The Marked Read online

  She frowned. “I didn’t even get to hear about your new focus class. How’d it go?”

  “It was fine. Just like ethics class, only we talked about science, too.”

  “Can you come find me when you’re back?” she asked. “I need to ask Trevor a question about our English homework, but I don’t want to go alone.”

  I cringed. The last thing I wanted to do during my free time was hang out with Trevor. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Can Hennie go with you?”

  Esther wrinkled her nose. “Hennie? She’s terrified of Trevor. Besides, she’s off with Yashir somewhere.”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and forced myself not to check my watch. “Is there anyone else?”

  “Of course! Allie or one of the other girls can go with me. But you’d better save some time for me tomorrow. I need to hear what’s going on in your life, you know.” She laughed as if she didn’t care, but I could see that she was hurt.

  I cleared my throat. “Sure, we’ll talk tomorrow. I’d better go. You understand, don’t you?”

  She bowed grandly. “Who am I to stand in the way of true love?”

  A wave of guilt passed over me as I hurried down the hall. Esther had been my first friend at Delcroix, and she and Hennie had been like a lifeline for me the previous semester. I knew she was disappointed that nothing had happened with Chris, the first boy she’d had a crush on that semester, while Hennie and I had both ended up with boyfriends.

  I hurried down the stairs and booked across the path to the Main Hall. The entrance to the library was on the first floor, through a set of tall wooden doors that reminded me of something in an old English castle. Unlike the classrooms, which had gray linoleum floors, the library had thick Persian carpets and real lamps, and a mix of long tables and individual cubbies for when you really needed to study. I wound through the stacks until I got to a tiny room tucked at the back of a hall. It was deliberately unappealing, with just a couple of study cubes and dim lights and a bunch of dusty old books. Cam appeared a few minutes later, backpack slung over one shoulder, his blue oxford shirt somehow making his shoulders look even broader than usual.

  “So, how was your first class?” Cam asked. He threw off his backpack and slid into the chair next to me. “Did you enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy is a strong word.” I explained what Mr. Fritz had done to me. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how disappointed I was in myself for what had happened. It felt as if I’d been betrayed, not by Mr. Fritz, but by my own mind.

  “I couldn’t even move a pen, just because of something Mr. Fritz told me.”

  Cam laughed. “Dancia, Mr. Fritz has had tons of practice fooling students. Remember, you may have figured out how to use your talent years ago, but you’ve still got a lot to learn. That’s why we have the Program.”

  I shook my head doubtfully. “Maybe. But it doesn’t feel good.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, he did the same thing to me. I went from being able to feel the talents of everyone in the room to feeling absolutely nothing—it was like the air around me had gone dead. And it was all in my mind.”

  “That sounds even worse than what he did to me.” I cocked my head to one side. “I don’t think I ever asked you before—when did you figure out that you could read talent marks?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “I started seeing colors and patterns in the air around certain people in fourth grade. It was terrifying. When I told my dad about it, he said only sick people saw pictures in the air. I tried to pretend they weren’t there, but they wouldn’t go away. I was too scared to talk to my dad about it again—I thought he’d send me to a hospital or something.”

  “That’s a lot for a little kid to worry about,” I said softly.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t pleasant. I did everything I could to make sure my dad would think I was normal. I got into sports and practiced hard, I made lots of friends and joined every club I could think of. I was the most average, well-adjusted kid I could be. And it worked. Eventually, he forgot all about it.”

  “How did Delcroix find you?”

  “Delcroix Recruiters visit schools all the time. They look for kids that stand out, and the ones who try the hardest not to. Sometimes they go undercover as substitute teachers, other times as parents or relatives. The Recruiter that came to my middle school had a talent for invisibility. He went through the office and looked at files and watched the students for days on end. He was invisible, but his mark was pulsing over his head like a neon sign. When he saw me watching him move around, he knew something was up. He called Mr. Judan, and before long, I was telling him everything.”

  I thought of my own visit from Cam and Mr. Judan. I had been far too scared of my talent to tell them the truth about it. “Did he…um…persuade you to tell him?”

  Cam shook his head. “He didn’t have to. After all those years of seeing things, I was desperate for someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy. Mr. Judan told me I had a special gift that he wanted to help me learn to use. It wasn’t exactly a hard sell. He talked to my dad about giving me a special scholarship to start high school early. I lived at Delcroix that summer, and started freshman year in the fall.”

  “I had no idea.”

  He leaned forward, staring intently into my eyes. “That’s why I understood how you felt, Dancia, that first time I met you. I could tell you’d been through a lot, just like me. And I wanted to help you understand that it didn’t have to be that way. You didn’t have to be alone.”

  I leaned over the table and took his hand. “I’m not alone. Not anymore.”

  SOCCER SEASON began a week after classes resumed. I was hoping Esther and Hennie would join the team, but they refused. Esther said she’d run enough during cross-country to last a lifetime. Admittedly, she was more of a walker than a runner. Hennie wanted to spend more time listening to music with Yashir, though as far as her parents knew, she needed the extra time to study.

