The Marked Page 9

  “But—”

  “What are you going to do? Let them use you as a punching bag? You honestly think that’s going to help?”

  I wanted to argue, but Barrett was right. I fought like a six-year-old girl. When I’d practiced on a bag in my self-defense class, I had been lucky to escape the bag’s knocking me over. If I took on someone who knew what the heck they were doing, I’d have been a bloody lump in a matter of minutes.

  “There are other ways to fight,” I said.

  I faced Thaddeus and deliberately tuned out the rest of the fighting. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I focused my mind in anticipation of figuring it out.

  “Stop, Dancia,” Barrett’s voice snapped over my shoulder. “You aren’t ready.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  I’d never heard him sound like that, with no room in his voice for compromise or discussion.

  “I want to help.”

  Cam blocked a kick from Thaddeus but staggered under the force of it. I saw blood dripping down Trevor’s face.

  “I need to help.”

  “You’ll be overwhelmed. You don’t have the control yet.”

  “I’ll be careful, Barrett.”

  “People will get hurt. Seriously hurt. There will be questions.”

  I shuddered. The teachers at Delcroix had told us hundreds of times that we needed to keep the Program secret. Part of what made Delcroix such a powerful force for good was that people didn’t know it existed. Unfortunately, my record for secrecy—let alone moderation—wasn’t great. In my fight with the Watchers last semester, I’d left a broken windshield, a downed telephone pole, and a giant sinkhole in my wake. Hardly subtle.

  More people rushed past me to join the fight. I overheard a low-voiced argument as Anna and her mom came outside. Anna’s mom was telling her to go call the police, while Anna wanted to join the fight. Eventually she did as she was told and ran back into the house. Anna’s mom headed for the thick of the battle, joining a junior named Olive against a guy whose hands seemed to be everywhere. Maybe he had more than two. It was hard to tell.

  Slowly, our odds improved. Meredith was the first sophomore on the street. She joined the fight beside Sam. She wasn’t much on the offensive, but because she could sense her opponent’s next move, she always held her own. Alisha, another sophomore, made up for in enthusiasm what she lacked in finesse. Anna’s mom fought like three people rolled into one. She grabbed the many-handed guy’s head and smashed it against her forehead, then turned around and slammed her foot into the back of a girl behind her.

  The scariest person out there was the figure who had been blowing out the streetlights. When they got closer I could see it was a girl, small and slight. She didn’t attack anyone directly. Instead, she lurked around the edges of the fight, and when one of the Delcroix kids was distracted, she’d grab them from behind. If she could hold them long enough, they’d scream and twitch, fall down, and take a while to get up.

  When the vicious ballerina landed a kick to Kari’s ribs that knocked her to the ground, Electricity Girl ducked in and grabbed hold of Kari’s arm. Kari struggled, then seized up in a ball and shrieked in agony.

  Meredith yelled, “She needs five seconds! Watch out, Sam, she’s headed your way!”

  Sam paused to duck a punch from a guy with a short, spiky Mohawk, then lashed out at the girl behind him. She danced back, just out of reach. I got the impression electricity was all she had in the way of fighting ability.

  Not everyone at the party joined the fight. Besides the seniors, several of the sophomores edged nervously onto the sidewalk beside me, gawking at the brawl. It was primarily the Life Talents that hung back. They didn’t seem to have the same aptitude for battle as the Somatics.

  Luckily, most of the juniors were Somatics. They didn’t pause for even a moment before joining the fight. But for all their Somatic power, the Delcroix kids weren’t winning. David ran in and pulled Kari to her feet, helping her limp off the street and onto the grass. Geneva came out next. She landed on her shoulder after a brutal aerial assault. David, who seemed to act as a sort of medic, threw her over his back while Anna’s mom provided cover from the acrobat Geneva had been fighting.

