The Marked

by Inara Scott

  My shoulders sagged. My feet were on fire, the cuts on my legs were screaming for relief, and my skin throbbed with heat. Mr. Fritz was right. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t fight them both. Suddenly, I could barely summon the strength to keep standing, let alone keep fighting.

  I lowered my eyes, ashamed of what I was about to do. I pictured myself falling to my knees, surrendering. As I studied the ground, I saw my sweatshirt next to me, a limp gray mass balled up next to my feet. I recalled the defiant way I’d dropped it, my brief moment of confidence before this had all begun.

  Confidence.

  It’s all mental…

  A voice reverberated in my head. I clung to it, closing my eyes so I could focus on the low echo it left behind. It’s all mental—what did that mean? Where had I heard that before? The heat and the stinging in my legs brought a fresh wave of dizziness. My thoughts blurred and faded in and out. Then it came to me. The pen. I pictured the pen I’d dropped on my first day in class with Mr. Fritz, and fury slowly replaced the despair that had almost sent me to my knees.

  Mr. Fritz had used that pen to trick me into believing I couldn’t use my talents.

  He’d used my mind against me.

  “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?” I stared at him, wide-eyed. “Making me believe I can’t win.”

  A small army of brambles hit my feet and snaked up my calf. Sharp needles poked my bare skin in hundreds of places. They were moving fast, coiling around my shin and starting up my knee. Mr. Anderson had taken advantage of my distraction to throw everything he had at me.

  Mr. Fritz held a hand over his chest in an expression of pseudosincerity. “I’m looking out for you, Dancia. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “The hell you don’t!” I spat, anger burning my throat as surely as the fire that Barrett had sent licking through my body. I’d been fooled by Mr. Fritz before. I was not going to let him take advantage of me again.

  What I wanted was to pick Mr. Anderson and Barrett up like rag dolls and throw them on the ground, but I didn’t actually want them to die. It was clear, though, that I needed to try something new. I focused my attention on the plants Mr. Anderson was using against me and, my whole body shaking with the effort, compressed the soil with the force of gravity that reached up from below. I spun in a slow circle, holding in my mind all that I saw and focusing on the things I couldn’t see—the darkness and energy pulsing below the surface of the earth.

  As I watched, the ground actually sank—first six inches, then eight, then a foot. Mr. Anderson stumbled back as I rose above him. The earth fell away, the plants and soil becoming compacted in a thick black stripe. The vines around my leg tightened, then slackened, becoming limp and flat in my hand. I reached down and ripped a handful off, ignoring the bloody scrapes they left behind. All around the clearing, the plants shuddered and fell flat.

  I’d created a dead zone. The power of the earth’s core had turned the soil into rock.

  The sudden change in the level of the ground sent my attackers reeling. Mr. Fritz wobbled and lost his balance, dropping to his knees. Mr. Anderson waved his arms, fell heavily on his rear end, then slowly pushed himself up to a standing position. Barrett, who was still on the ground from the last time I’d dropped him on his back, rolled over in a half somersault before pushing himself into a cross-legged position.

  He placed his hands on his knees. “You don’t want to fight me, Dancia. You know I’ve been holding back. You’re scared—and if you aren’t, you should be.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who should be scared,” I snarled. By this point I’d lost any interest in moderation. I pulled down a young maple tree a few feet behind him. It crashed between two Douglas firs, ripping down branches as it fell. This was a risky move. I didn’t know exactly how the tree would fall, but I no longer cared. Barrett’s voice was cutting right through to my soul. These people I trusted and depended on had turned on me, and the sting of betrayal was as strong as the heat coursing through my legs.

  Barrett blinked, and tiny flames licked the front of my shoes, melting the soles and blackening the leather.

  “Give up, Dancia,” he said calmly. “You’re still a child. You can’t control yourself.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. He was right, of course, and that only made it worse. A shower of branches fell from the trees around us. I hadn’t even realized I’d touched them, but they fell straight down like spears, thrusting into the soil in loose circles around Mr. Anderson, Mr. Fritz, and then Barrett himself. He ducked, pushing aside evergreen boughs and maple branches as they landed on him, wincing when they jabbed his skin.

