up liquid, she flopped onto her side, the beating of her heart so loud that she nearly didn’t hear Nixie say, “That was payback for when you pelted me with rocks on Friday night, Mensen—and for the fact that your little girlfriend is a pain in my ass.”

  Bleary-eyed and dazed, it took Eliana a moment to realize Kiki was “her little girlfriend.” When she sat upright, Nixie’s eyes were alight with the use of her Affinity—and perhaps the violence. The annoyance didn’t settle in Eliana’s core until she noticed both Marduruses were smirking at her.

  You had that coming, Mensen, Calder thought without remorse. Never make yourself vulnerable to my sister or Nero. Now you know you’re in for a shit-ton of hurt if you do.

  Eliana’s lips shifted with animosity, but unfortunately Calder was unable to comprehend any of her hateful nonverbal responses.

  “Get off the mats, Belven”—Nixie nodded toward the bleachers—“before I drench you as well.”

  As if the thought of water ruining her hair and makeup was more terrifying than a punch from Nero, Kiki swiftly scurried to her roommate and hauled her to her feet. Though the gesture was kinder than Eliana would have expected, she did note Kiki was careful not to get too close. She wasn’t sure if it was because she didn’t want to get sopping wet or because the “girlfriend” comment had flustered her.

  “Why would you do that?” Kiki breathed once the two were safely seated on the bleachers again. The Rosses beckoned for other students to file onto the mats, forming a line of quivering kids who would be forced to fight Nero. None of it seemed instructive—or ethical—but as was just proven, there was nothing Eliana could do to stop it.

  “I just…wanted to see how far the Rosses would let it go,” she said, wringing out her hair.

  “They would have let Nero murder you if I hadn’t stepped in!”

  “Which means they would have let Hastings die, too.”

  Kiki blinked, processing the insinuation. “You… You’re sneaky,” she finally said. Even if her inflection hadn’t indicated it, her baffled mind was thoroughly impressed. “But next time you do something like that, you need to ask me first.”