Chapter 41 #2
Quinn didn’t fight it for long. When the jungle became too thick for her to wade through, she fell to her knees with a squelch in the mud that was slowly frosting over.
Ice burst from her chest, forming a wall of glittering, spiked barricades around her. A crystal-clear spire shot through the canopy above, and a mote of frigid water wove around it all.
In the middle of those barricades, Quinn wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth, trying to catch her breath as it fogged out in front of her. Long after she’d finally rocked herself into stillness, a familiar voice wormed its way toward her.
“Well, isn’t this an interesting display of magic?”
Quinn looked up to find Lexington’s face leering through her opaque walls of ice.
I continued on, chasing after other memories in search of a hint of Mr. Gleekle.
Parties, classes, one-night stands, drinking games, friends—the chaotic routine of Quinn’s life in the last year went by in a blur as I ran past those short, angular paths, merely glancing at their dead ends before rushing on—until I did a double take and turned back.
There, at the end of one, a castle-like structure of… of shells cloaked what should have been the space for a memory.
I raced toward it, heart skittering, knowing that another Mind Manipulator had buried whatever this was—albeit clumsily, with their own magic rather than using Quinn’s mind to hide parts of itself.
I plunged my hand through the sharp fragments, tossing aside scallops, whelks, and disjointed ladybug wings, until it all came scattering down and the mist burst into life around me.
“Quinn Balkersaff?”
Kimber Leake had cornered Quinn in almost the exact same spot between Element Wielder classrooms… but now, Quinn turned to face Jenia’s older sister with fear and wariness knotting between her eyebrows, her fingertips frosting over with blue on instinct.
“Yes?”
I saw her eyes shoot to the little red dot in Kimber’s shoulder brand that marked her as an elite.
This must have been sometime after Jenia’s exile, when Kimber had shown up for the Branding as a Good Council representative.
Perhaps even when her parakeet had been spitting names at me on my house’s balcony.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Quinn added in a mutter.
Every ounce of Kimber’s polite demeanor seemed to snap away.
“My sister’s not dead!” Chest heaving, she tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear and said more calmly, “Look, I don’t have anyone else to go to.
Jenia had a falling out with Dazmine Temperton, our family in Belliview would never even entertain the idea of helping a disgrace.
” Kimber’s voice snagged on a choke with that last word.
“And her boyfriend really is dead, by the looks of it.” She lowered her tone and leaned in close to Quinn.
“I can break her out of the prison where they’re keeping her, but I need someone to hide her for me if I do—your home village is small, right?
Alderwick, right? You could keep her safe there? ”
Nothing about my house’s old Wild Whisperer princess looked sane right now. She was curling her fingernails into her fists repeatedly—open, close, open, close—and when a very familiar parakeet swooped into the alleyway to land on her shoulder, her body gave a violent tremor.
Quinn backed away, her fear hardening into crude distaste at the mention of how small our home village was.
“I don’t know what you mean by prison unless that’s what you’re calling the pirate ships out there. But I can’t hide Jenia in Alderwick even if I wanted to risk my ass to mess with the dome or run away from the Institute. Those are the rules, Kimber. And you, out of everyone, should know that.”
She eyed the brand, the dot in the middle, with such vehemence that it was a wonder Kimber didn’t tell her parakeet to rip into her face.
“You’re right,” she said instead, her own face hardening into smooth, lethal contemplation. “My mistake.”
And when she dove into Quinn’s mind to smother this memory, I knew my assumption had been correct.
Kimber had been branded with a second power sometime during her years at the Esholian Institute: Mind Manipulating, just like me.
And if Jenia’s earlier claim was true, she had been spying on my mind all of last year.
She’d discovered what I was—a half-faerie—and apparently thought she could give her younger sister a shot at joining the Good Council if Jenia claimed that discovery for herself.
Little had either of them known that Dyonisia had known about me and the innate power in my blood all along.
I wanted to dig deeper, but a distant, outward part of me recognized the sounds of a conversation ending in the real world.
Without Dazmine to keep her distracted… I couldn’t risk Quinn sensing my presence. I ripped myself out of her mind just as she was opening her door again.
“…so I don’t need you to tell me how to live my life,” she was practically shrieking, and that pale, cropped hair of hers crackled with living flames.