  He held out his hand with the palm facing toward me, and pain shot through me. I staggered back as my clothing started to hiss and smoke. Thus far, Barrett had been saving me from serious injury, but as we ratcheted up the violence, things would change. A rhododendron jerked unevenly and flew into the air, spinning with increasing speed, showering us with flying soil and rocks. Clumps of moss and decaying plants rose and fell in dizzying profusion.

  “Dancia, what are you doing?” Mr. Fritz shouted, covering his face and crouching down.

  “I’m fighting. Just like you wanted.” I tried to think, to clear my mind the way Barrett had taught me, but it was too full. The debris of scattered thoughts, confusion, and anger had turned into mountains, filling my head with demands for attention. The pain wanted me; the black lines and forces wanted me. Mr. Fritz was yelling, and Barrett was smirking. Suddenly I was desperate for it all to be silent, for the earth to return to normal and the branches to stop raining from the trees. But I was no longer in control. The forces around me had been sent into chaos. I heard a massive sound, a ripping and tearing, and realized I had somehow knocked loose the trunk of one of the old fir trees that ringed the clearing. It must have been a hundred feet tall, and it was swaying like a stalk of grass in the wind.

  I tried to use what power I had left to stabilize it, to push it up while the instability threatened to drag it down. But I was out of juice. The pain Barrett and Mr. Anderson had inflicted, and the effort of using my talent for so long, had left me exhausted. The crown of the tree dipped lower, and the branches knocked against the trunk of a nearby oak. I pushed against it, crying out in exhaustion when nothing happened. I struggled to stay on my feet, unsure how to keep the black lines that held me upright stable and in balance.

  “Dancia, stop!” Mr. Fritz yelled, but I was too far gone.

  The last thing I remembered was Mr. Anderson yelling at me to run and the sound of crashing branches.

  WHEN I came to, I was lying on the ground. I opened my eyes slowly and saw Mr. Fritz anxiously patting my cheeks.

  “Oh, thank goodness. Are you all right? Do you feel dizzy? Can you tell me the day of the week? The year?”

  “I think you’re supposed to ask the questions one at a time, Mr. Fritz,” I said sourly, pushing myself to a seated position. My muscles screamed, as if I’d just finished a marathon, and my skin was tight and warm. I held out my hands and saw that they still glowed faintly pink. My shoes were a total loss, the soles unrecognizable, but my clothes were still intact, just slightly singed.

  “She’s fine,” Mr. Anderson barked. He bent over me, his bulk blocking out the light. “You are fine, aren’t you?”

  “How the heck should I know?” I assessed the damage to the clearing. An oak tree lay on the ground, fresh dirt falling in clumps from the roots. Branches littered the ground, a number of them embedded in it like stakes. There were three rough circles of sticks surrounding the spaces where Mr. Fritz, Mr. Anderson, and Barrett had been, and a line of rock edged the clearing.

  The giant fir tree, however, still stood.

  Mr. Anderson said gruffly, “I grew the roots as fast as I could. That gave it a little extra stability. You hadn’t knocked it over, just loosened it.”

  I placed my hands on my knees and pushed my weight onto my feet. A second later, I teetered to one side. A pair of hands steadied me
from behind.

  “I should get David,” Mr. Anderson said.

  “She’s exhausted, not sick,” Barrett replied, over my head.

  Mr. Anderson wiped his forehead, leaving behind a smear of dirt. “How can you say that? Did you see her legs?”

  “Her legs aren’t the problem. This took everything she had. Besides, David needs energy to heal, and she’s got nothing left.”

  He was right. Though I wanted to run away and never look into their faces again, it was all I could do not to collapse into Barrett’s arms.

  “D., sit back down. You need to get up your strength before you go anywhere.”

  I tried to shake him off, my voice trembling. “Let me be. You don’t care about me anyway. You enjoyed that.”

