Poisoned Garden

by Tracy Korn

  "Oh my god," I whispered, closing my eyes and turning into his shoulder.

  Leo chuckled. "Hold on."

  The next thing I felt was a whoosh of air, and then we were still. We were on the ground, at least it seemed we were. He released me, and I slowly opened my eyes to find him pulling his shirt from his pocket. His wings were gone.

  "What just happened?" I said, afraid to move. His perfect, white smile peeled through the dim light as he put his shirt back on. "How did you do that?"

  "Well, I've had a little more practice than you, Halsey," he said, arching a dark eyebrow.

  "But your wings weren't like mine…" I trailed off, not even totally sure I hadn't somehow hallucinated mine, and I definitely wasn't sure how to describe his. I shook my head, opting for the obvious. "There were, um, no feathers."

  He shook his head in agreement, letting his gaze sweep the ground for a second. "I'm a Salamander Elemental…fire," he said, meeting my eyes again. "My physical shift is a dragon."

  Chapter 14

  "A dragon? They don't exist," I said flatly, though I didn't know why I wouldn't believe him. I'd just seen his wings with my own eyes.

  "A lot of things aren't supposed to exist," he replied with the ghost of a grin. "That doesn't mean they don't."

  We walked a few more steps before stopping at a huge, white-brick estate house, this one, two stories high with rows of long, narrow windows on each level.

  "This can't be my dorm building," I said in disbelief.

  Leo winked at me. "Don't worry. You'll move to a bigger one next year."

  I smiled, but the insanity of everything that just happened the last hour prevented me from sharing his levity.

  I glanced at the enormous house again, then back to him and shook my head. "Look, I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but I'm still not totally convinced all this isn't the result of major hallucinogenics in my system."

  "I felt the same way," Leo said as we started walking toward the iron-framed door. "After my welcome dinner, I tried to queue home just like you did in the bathroom, even though Sylvie told me it wouldn't work—she was my mentor since there weren't really any upperclassmen then."

  "What finally convinced you?"

  "Meeting my roommate and hearing that he felt the same way—then hearing about his shift," Leo said, glancing at me. "It was a relief to know someone else had been going through the same weird stuff the week before arriving too, not to mention everything with the Hurricane berries." He stopped in front of the door and leaned against the frame, meeting my eyes with another slow smile and a shrug. "It helped not to feel alone." I didn't know what it was about the way he looked at me—like he was looking for something—but I couldn't think of anything to say in reply while I tried to figure it out. He sucked in a sudden breath after another few seconds and pushed a hand into his jeans pocket. "Which is why it's time to meet your roommate," he added, handing me a key. "Go ahead, that's your copy."

  I turned the key in the door and pushed it open. Inside, the foyer was dimly lit and more modestly furnished than the main house where I imagined Uri must have lived. Two staircases wound down from the open second floor, which was lined with doors that seemed to wrap around to the back of the house.

  "Are those the dorm rooms?" I asked, immediately feeling stupid because what else could they be?

  "Most of them," Leo answered, leading us toward the polished wooden staircase on the left. "There are more on the main level in the East wing. The kitchen and library are in the West wing."

  "How many people live here?" I asked just as two girls came out of a room and nearly ran into us.

  One of them looked me up and down, raising an eyebrow at my hair. "You a unicorn shifter or something?" she asked, but she and her friend didn't slow down long enough for me to volley a comeback, even if I'd had one.

  I did, however, risk a glance at Leo to see if there were such things as unicorn shifters, but he'd already closed his eyes in a long blink. I was admittedly a little disappointed.

  "Magical mean girls—awesome," I said with a nod.

  "That would be Anya. She arrived a few weeks ago." Leo shook his head. "And she wasn't nearly as mouthy when her skin hardened and her tail was flapping all over the dining room floor."

  I gaped at him. "What?"

  "They're both Water Fae Elementals—Undines." he said with a nod to the pair as they left the house. The confusion I felt must have registered on my face, because the corners of his mouth pulled up when he leaned a little closer and whispered. "Mermaids."

  I stared at him blankly for a few seconds, not quite sure if he was joking or not. He didn't say anything else about it, though, and I was honestly starting to feel too exhausted to ask.

  "Of course. Mermaids. Why not?" I managed, nodding a few times before following Leo to a door with a bronze number seven fixed to the wall. There was no answer when he knocked, so he fished another key from his pocket and handed it to me. I didn't have a chance to put it in the lock before a girl with red hair came bounding up the stairs, dropping flowers from the enormous bundle in her arms. She backtracked a few steps to try to pick them up, but only wound up dropping more.

  "I'll get those," Leo said, chuckling as he darted halfway down the steps to pick up the flowers that had fallen.

  "Thanks. Hi. Sorry. Sorry I'm late," the girl said, her long red hair falling into her eyes. She tried to blow it clear, but somehow just managed to make more strands fall forward in the process. "Hold these, Leo. Um, please and thank you." She shoved the bundle of flowers into his arms and in the span of about five seconds, she twisted the length of her hair until it looked like rope, then wrapped it into a bun and pulled it into a knot. She picked up the flowers that had fallen, and grabbed the rest from Leo as she made her way up the stairs to me. I was out of breath just watching all that.