  Cam had done some damage to Thaddeus, who was now swaying slightly. Still, Cam had to land four blows to match a single strike from his superstrong opponent. At the same time, clusters kept springing up with one of our people under assault by two of theirs. Blood dripped down Trevor’s face, obscuring his vision, and Sam was barely avoiding the girl with the electric hands. Meredith kept shouting warnings to him, and he’d move out of reach seconds before being shocked, but each time he moved slower, and the girl got closer. Finally, she had him in her grip for a second, then two.

  I stood there helpless, trying to think of something, anything, to do to help. I was about ready to throw myself after Electricity Girl—she was tiny, after all, so there was a chance I could take her—when I noticed a boy standing quietly on the other side of the street, slouching against a blown-out streetlight.

  He was tall and lean, hands tucked in the pockets of a long duster-style coat. His bandanna was tied around his forehead, pushing up dark, spiky hair. I squinted, walking to the edge of the curb in an attempt to make out his face.

  The dark figure raised his hand, as if in greeting. I stepped into the street, wanting and yet not wanting to see the face. To make out the features I was sure I knew.

  The wail of a siren startled me, and I jumped back onto the curb. Thaddeus paused while Cam panted, doubled over on the street. Then Thaddeus held his fingers to his lips and whistled two short blasts. The gang threw a few last blows at whomever was nearest, then began running back the way they had come. They reached the corner and split into several groups, fading into the darkness in packs of two and three.

  As if freed from a spell, I ran over to Cam. “Are you okay?”

  His breath whistled unsteadily. He straightened slowly, gritting his teeth. “Did you see which way they went?”

  “I think they split up.”

  “Damn.” He spat blood onto the street from a cut on his lip.

  Trevor joined us a moment later, blood smeared across his cheek and down his shirt. He said only one word, the sound of it falling from his lips like poison: “Irin.”

  Cam nodded. The rest of the group gathered silently by the driveway. Kari was limping; Geneva was holding her arm against her stomach. No one appeared unscathed except Anna’s mom, who was practically bouncing on her toes, fury radiating from her like heat off the pavement in summer.

  Lucas jerked open the door of his car, causing the hood to rattle and glass to fall in a shower from the windshield. He crawled inside and extracted the brick. “I guess he was serious about leaving a message.”

  “What does it say?” Cam called.

  Lucas held it up. The words were written in white—lumpy and uneven.

  WHO’S WATCHING WHO?

  WHILE WE stared at the brick, a man came out of the house across the street and called to Anna’s mom. She hissed something in Cam’s direction and hurriedly straightened her clothes. Then she waved and walked over to meet the neighbor. The sirens were getting louder, and more lights were coming on in the nearby houses.

  Cam walked up to Lucas.

  I followed a few paces behind, flanked by Trevor. “Give it to me,” he said quietly to Lucas, holding out his hand.

  Lucas shrugged. “I’m not sure why I should. It was my car.”

  “Funny that you didn’t lift a finger to protect it,” Trevor snapped.

  Lucas hefted the brick in his hand. “Maybe we should give it to the police.”

  “We need to keep it,” Cam said. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “And what do we tell the police?” Tara asked. “That the windshield spontaneously collapsed?”

  Barrett hefted a large rock from the landscaping in front of Anna’s house. He pushed past the group and planted the rock in Lucas
’s front seat. Then he took the brick from Lucas’s hand and gave it to Cam. “No need to fight about it. Cam’s just doing his job.”

  Cam narrowed his eyes, as if trying to determine whether Barrett was mocking him. “Thank you,” he said. He took the brick and headed for the house. Lucas and the other seniors watched as two police cars pulled up across the street. Red and blue lights flashed on our faces and reflected off the broken glass in the street.

  As soon as Cam left, Anna appeared by my side, her Cupid’s-bow mouth twisted and tight. “I hope you’re happy.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to erase the images from a few minutes before. Cam, bruised and bloody. The boy with the long coat and spiky hair. “Surely you can’t think I had something to do with this.”