  Barrett released my arms, but then my knees buckled. He caught my limp body and lowered me to the ground. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I had to act like that so you’d take it seriously. If you didn’t believe I would hurt you, you wouldn’t have fought back so hard.”

  I tucked my knees into my chest and began to rock back and forth, fighting the thickness in my throat. Things had changed in an instant. People I thought were my friends had hurt me; the Program I thought would teach me control had sent me reeling into total chaos. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I said hoarsely. “I was supposed to join the Program and then everything would make sense.”

  Barrett touched my shoulder. “That’s never going to happen. It’s only going to get more complicated. I wish I could tell you something different, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  I slumped, my shoulders shaking with the effort of maintaining my fragile control.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I heard Mr. Anderson whisper over the top of my head.

  “She’s fine,” Barrett said to him. “She’s just got a lot to work through.”

  The quiet concern in their voices sent me over the edge. I buried my face in my knees and soaked my skirt with my tears. Barrett gently patted my back. Frustrated sobs passed through me in waves. I’d failed in the most spectacular way possible. I’d failed Barrett and Mr. Fritz and Cam and Trevor and myself. I had no right to be in the Program. Trevor had been right all along. I was a time bomb that had finally gone off.

  Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the storm started to pass. The shudders that had racked my body quieted, and my shoulders stopped shaking.

  I turned my head and rested the side of my face on my skirt. The cold, wet fabric felt soothing against the hot skin of my cheeks. I imagined I was in my backyard and that any minute now Grandma would come out and give me a hug and call me “dear child.”

  Without raising my head, I said bitterly, “So, what’s the next stage for me? Isolation chamber?”

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Fritz asked.

  I couldn’t look at him. Even though I know he did it with good intentions, it still infuriated me that he played so easily with my emotions. “Your little demonstration. It worked perfectly. I mean, except for the part where you almost got killed by a two-hundred-year-old tree falling on you. You should have anticipated that part.”

  “Dancia, we didn’t—”

  I sailed past his protest. “Of course you did. You three used your talents to show exactly how much damage I would do if provoked. And it worked perfectly.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all.” Mr. Fritz crouched down beside me. “We had no desire to set you up. After what happened this weekend, we realized we couldn’t make you keep all your power locked inside. You aren’t going to be content to stand on the sidelines forever, and we needed to know what would happen when you let go.”

  “Right,” I scoffed. “This was an activity. Not a demonstration of my lack of control.”

  “You needed to stretch your wings. We wanted to see what would happen if you were provoked, but not because we don’t trust you. We’ve never had someone like you at Delcroix before. We’re fumbling through this right along with you.”

  “Please, Mr. Fritz,” I said wearily. “No more lies. Not now.”

  “This is the truth,” he insisted. “When we started your classes we were scared. I’ll admit that. We thought we needed to keep things small and force you to learn control that way. But Friday’s incident showed us that that was a mistake. We realized we needed to take you to the next level.”

  “And that is…?”

  “Exercising the full extent of your power. Not by moving around sticks and pens, but by confronting real threats. You needed to do that when you were surrounded by friends, not enemies. That was the point of today’s exercise. Not to teach you some lesson about being dangerous.”

  “So we’re friends now.” I laughed sourly and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Could have fooled me.”

  “Aren’t you glad this happened today and not in front of Anna’s house, in the middle of Santiam Lane?” Barrett asked. “We’re trying to figure out how to help you, D., and train you. You’ve got to cut us a little slack if we don’t get it right the first time.”

  “You almost set me on fire,” I said to him. “You laughed at me. I’m supposed to cut you slack after that?”

  He grinned. “You nearly broke my back, but I guess I did want to try flying. It was pretty cool, actually. We’ll have to do it again some time.”

  I was not in the mood for humor. “I don’t understand how you can act like this all doesn’t matter. I almost killed you. How can I use my powers if I’m such a danger?”