  Given my exhausting schedule of classes, homework, and spending time with Cam, I was relieved to find that soccer at Delcroix wasn’t exactly a serious sport. Unlike Danville High, where only the best made varsity, Delcroix had barely enough players for a full team. The Delcroix team played in a club league with a bunch of other private and alternative schools. We practiced every day, but only for an hour and a half, and sometimes all we did was run the cross-country course around the school. We didn’t win very often, but it was still fun.

  Things settled into a comfortable routine, though I knew better than to become complacent. Anna was obviously saving her information about Jack to reveal at the worst possible moment. My Program classes were amazing. Physics kicked my butt, yet somehow Barrett managed to make it interesting. Mr. Fritz had been right when he said it was important for me to understand what I was doing. Even though gravity didn’t seem like a difficult concept (you drop something, it lands on the ground, right?), there were nuances I hadn’t gotten before. Like each thing exerting its own gravitational force. It wasn’t just the moon and the earth that were pulling on things—every object pulled on every other object, and I had to learn to distinguish the individual forces before I could learn to control them.

  Most importantly, I learned that controlling my mind was easier said than done. Before, I’d only disturbed the forces of gravity for a second or two at a time. Now I was being trained to hold the forces out of alignment. This was surprisingly hard. If I got distracted and my concentration wavered, even for just a second, I would drop whatever I was holding, or send whatever I’d been pulling down back into the sky.

  Barrett’s talent—generating heat by exciting individual particles of matter—required enormous focus. He said there were several other people in the world with talents like his, but they didn’t have his control. They could warm up a bowl of soup. Barrett could create a twenty-foot geyser of flame, set a house on fire, or boil someone’s blood. Of course, he was far too laid-back to do any of those things, as far as I could
tell, but he did have the power. His Swiss teacher made him do all sorts of weird meditation exercises to improve his concentration. Barrett said I could worry about that later. For now, we’d focus on the basics.

  Surprisingly, the class I enjoyed most was Mr. Anderson’s. He usually had me follow him around and help with whatever he was working on that day. Sometimes we walked in the woods and noted where blackberry brambles were suffocating native Oregon grape plants, or where ivy was crawling up the trunk of a Douglas fir tree. The next week we’d go back with thick leather gloves and a wheelbarrow and pull the offending invaders from the ground. Still other days, we worked in the garden, adding compost to the soil, weeding, or picking vegetables that grew even though it was the middle of winter.

  Mr. Anderson talked a lot about photosynthesis, the process of taking light and making it into food. This transformation, he said, was at the root of everything he did. And everything I did, in a way. The earth was constantly changing, Mr. Anderson said, but everything was in balance. You didn’t create new things, you just turned one thing into something else. Light and food. Energy and matter. The earth was about relationships, one thing blending into the next. If I didn’t understand that, I would never fully understand how an Earth Talent worked.

  Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t learned any more about what had happened the night of Initiation. I had the feeling that if it were up to Mr. Judan and the others, I never would. Cam showed no interest in talking about it, the other sophomores didn’t seem to care, and the juniors—led by Anna—clammed up whenever I asked any questions. I hadn’t screwed up the courage to ask Barrett. I had the feeling he might just laugh and blow it off, the way he did most other things people took too seriously.

  I asked Cam about it every so often, but he never quite answered, waving his hands vaguely and saying that things were out of his control. Finally, he told me I needed to let it go. It was in the hands of the Watchers now, and there wasn’t anything more he could tell me about it.

  That started our first fight. We had just finished running the cross-country loop around the school, and despite the chilly air, my T-shirt clung to my back with sweat. I held it out from my stomach and waved it back and forth to cool myself as we walked.

  “But why can’t I know what the Watchers are doing?” I said. “I’m in the Program now. There aren’t supposed to be secrets anymore. Besides, you said it was just a gang of regular kids from Seattle. If that’s true, why are the Watchers involved?”

  Cam must have been annoyed by my finding a weakness in his story, because he threw his hands in the air and exhaled sharply. “There isn’t any big secret. They’re still trying to find the people who broke in. You can’t expect the Watchers to tell everyone who their suspects are and what information they’ve gathered.”

  “I’m not asking for that,” I said, wiping my forehead with the hem of my shirt. “I just think it’s strange that they’d send Watchers after some local gang. What will they do if they find the people who broke in? They won’t kill them, will they?”

  “If they aren’t dangerous, the Watchers will let the police handle it,” Cam said. “It’s up to them. You just have to trust them.”

  “How am I supposed to trust them if no one will say what they’re doing?” I asked.

  “That’s what trust is,” Cam said. “They don’t have to explain everything.”

  “I guess I’m not good at trust, then,” I said, flaring up.

  We walked back to school in silence. A few hours later, Cam texted me while I was studying: Sorry—didn’t mean to fight. I’m tired. Too much homework.

  Relieved, I wrote back: Me, too. I shouldn’t keep bugging you. I know you’d tell me if you could. We okay?

  I waited, staring anxiously at the phone until I got his response. Of course. Meet me in the stacks, five minutes.

  I grinned, slipped my phone into my backpack, and headed for the library.

