Nerve

by Kirsten Krueger

  “Ah, I see,” Lavisa said, but he barely heard it, for they’d passed the first floor, and the lounge sprawled before them, booming with noise and crowded with students. The diversity of hair colors, all milling and bouncing about, was so jarring to Tray that, at first, he didn’t quite notice what all the students had in common—that nearly every one of them held some kind of alcoholic beverage.

  “This—this is—the Reggs are allowing this?”

  “No,” Lavisa answered, “the Reggs are busy dealing with Adara. Nero’s running this event because—who would’ve guessed—it’s the big brute’s birthday tomorrow.”

  Tray could only gawk as he followed her to the ground floor, immersing them both in the torrent of tipsy teenagers. Many casually relaxed on the couches while others had formed clusters of animated conversation. As Tray studied the whole scene, however, it quickly became clear that Nero’s version of a party wasn’t as lax and easygoing as most people’s. On the far side of the room, the couches had been displaced, making space for what was essentially a drunk version of Nero’s Dominion.

  Currently, the girl with the lethal metal chain was at the center of the ring, wielding it like a lasso. Tray had never personally encountered her, but he remembered how she’d tormented Ackerly at that session of Nero’s Dominion weeks ago, and he was fairly certain her name was Demira. Turquoise eyes alight with bloodlust, she whipped her chain against her opponent’s head, sending him to the ground.

  “That’s the fifth person she’s beaten,” Lavisa muttered to Tray as they wove through the lounge. “Unless I missed someone while I was upstairs.”

  “Have you challenged her? Other than Nero, you probably have the highest probability of defeating her,” Tray said as he wiggled through a few tightly packed students.

  “True, but Nero’s forcing anyone who fights to take a shot of vodka first and I’m not interested.”

  “You don’t drink?” Tray asked before tripping over someone’s foot and colliding into her back. When she turned around, he knew it was more than agitation in those cold, yellow eyes.

  “No,” was all she said. The intensity demanded explanation, but then his attention caught onto a sight near the wall to his left: a hole in the floor, from which half of Calder Mardurus’s body poked out as he drug boxes into its depths.

  Tray would have changed his course to confront the boy if he and Lavisa hadn’t reached their friends. It was hard to call them his friends, though, considering the group consisted of Seth, his brother, Ackerly, his roommate, and Ashna, Naira, and Cath, practically strangers.

  Perched against the wall near the glass doors, far enough from the brawls to evade Nero’s attention, Seth narrated a dramatic story to the others, his hand motions sloppy and uncoordinated. Tray had never been a fan of drunk Seth, and seeing his twin now, captivating an audience and receiving grins of appreciation, stirred that ancient bitterness in him—the same feeling of jealousy toward his brother that had probably imbued his strength Affinity after years of its lingering presence.

  “…dunno how he didn’t realize what she was doing.” Seth took a theatrical swig of his beer, careening slightly toward Naira, who lounged on his left. “First Adara locks him in the closet and convinces him to pee in a cup, and then ten minutes after releasing him, she happens to give him a drink that looks like piss? Uncle Rob is stupid with a capital SSST, let me tell you.”

  The rest of the group chortled, Naira’s guffaws the loudest as she gripped Seth’s shoulder for support. None of them even noticed when Tray and Lavisa stepped behind Ackerly.

  “I wasn’t aware that ‘st’ was one letter now.”

  Seth blinked twice and then slowly fixed his glossy eyes on his twin. “Oh, hey, bro. Didn’t think you’d come down here for this. Doesn’t seem like your type-a deal.”

  “It isn’t,” Tray confirmed flatly, eyeing their drinks with distaste. Ackerly was the only one who appeared to be empty-handed, though Cath, who held a cup in either hand, seemed to be distributing them to students rather than consuming the alcohol herself.

  “And yet you seem like the one who needs to be inebriated most out of all of us,” Naira sang, swirling her cup around tantalizingly. She propped her elbow on Seth’s shoulder, the position lifting her shirt enough to expose a sliver of her stomach. Flustered by the sight, Tray hastily met her peachy eyes, and her eyebrows jumped in response. “Cath, give him a beer. Or, better yet, why don’t we get our man Ackerly here to grow us some cannabis?”