  “We’re all dangerous. Some of us a little more than others, I admit, but you didn’t do anything we didn’t provoke you into doing. In fact, you did everything right.” Barrett gestured toward Mr. Anderson, who glowered at us from a few feet away. “You kept us both alive while finding ways to beat us back. We provoked you, D., and you reacted like the powerful person that you are.”

  “But I got overwhelmed. I didn’t know what was happening at the end. If that tree had come down—”

  “We’d all be dead,” Mr. Anderson said. “But it didn’t, and we aren’t. You kept it together longer than anyone could have expected. You should be proud of that, not beating yourself up.”

  Barrett jumped to his feet. “Now you know what you need to learn. You’re like a kid learning to walk, D. You’re going to fall a few times along the way. You just need to trust us to pick you up after you do.”

  Mr. Fritz ran his fingers through his wiry hair, removing a clump of dirt and a leaf as he did. “We’re trying to help. It may not feel like it right now, but we are. Someday, you’ll be a target, Dancia. I hate to say it, but it’s true. People will learn how powerful you are, and they won’t want you opposing them.”

  “You mean the Irin?” I asked.

  The three of them exchanged meaningful looks. I thought maybe they would protest, or try to lie, but they didn’t even act surprised. I guessed Cam must have told them what we’d talked about after Anna’s party.

  “Yes,” Mr. Fritz said, “the Irin. When that happens, we want you to have the tools to defend yourself.”

  “We care about you,” Barrett added. “We’re doing this because we want to help you.”

  “All of us,” Mr. Anderson said gruffly.

  I blinked through a renewed haze of tears. I had a troll doll, a human torch, and a mad gardener watching over me. It was a measure of my emotional instability that I found this comforting. “Thanks. I think.”

  We trudged back to school as soon as my legs would hold me. I hobbled along, leaning on Barrett and Mr. Fritz at first. By the time we hit the practice field, I was walking on my own, albeit slowly and somewhat unsteadily. I was stunned when I checked my watch and found that it was only three o’clock. It seemed much later.

  Cam came running out of the school as soon as we were within sight of the Main Hall. His usually gentle features had a wildness about them. As soon as he reached me, he immediately wrapped one of my arms over his shoulders and arranged the other around his waist. “What happened to your shoes?” he demanded
.

  “They…um…melted.”

  “Lean on me,” he directed. “You shouldn’t be walking.”

  I let him move my body; my arms hung limply. I felt strangely shy around him, unsure how I would, or even if I should, tell him what had happened. “I’m okay. Just tired.”

  “Are you sure?” He studied me from head to toe. “What about your legs?”

  I couldn’t hide the bloody gashes that crisscrossed my shins. “It looks worse than it is. They’re just scratches.”

  He tightened his hold around my waist. “You can’t fool me, Dancia. I’ve never felt you fight like that before.”

  I focused on keeping my footsteps even and steady, ashamed to recall just how bad things had gotten. “You knew we were fighting?”

  “Not until you got started. I couldn’t miss that. Mr. Judan had to tell me what was going on so I wouldn’t run out there after you. It was like the Fourth of July for talent marks. You were lighting up the sky.” Cam glared at Barrett. “I’ve never seen so much energy in one place.”

  “It’s part of her training, Cameron,” said Mr. Fritz. “We had to move her along. I didn’t want to do it, either, but we all know she needed it.”

  Move her along. Mr. Fritz had told me they had done this to make me safe and protect me from the Irin. But all it was really about was moving me along, testing me, and making me stronger. I felt a surge of anger, and I wasn’t sure whom to direct it at.

  “You’re done now?” Cam said to Mr. Fritz. It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes,” Mr. Fritz replied. “Mr. Anderson and I need to let Mr. Judan know what happened. You can take her back to the Residence Hall if you’d like. She ought to lie down for a while. It will take some time to get her strength back.”

  Although it seemed to happen with alarming frequency these days, I had never gotten used to the concept of people making plans for me as if I weren’t there. I waved my free hand in front of Mr. Fritz’s face. “Hello! I’m still here, remember?”

  Mr. Anderson grunted. “Can you walk?”

  “Yes.”