  "Halsey, this is Alita," Leo called up to us. "Your roommate."

  Alita pushed the flowers into my arms this time, but tucked in the ones that were falling out. "Oh! These are for you," she said. "They sing. Not right now because they need water, but after that they'll sing, and I thought you'd like that because I would have liked that when I got here, but I didn't have a roommate yet who already knew about them," she rambled. "So, I got them. Oh, we can go in. Thanks, Leo. Bye!" Alita added as she pulled a key out of her pocket and quickly opened the door. I glanced down at Leo, whose dark brows were arched in surprise, his wide, brilliant smile beaming up at the door Alita had just disappeared through.

  "Looks like you'll be in good hands now," he said, meeting my eyes one more time before he turned to go back down the steps.

  "Wait!" I called down to him. He looked back at me over his shoulder expectantly, and my mouth suddenly went dry. "Thanks," I said, more quietly than I had intended.

  He nodded and bowed just a little before taking another few steps, swiping up the last one of Alita's fallen flowers and smelling it as he made his way out the door.

  ***

  I followed Alita into the room and closed the door behind me with my foot. The space was bigger than I expected it to be with a small, round table, four chairs, and two full beds, one on each side of the room. A side table and an old fashioned lamp sat along the wall next to each bed, the light filtering through the lampshades filling the room with an orange glow. The embroidered quilts on the beds looked thin, but I imagined it didn't get too cold here, and the stacked, white pillows nearly did me in. One look at them and I was overcome with exhaustion, despite the nonstop adrenaline rush since the helicopter landed. Or, maybe because of it.

  "Here you go," Alita said, coming back into the room with a big, clear vase, which she set down on the small table.

  "We have our own bathroom?" I asked, assuming that's where the water came from.

  "Kind of?" she said, scrunching up her face like she wasn't quite sure. "It connects to the room across from us, but we can lock the doors, or they can, it just depends who gets in there first," she explained with
out taking a breath. "Here, put those in the water and listen."

  She helped me put the flowers in the vase, and to my amazement, different sounds started filling the air like voices. I stepped back, surprised, because once all the flowers were in the water, it really did sound like an actual chorus singing in wordless harmony.

  "How is that possible?" I asked, fascinated as I studied the strange shapes and colors—tubular yellow flowers with magenta rings around the edges, and smaller, teardrop shaped flowers that were the same color as a cloudless sky. "Do all the flowers sing on this island?"

  "I don't know. But if so, they only do it when you pick them," Alita said, nearly vibrating with energy until she suddenly sobered. "But don't go picking stuff, especially to eat. Nothing that's just growing on a bush or something, whatever you do. Like, not even one berry out there."

  "Why?"

  "Because anything you eat that's not from the dining hall will make you shift into whatever you are, and you won't be able to ask for help because nobody can talk when they're shifted, and if you're a mermaid, then you're really in trouble because you can't walk, and—oh, hey, what are you?" Alita asked, stopping her barrage of words abruptly, as if the thought just occurred to her.

  I shook my head to clear the dizzy feeling listening to her gave me. "Uh, an eagle, I think?" I answered, feeling ridiculous for even thinking it at all, let alone saying it out loud.

  "Oooh," Alita said in a low, secret way that made me think an eagle was either really good or really bad.

  "So, this is actually real?" I asked." It's not a hallucination, like from drugs they gave us?"

  She laughed under her breath, the sound reminding me of tinkling shells. "I thought that too after they gave me those berries and I turned into a fox. A fox! And a week before I even knew about Eden's Bluff, I started growing a tail. At least, that's what I saw. After a few minutes, it was gone. I thought I'd imagined it."

  "That's exactly what happened to me. I thought my hands had turned into feathers." I said, relieved, then explained the unnatural speed and lung capacity I also experienced, the strange screeching sounds…and how I thought maybe I'd become Feral after Lauren had bitten me.

  Alita's green eyes widened. "I was sure for like, an entire day I'd somehow contracted Red Fever too, but I hadn't been bitten or anything. Those things couldn't get behind The Citadel wall—did they not guard your wall?" she asked, but didn't stop talking long enough for me to answer. "Ours is guarded by live patrols, Tub droids, and an electric field, so it's not like anyone from The Swamp could have even come in and infect everyone. "She wrinkled her nose on the last sentence, and the blood in my veins suddenly felt like it dropped several degrees.

  The Swamp. The Grind. It didn't make any difference, and the relief I'd felt just a second ago knowing she'd experienced nearly the same thing I had vanished, replaced by something hollow. Something angry.

  We'd may have both left our cities, our worlds, our whole way of life. But The Wall had come with us.

  Chapter 15

  I'd minimized any further conversation with Alita last night by telling her I was tired from traveling all day and just wanted to take a shower, then go to sleep. Fortunately, it worked, and my biggest problem for the rest of the night was trying to decide if I could use the water from the sink as I brushed my teeth, or if it would give me a beak or something.

  This morning was another story.