Dazmine opened her mouth to call her back, but I shot a single, shaking thought into her mind: let her go.
Sneering, Quinn slipped back into her room, managing to slam the door behind her even though she’d only opened it a crack. From behind it, I could hear a deep, muffled voice, and Quinn answering, “Nothing. Just a girl I used to hang out with every so often…” before her voice faded, too.
I yanked Dazmine down the hall until we’d rounded a corner.
“What…?” she started to ask.
I shook my head at her and tapped my head.
I got a lot of information, I sent into her mind, but I don’t want to say any of it out loud.
Even though the hallway was empty for now, I could still hear music drifting up from the bottom floor. Distant laughs and groans and screams still melted through the walls of this place. It was better to assume anyone could be listening.
Dazmine cranked up an eyebrow. And?
And I think Mr. Gleekle’s secret Branding is a part of the Good Council system, I said, still filled with shock at all those pieces I’d picked up in Quinn’s mind.
They’re picking out students who demonstrate superiority in some way and giving them a second brand—then testing them throughout their remainder at the Institute.
If they learn to control two powers, they get recruited to the Good Council.
If they can’t control the two powers—if they descend into madness like Jenia did—they’re brought up to that prison just like all the others who fail their Final Test.
Dazmine dropped her arms with a gape.
So Jenia…
Knew about this because her sister was picked out sometime during her five years here at the Esholian Institute and given a second brand.
That whole confrontation in the jungle… it was all just a way for Jenia to prove that she belonged on the Good Council, too.
But it seems like she didn’t think she could do it by herself, so she asked for help.
Despite the fact that she, Fergus, Jacques, and Quinn had failed their mission, whatever they’d done that day must have caught the Good Council’s attention anyway, because two of them had been branded twice now.
But while Jenia had dissolved into a screaming fit on her hands and knees, Quinn had apparently been able to manage her Shape Shifting power just fine.
Or… was the new hair a sign that she couldn’t control it?
A quiet look of horror clouded Dazmine’s features.
Dazmine? I prompted.
She rubbed her eyes with a shaking hand.
Jenia once told me she was going to punish you and your friends once she was on the Good Council and had the authority to. I laughed at her. I didn’t think there was any way Dyonisia Reeve would recruit her, so I laughed in her face. I didn’t realize she was serious.
Yeah, that sounded like Jenia Leake. I wasn’t surprised she’d turned to a more willing friend after Dazmine had scoffed at her ideations.
What I was surprised about was the second Branding itself. To think that every elite on the Good Council had an extra power…
What did Kitterfol Lexington have besides Mind Manipulating? I’d never seen a single hint of another magic from him.
And was that what Lexington had meant would happen to me if I delivered him his batch of pills? I’d join Mr. Gleekle’s secret club? I’d get yet another brand—another power?
At that moment, a trio of Element Wielders lumbered past us, absorbed in their own giggling conversation. Dazmine and I fell back against the wall, pretending to fix the fallen strands of each other’s hair.
When the trio had faded around the corner, Dazmine asked, Does Quinn know where Jenia truly is right now?
No, but… I relayed all the other memories I’d witnessed up to the moment Kimber had cornered Quinn. Her sister does. And apparently, she’s willing to break her out of prison, but doesn’t know where to put her.
As soon as I said it, Dazmine’s eyes flashed open.
That’s it! She began to pace, her eyes glued to the floor. That’s what Terrin and I have been missing!
“Dazmine,” I started to whisper, but it was like she didn’t hear me.
The pirates can’t break into the prison, so we need someone to let us in—someone from the inside.
“Dazmine…”
If we could just make contact with an elite, turn them into a double agent—
“Dazmine! Shut your thoughts down right now.”
I felt something in the air around us, like another mind was searching. Reaching. Probing. Maybe Steeler was just listening in on our mental conversation, but I hadn’t felt his dark, fathomless energy since I’d told him to go earlier. This… this felt foreign.
Yet shockingly familiar.
Horrified, I dove into Dazmine’s mind, landing on a surface that rolled with dry, unforgiving waves of sand—just as another figure evaporated, like a shimmer of heat, right near her consciousness.
A wormy figure I’d recognize even in my deepest nightmares.
Lexington.