  The innocent boy stiffened at the request.

  “Ignore her,” Ashna advised with an eye roll. Like Ackerly, she still wore her green cargo pants—or rather, Adara’s green cargo pants—and her vibrant hair was contained in a braid that merged all of the various colors in a mesmerizing way. “She asks me to grow weed for her all the time.”

  “Yeah, but you refuse since you don’t want to try expanding your flower Affinity to all plants,” Naira said before sipping on more of her drink. With her casual tone, Tray almost didn’t catch the connotation. When he did, his eyes narrowed, but he didn’t have time to open his mouth before Hartman appeared beside Lavisa, orange eyes drooping and freckles vibrating at a subdued rate.

  “Mmmore?” he hummed, extending his empty cup toward Ashna. Lavisa’s jaw was tight with that same rancor she’d expressed earlier, but Tray’s jaw had fallen slack at the sight of Ashna hovering her finger above Hartman’s cup and then, somehow, spouting alcohol from her flesh.

  “What the—you just—you—you have—no—”

  “I think your robot brother is malfunctioning,” Naira observed, retrieving a drink from Cath and handing it to Tray. “Relax, temperamental twin.”

  “No—no—this is—Ackerly,” Tray finally hissed, unable to organize his thoughts with everyone’s eyes trained on him. “We need to talk about this! She has more than one Affinity—”

  “I…know,” Ackerly admitted with a wince. He peeked over at Ashna, as if for permission, and she nodded, avoiding Tray’s incredulous gaze. “She has…infinite Affinities. We didn’t want to tell you because we knew you would react…well, like this.”

  “She—has—” Tray ran a hand through his hair as he turned away from them. Ackerly was unfazed by this knowledge, still infatuated with this deceptive girl, but Tray’s mind sifted through the disastrous implications. This girl—this Wacko, mostly likely—had infinite Affinities. She had the ability to do anything that anyone in this room could do and she worked for the terrorists. This multiplied the direness of their situation by…infinity.

  “I didn’t want to lie to you, Tray,” Ashna’s soft voice sounded from behind him, “but you can see how my Affinity makes me…a target.”

  “Why, then, have you exposed yourself to half of Periculand?” he growled, his body still aimed away from them.

  “No one here knew what my Affinity was before—I didn’t announce it. Now they all think that I can only produce alcohol, and I wouldn’t have made that known had Nero not threatened Ackerly.”

  Spinning around, Tray met her eyes and saw the honesty in them. He’d never been particularly skilled at decoding human emotions, but he was intelligent enough to detect a lie—most of the time. Still, he didn’t fully trust her, certainly not enough to question her further and divulge the knowledge they possessed.

  “Fine,” he said through a sigh of defeat. “Show me your Affinities, then.”

  “A-all of them?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Show him how you can’t get drunk, Ash,” Naira encouraged.

  “Well, I can, but it only lasts for ten minutes at a—”

  Tray’s yelp interrupted Ashna’s retort. He didn’t typically react so pitifully, but the sudden drenching of his back had caught him completely off guard. With the suit on beneath his sweater, the liquid hadn’t seeped through to his skin, but the impact of the water had startled him. Peeking over his shoulder, he found his backside soaked and, as expected, Calder approaching.

 
Tray scoffed at his sopping wet clothes. “Was that necessary?”

  “I’m not sure why you’re asking me,” Calder said, appraising the whole group with guileful eyes. “Little Corvis was the one who dumped his beer on you.”

  “What do you—” But then he followed Calder’s gaze to where Hartman teleported around the room in rapid succession, stealing drinks from Cath and pouring the liquid on random students, causing mayhem that Nero was sure to notice.

  “I told him to spark a bit of a distraction so we can discuss tomorrow’s trial.” Scrunching his nose at the others, Calder added, “Privately.”

  “Why bother with the secrecy?” Lavisa questioned. “You know Tray’ll tell us what’s going on as soon as your little discussion is over.”

  The secondary tilted his head mockingly. “Do I know that, Dispus?”

  She shot a disbelieving scowl toward Tray, but all he did was give her a tight-lipped nod before saying, “I’ll be back.”