  I found my bag and pulled out a bra and a pair of underwear, happy I'd brought them despite being told not to pack a bunch of stuff because there were no replacements here. Apparently everyone just went commando? I put on one of the white shirts in what was apparently my closet, as well as a black skort. It was definitely not my intention to look like I was a runaway server from a wedding, but these were my only options. Ten white shirts, ten black skorts. Who even wore skorts anymore?

  Resigned that what I looked like today was not going to be high on my priority list, I pushed a hand through my still purple hair to keep it from falling in my face. For half-a-second I wished it were long like Alita's so I could just put it all in a braid and be done with it. I settled for pulling it back into a stubby ponytail and anxiously tapped open my queue when I heard the internal ping.

  My excitement crashed and died a fiery death when I saw the message wasn't from Max. Uri had sent instructions for anyone who had arrived on the island within the last month to report to the dining hall for breakfast, and then go somewhere called The Eastern Arena an hour later. Fortunately, he included a mapping widget, and I blinked twice to start the download.

  I wondered briefly if there were any students here who didn't have an ocular communication lens, and if not, how they were supposed to find where to go.

  Alita gasped, startling me out of my pondering. "We're meeting in an arena?" she said, nearly breathless. "Nobody said anything about fighting in my welcome letter," she added, blinking away what was evidently her internal queue screen.

  "They still haven't said anything about fighting," I reminded her. "Maybe there are just a lot of seats there. It says everyone who arrived within the last month needs to come, right?"

  Alita's expression started to relax, then abruptly changed to wide-eyed excitement. "Wait until you try the waffles here," she said, not moving a muscle from the frozen state of bliss she'd adopted upon remembering that island waffles were a thing in this world.

  Turn left in ten feet, the map widget said in my ear, making me nearly jump out of my skin since I'd forgotten about the download. I turned it off abruptly and just followed Alita to the dining hall, which she swore was just up ahead.

  The island in the daylight was more like a living painting than anything else. The colors of all the plants were more saturated than normal plants, and the grass was thick and plush like expensive carpet. The manicured paths weren't bare dirt like the one back in the woods in The Grind. The one we were taking was covered in dense moss, which was a few shades lighter green than the grass. Every step felt springy under my feet, and I couldn't resist taking my shoes off just to feel it on my skin.

  It felt like walking on carpet, at least, what I imagined walking on carpet would feel like. Living in the woods, floors were far less expensive to maintain, so that's what we had.

  "What are you doing?" Alita said over her shoulder. She chuckled, but her bold, red eyebrows darted together in a look of judgement I knew well.

  "It could be carpet," I answered, then remembered she was from the interior in Florida, and carpet was probably everywhere inside their Citadel wall. She would have no idea what this feeling was like.

  She shrugged and turned around again just as a flock of huge, multicolored birds with long, white tails few overhead. I watched them glide gracefully across the sky until they disappeared over the treetops.

  "Halsey, what are you doing?" Alita called to me, and to my surprise she was several yards ahead. I jogged to catch up to her, still surprised by how fast I could move now.

  "Did you see those birds?" I asked. "The flock of colorful ones with the long tails?"

  "They're seniors," she said matter-of-factly. I squinted at her. "No, really. Their physical shifts are birds of paradise. They fly overhead everyday to get to the dining hall."

  She turned down another path, which was covered in cobblestone instead of moss, so I put my shoes back on and tried to make my brain accept the fact that those were people flying above me a few seconds ago. I remembered the feeling of the wings on my back from last night, heavy and cumbersome, and I had no idea how they could ever be used for flying. Wait, could I actually fly? I thought, feeling a little stupid that this hadn't occurred to me already.

  A few minutes later we came upon a building that must have been the dining hall. It was simply structured, but not industrial looking at all. Instead of the cement and steel I was expecting, this building was made of whitewash brick like my dorm house with a terra-cotta roof.

  Inside, normal looking students filtered through various lines
, some featuring buffet bars and others with attendants dishing out selections. I scanned all the different bays in the vicinity of the foyer. They had every fruit I'd ever seen and several I never had, like bananas that were about as big as my thumb with vertical purple stripes.

  "We don't have a card or anything. How do we pay?" I asked Alita, who was already a few steps ahead of me surveying our choices.

  "You don't," she answered. "Just pick out what you want and sit down with it."

  I couldn't do anything but blink at her for a few seconds. I knew my scholarship came with room and board, but I wasn't accustomed to anything being free. Ever. So I was surprised all over again. Apparently, everyone who was here also must have received a full-ride scholarship because Alita was right. There were no pay stations anywhere to be found.

  The fruits and vegetables in the fresh bar I walked up to were mostly familiar, but they were much larger and much more richly colored than the ones I'd seen at Mr. Burke's grocery. The strawberries were the size of plums, and the plums were the size of oranges. I spooned a scoop of mixed fruit into a little bowl, nearly spilling it when Alita almost ran into me with her plate full of thick, blue waffles covered in what looked like strawberry pieces and whipped cream.

  "These are not from Earth. I'm telling you," she said, completely straight-faced.