  Anna stepped a few feet closer and leaned in toward me, putting her hands on her hips. “I don’t see why not. First you tell them when we have Initiation, then you let them know about the party. It hardly takes a rocket scientist to figure it out.”

  I straightened and met her stare. “And tell me why, exactly, you think I’m trying to get my boyfriend beat up?”

  “Because you stood by and watched while everyone else was fighting,” she spat. “You aren’t loyal to the Program, and you never will be.”

  My face flushed as shame and anger washed over me. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. I couldn’t fight them. Barrett told me not to.”

  She was right. I hadn’t fought back. But I had assumed Cam would understand. Now the thought occurred to me—what if he didn’t?

  Anna stuck her fingers into the pockets of her tiny low-rider jeans, and turned her face to the side in disgust.

  “You listened to Barrett?”

  “He’s my teacher. I’m supposed to listen to him.”

  “I’m not sure what’s worse—that you’re a traitor, or that you’re a coward. We’re in the Program to fight, Dancia. Not to hide behind our teachers.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. Barrett’s warning rattled around in my head. He’d said I shouldn’t fight because I wasn’t ready, and might hurt someone. Wasn’t that the same thing Trevor had said, at Initiation, and what I’d always feared about myself—that when I relaxed my hold over my talent, I’d lose control and people would get hurt? The wrong people?

  “You and Trevor better get your stories straight,” I said. “Last I heard, he thought I wasn’t ready to be in the Program. Now you’re telling me I should be in there throwing around my talent?”

  “When your friends are in trouble, you fight,” Anna hissed. “Everyone knows that.”

  I made one last attempt at reasoning with her. “Look, whether I should have fought with them or not is beside the point. I don’t even know who those people are—how could I have contacted some random gang from Seattle?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know about the Irin,” she said scornfully.

  “What?” I asked. “Who is that?”

  “The Irin, Dancia,” she said impatiently. “We all know he’s one of them now. All you have to do is call him.”

  I caught my breath. Unable to prevent it, I let my gaze stray for a moment to the spot where I thought I’d seen him. “Who?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

  “Jack.” Her eyes bored into mine. “You still care about him. You’re helping him. And as soon as I have proof, everyone will know.”

  The police questioned all of us, moving systematically through the crowd with their little notebooks, writing down everyone’s stories. An ambulance arrived a moment after the police, and paramedics looked at Trevor, Cam, and the girls. They told Trevor he might need stitches in his eyebrow because it kept oozing blood, and said Cam probably had some bruised ribs but didn’t need to go to the emergency room. They thought Geneva’s arm needed to be X-rayed and offered to take her in the ambulance, but she said she wanted to wait for her mom.

  The party began to disperse as soon as the police left. Based on our description of the bandannas, the police had said it sounded like a gang from Seattle that had been making a lot of trouble lately, though they couldn’t say why they would have picked a fight with us, or what they were doing in a suburb thirty miles from downtown. Everyone agreed that that was the story we’d tell our parents: random gang violence. There was to be no mention of the fact that their leader had hurled a brick forty feet and broken the windshield of a car, or that the gang included a guy who could fight while leaping twenty feet in the air.

  After the police were gone, David sat Trevor down on the curb and pressed his fingers against Trevor’s cut. Slowly, as we watched, the skin closed up and a nice, healthy pink line appeared. Then David cupped his hands around Geneva’s elbow and squeezed. She turned a ghastly color and groaned softly, but when he let go, she moved her arm around and smiled. He did the same to Kari’s belly, and she sighed with relief.

  David, as I’d suspected, was a healer. He couldn’t bring someone back to life, but he could repair minor wounds and broken bones just by laying on his hands. It exhausted him and the person he healed, though, because he combined his own energy and the energy of the injured person to do the healing. He, Trevor, Kari, and Geneva all went inside to lie down afterward, while Anna’s mom fixed them some kind of energy drink to help them regain their strength.