  Seth didn’t seem perturbed by this; he and Naira continued giggling to themselves, drinking as if the fate of this town wouldn’t be determined in a matter of hours. Lavisa and Ackerly stared after him, though, the former with suspicion and the latter with curiosity—and then Ashna watched him with a combination of both. Tray wondered, as he wove through the lounge with Calder, if she had the ability to read his mind.

  Hartman’s little distraction had proven successful; the brawls on the far side of the lounge had broken up, now replaced with an even more entertaining show of Nero chasing his stepbrother around the circular room. The birthday boy was clearly already intoxicated, his movements disoriented and clumsy as he pushed through people and staggered into inanimate objects.

  In all the commotion, Tray almost didn’t see Kiki Belven sprawled on one of the couches, batting her eyelashes at Hartman’s roommate, Carrick, as he massaged her bare feet. Was that who Kiki and Eliana fought over? Carrick, in Tray’s eyes, had never proven to have much of a personality; he was like a brick, as Adara had dubbed him. Tray’s…feelings for Eliana really were obsolete, but it still irritated him to think he was so oblivious that he hadn’t noticed the two girls fall for this blob of a boy.

  Calder guided Tray until they’d reached a more secluded section of the lounge. A multitude of students concealed the collection of couches, but they were all too preoccupied by Nero’s chase to care when the boys joined two others for this private discussion.

  “Tray Stark, though burdened with emotions he cannot comprehend and problems he cannot solve, has not succumbed to the temptations of alcohol like so many of his mindless peers. Instead, he continues on with a clear mind, refusing to haze his thoughts, even if a lower level of cognition might ameliorate his stress,” said the boy seated on the bright blue couch against the wall, his voice suave and serene. Tray had never personally interacted with him, but he knew him to be Calder’s roommate, Colton, the boy who could see this “Otherworld.” Everything from the way he sat so perfectly straight to the crazed gleam in his evergreen eyes pointed to his insanity, yet…his speech had been entrancing, and his words had been eerily valid.

  “Despite this,” Colton went on, “he has not denied himself the pleasure of being externally doused in the substance that would internally soothe him—”

  “Don’t screw with him, Col,” Calder chided as he approached the red couch adjacent to his roommate’s. “You know better than anyone that Corvis dumped beer on—”

  “Don’t sit there,” a girlish voice said. Tracing it, Tray finally trained his vision on the second unfamiliar person, who wasn’t so unfamiliar at all. How he hadn’t noticed her before was beyond him, but on the green couch lounged the girl who should have been in jail—the girl whose trial they were about to discuss.

  Though she shared Adara’s dark hair and impish demeanor, she was very plainly not Adara Stromer. Tray pinpointed about thirty-seven minute details that gave it away—from the too-short length of her hair to the too-long length of her nails to the fact that her face was almost…slightly…appealing. That almost-prettiness alone solidified the result of his assessment, deeming her—or him—as Ruse Dispus.

  “Join me, Pixie Prince,” he purred, imitating Adara as he caressed the empty cushion beside him. “I’ve warmed it for you.”

  “Can you stop pretending to be Stromer, please?” Plopping down on his own couch, Calder glanced around warily. “You’re gonna attract attention.”

  “If you know me at all, you know I don’t view attention as a negative thing,” Ruse retorted, but he heeded the command, his hair shortening, his limbs lengthening, his muscles broadening.

  Tray had seen the shapeshifter undergo these transformations with swiftness, but right now he took his time—probably to irk Calder. There was definitely a hint of impatience in his posture when Tray turned to him and asked, “Can you dry me before I sit?”

  Calder’s lips curled as he examined the beer coating Tray’s back. “Do I have an Affinity for alcohol, Stark? No. So, no.”

  Huffing a sigh, Tray slumped onto his own yellow couch and appreciated the suit he wore. The liquid, which he assumed was cold and sticky, didn’t have any affect on his skin—although, he didn’t doubt it would probably ruin his clothes. He couldn’t afford to buy a new favorite sweater and jeans, not since he had to pay for food, not since his parents were missing—

  “Tray Stark worries for his parents,” Colton narrated, jolting Tray with the mention of his name.