  After my fight with Cam, I realized direct questions weren’t going to get me far. Instead, I started spending more and more time in the Program library. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I had the feeling that there was more to the Governing Council and the Watchers than they were telling me. So I went hunting for information, studying all the history books I could find. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much. I thought there would be huge tomes filled with hundreds of pages on the Governing Council. Nope. Just a few scattered books, one of which was about Maria Salvoretto, whom Mr. Fritz had told me about on the first day of class. Maria, I learned, had a gift for foresight, and after having a vision of a school for students with extraordinary powers, she decided to go out and create one.

  Maria sounded pretty smart. She didn’t tell anyone what she was doing, so her little traveling band didn’t get burned at the stake or anything. But everywhere they went, they did good things. They healed people, used their physical gifts to plow fields and build houses and to rid towns of plagues and dangerous animals. All this in a secret way so that no one knew exactly what had happened. After her death, lots of people wanted her to be made a saint.

  Apparently, things had gone on like that for hundreds of years, with the talented roaming the world doing good deeds and learning how to cultivate their skills. It wasn’t until World War I that things started to change. The talented got organized and became involved in governments and politics. They formed the Governing Council to centralize the operation of the schools and the efforts of the talented across the globe. They realized that with the proper training, some Level Two Talents could be turned into Level Threes.

  The numbers of talented grew.

  And then, about ten years ago, Mr. Judan began building his army of professional Watchers. Watchers had been around in some form for a long time. Maria “watched” her pupils for a year to avoid developing the talent of someone who couldn’t be trusted. Once the Governing Council realized they could turn Level Two Talents into Level Threes, they started watching likely candidates. But Mr. Judan’s Watchers were different. The books I found didn’t say the Watchers were killing people, but it seemed obvious to me that that was going on. I just didn’t understand why things had become so violent.

  Most of what I found in the library described talents and how to use them. In one book there was an account from the seventeenth century by a person with a talent very similar to mine, describing how she had learned to move objects in every direction just by playing with the forces around them. There were detailed lesson plans describing how to move a Level Two Talent for persuasion up to a Level Three, and how to teach a shape-shifter to move smoothly from one form to the next. Seeing that helped me understand exactly why they’d been so worried about Jack’s stealing books from the library. If Jack had taken any of these books, he, or whoever ended up getting a hold of them, could have become very powerful, very quickly. It was like handing someone a loaded gun.

  A really big, magic gun.

  Despite my best intentions, I was too consumed with my research and classes to hang out much with Hennie and Esther. Any free time I had in the evenings I spent with Cam, and my classes were so hard I spent all my study time actually studying. Hennie was joined at the hip to Yashir, so she didn’t notice, but I knew Esther wasn’t happy that I was never around. Things only got worse after she developed an interest in a sophomore named Matt, who was in her drama class. He asked their teacher for a different partner for a scene from Romeo and Juliet after Esther had maneuvered for them to be together. She was crushed. I texted her every chance I got, and we talked on the phone over the weekend. But it wasn’t the same, and I could feel the distance growing between us.

  I DIDN’T start getting nervous about Valentine’s Day until Esther brought it up on our way back from a soccer game. Anna’s dad had come to see the game, and he drove Anna and her friends back to school. That left me and six other players on the bus. It was a sunny day, so Hennie and Esther had decided to tag along as spectators. They were, of course, the only ones.


  I was exhausted but happy. Allie and I had each scored goals, and Anna, for once, had not. I sat across from Hennie and Esther with my gear on the seat next to me and tried to keep my eyes open. I didn’t get nearly enough sleep these days, and I usually ended up taking a nap on the bus ride home. But it was a rare chance to hang out with Esther and Hennie, so I pretended to be alert.

  “So, what are you two doing for the big day?” Esther asked me.

  I squinted at her through half-opened eyes. “What big day?”

  “Valentine’s Day. It’s next Friday. What are you and Cam doing to celebrate?”

  We hit a bump in the road, and I grabbed my bag to keep it from falling off the seat. This allowed me to avoid meeting Esther’s eyes. I didn’t want to think about what she’d be doing on Valentine’s Day.

  “I thought maybe I’d get him some chocolate?” I said tentatively.

  Esther’s mouth dropped open. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  I leaned my head against the seat. It had, of course, occurred to me that Valentine’s Day was approaching. I could hardly miss it, with pastel candy hearts and yellow marshmallow chicks displayed in every corner of our grocery store. But I’d tried not to pay attention. The last thing I wanted was to be disappointed by whatever Cam did—or didn’t do—in honor of the day.

  “What’s so bad about chocolate? He loves the stuff.”

  “It’s boring,” Hennie said, leaning over Esther’s lap from her spot by the window. “Everyone buys chocolate. You have to find something different, something unique that shows how well you know him.”

  “Great. No pressure or anything. What are you doing for Yashir, smarty-pants?”

  “I bought him a new nose ring,” she said dreamily.

  “Oh, yeah,” I snorted. “Nothing says romance like an earring you wear in your nose.”

  Esther laughed, then sobered abruptly and shook a finger at me. “That does not get you off the hook. You need to come up with something good. Are you going out or anything?”