  As a stream of cars and anxious parents lined up in front of the house, Cam found me sitting on the curb, staring blindly at the bushes on the other side of the street. He offered his hand. I shook my head, not wanting to hurt him, and got to my feet myself, following him into the house while Anna and her mom said good-bye to the others and tried to allay the parents’ fears. Cam slouched deep down in Anna’s high-backed leather sofa. I could tell he was in pain. He told the paramedic it wasn’t serious, but his breath seemed shallow, and he winced whenever he moved too quickly.

  “You should ask David to take care of you,” I said.

  “He’s too tired. I’ll be fine.”

  Cam’s eyes closed. The neck of his T-shirt was ripped, and there were dark specks of blood across the front. I thought about what Anna had said, and wondered what to do. Cam hadn’t acted any differently toward me since the fight, but he hadn’t run up and given me a big kiss, either.

  I traced the edge of the couch cushion. “I’m sorry I didn’t help.”

  He opened his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “I feel bad. Because I didn’t do anything. I should have helped you.”

  “No one expects you to. You’re just starting out, and, no offense, but you’re a lousy hand-to-hand fighter.” He smiled, and we intertwined our fingers. “You made the right decision, staying out of it.”

  “But I could have…” I didn’t even have to complete my thought. Cam seemed to understand what I meant.

  “Are you kidding? It’s not a big deal if someone sees Geneva doing her flips, but for you it’s different. People can convince themselves they didn’t really see a girl thirty feet above the ground. They can’t ignore a sinkhole.” He gave me a weak smile, then closed his eyes again. “Fighting’s my job, Dancia, not yours. At least for now. In a year or so you can kick their butts for me.”

  “That’s not likely,” I said. “You were amazing out there. If you hadn’t been up against Attila the Hun, you would have killed him.”

  Cam shrugged, then grimaced. “I’ve got no real Somatic talent. I figured when I started the Program I would need to work twice as hard to be able to hold my own in a fight.” He squeezed my hand gently. “You should have gone into the house. I was worried.”

  Warm honey coated my insides. I slid closer to him, though I was careful not to lean on his injured side. “Did you really think I was going to go inside? Just because you said so?”

  He chuckled, then touched his ribs with his free hand. “Man, that hurts. No, I didn’t think you would go inside. But I figured it was worth a shot.”

  Cam had tried to protect me. I choked up. Usually I was the one protecting other
people. I mean, Grandma did her best to take care of me, but she was so fragile herself, it felt like I was the one in charge most of the time. Even when I used my power, it was always to defend someone else. It was just something I did, the way I was.

  I loved the feeling that someone was watching out for me.

  I studied the flat plane of Cam’s stomach and the tousled hair that tangled around the bloody cuts on his forehead. I reached over and gently pushed back a lock of it.

  “This must be painful,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I noticed he did not move away from my touch.

  “Wait here.” I ducked into the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel. I ran it under some warm water, then sat beside him again and dabbed at his cuts.

  “That’s nice,” he said, closing his eyes again. “Thanks.”

  We sat together for a while. I wished I could have just kept my mouth shut, but something compelled me to break the silence. “So…does this sort of thing happen to you very often?”

  “Not like this.”

  He did not elaborate. I waited, hopeful, but I had an idea I could wait all night and he’d never tell me exactly what he was thinking.

  “You didn’t seem surprised that they knew about the Watchers.”

  “Some people figure it out. We aren’t perfect.”

  I waited again, but he lapsed back into silence. Finally, I screwed up my courage and used the word Anna had flung at me earlier that night. “Were they part of the Irin?”

  Cam stiffened. “The Irin? Where did you hear about them?”

  Something about the way he said it sent chills through me.

  “Anna,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “She wasn’t supposed to tell you about them.”

  A tiny shot of pleasure at the annoyance in Cam’s voice was quickly eclipsed by the realization that she knew something I didn’t. “But I’m in the Program now. You don’t have to keep secrets from me anymore.”

  “It isn’t about you. It’s the same for all the first-year students in the Program. They want you to focus on developing your talent this year, not getting caught up in the fight.”