  Cheeks heating, he avoided the other boys’ stares. “Don’t—say that.”

  “His parents have consumed his thoughts, the question of their safety eclipsing all other concerns—”

  “Stark,” Calder snapped, his voice nearly drowned out by a wave of clapping and cheering directed at whatever the Corvises were doing. “Focus. We have more important things to worry about.”

  “There is nothing in this world that is more important to Tray than his parents, and since their safety is unknown to him—”

  “You know, don’t you? Just tell him they’re safe and let’s move on, hm?”

  “You always ask me to lie, Calder,” Colton said, giving his roommate a quizzical look. “I don’t like to lie.”

  “Wait.” Tray leaned forward, mouth slightly ajar. “Are you saying…that my parents aren’t safe?”

  “It would be a lie if I said they were,” Colton confirmed, sending Tray into a frenzy. Until now this Otherworld had seemed nonsense, but in the past few minutes this boy had managed to read all of his thoughts with absolute clarity.

  “No—they can’t—Tell me where they are.”

  “I will tell you, but you will not rejoice—”

  “Enough.” Throwing his hands up to either side, Calder formed two identical orbs of water. In his frazzled state, it took Tray a moment to process that one was around Colton’s mouth and the other was around his own. Grudgingly, he kept his lips clamped shut and seethed inwardly as Calder seethed outwardly.

  “Huh,” Ruse mused, his light brown eyes darting between the two silenced boys. Thankfully, he’d nearly completed assuming a new body, and this one was male, with muscular arms, a stern face, and plain brown hair, almost as if…he’d decided to become Tray. Even though he had a twin, watching this kid’s perky attitude emit from his body was disturbing, but there was no way to react that wouldn’t result in drowning.

  “For once,” the shapeshifter continued with a self-satisfied expression that Tray had never seen on his own face, “I’m not the one you’re telling to shut—”

  Snapping his fingers, Calder summoned a third sphere of water that congealed around Ruse’s mouth, causing him to cough and choke. Then, unfazed, he glanced around at the three of them. “I have no interest in spending more time with any of you than I have to—except you,” he added to Colton, who nodded in understanding. “Periculy and Stromer’s trial is happening tomorrow morning, and tonight…the Rosses are going to plaster the cafeteria’s walls with Angor propaganda—”

  Tray
raised his hand, relishing in the movement he’d been deprived of performing for the past month. With an eye roll, Calder removed the water inhibiting his mouth, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Why?”

  “Because, as a way to ensure you don’t show up at the trial, they’re gonna frame you and your friends for vandalizing the cafeteria, and then you’ll receive a full day of detention, monitored by Fraco—”

  “I think I can take Fraco, thanks,” Tray grunted, wiping water from his chin.

  “Fraco won’t be the problem. The problem will be that they plan to lock you in the Mentals basement—chained to chairs.” Calder flashed a grin that made Tray question their alliance. “Apparently you primies are a real threat to them. Anyway, you know if you try to hide or avoid the punishment, they’ll end up postponing the trial until they can ensure you won’t be there. So you’ll need to get caught, and you’ll need to pretend you know nothing about—”

  “I can’t just let Adara go to trial without us! I need to defend her!”

  Calder’s blue eyes glinted like a deadly river. “Do you, Stark?”

  “I—just mean—that she shouldn’t go to federal prison—and since I’ve deduced that Angor must be innocent, we need him to take his position back.”

  “Hm, yes,” Calder said, still eyeing him with skepticism. “I agree. Which is why you will be at the trial. Dispus here is going to disguise himself as you”—Ruse waved merrily, as if Tray didn’t know who he was—“and then he’ll get caught and chained by the Reggs while you sneak into the courthouse with evidence.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Well, Colton, for one.” Calder pointed toward his roommate, evaporating the water from his face.

  “The Otherworld has revealed all truths to me,” Colton explained, “and though my tongue is tied for now, I believe the intensity of the trial will be the perfect climactic point for me to finally divulge all.”

  “No one’s going to believe your freaky friend,” Tray said flatly.

  “I know.” The devilish smirk spreading on Calder’s lip, reminiscent of Adara, made Tray cringe. “Which is why I also have something a little more concrete in mind: Angor’s file.”