3. Ella

Chapter 3

Ella

Ella spent half the morning working on lesson plans for the elementary school teachers that she knew would just be tossed in the trash and waiting for her amulet to vibrate with a message from Kellen that she was needed in his class. When she watched time crawl forward and the forty-five minute period concluded, not having heard about any issues with Connor and the stress ball, she let her lips curl up in a smug smile, not that anyone was there in her office to witness it.

Soon after, she received a message through the amulet that her assistance was required in the Herculea sector.

Where the Varmin quarter embraced industrial, impenetrable steel as their primary foundation, the Herculea sector possessed a more antiquated design to the configuration of the buildings, fashioned from gleaming white limestone, displaying little to no abrasions on the walls or asphalt, as opposed to the claw marks marring the Varmin grounds. The heavens began shedding tears on her journey across campus, mourning the world below, drowning the earth in vigorous streaks of rain. By the time Ella arrived at Herculea’s senior building, the strands of her blonde hair not protected by her jacket hood resembled tangled seaweed, both in appearance and texture.

She elbowed the door open, slipping inside. The number of the classroom she was being called to remained scrawled on top of her pendant. Luckily for Ella, this was a room she’d already been to in the last month, so finding it didn’t take as long as when she was summoned somewhere new, which was next to impossible when no one ever helped or directed her. The moment she stepped into the training room, she knew why she’d been called.

Oken Bennet had Skylar Wolfe pinned against the wall, her frail, lanky legs kicking at the air. Her fingers stretched towards his fist in vain, but the strength-wielder wouldn’t loosen his grip around her, crushing her slender windpipe. Ella’s eyes swung to the two Herculea instructors standing three feet away, silently begging the only adults in the room with enough strength to actually intervene and do something.

The instructors just waved their hands toward the students, leaving this as her problem once again.

Ella knew why they really called her here, the primary reason any instructor at Delmarth summoned her to their classes. It had nothing to do with them believing she was capable of helping these kids. They hoped Oken would turn his wrath on her and kill her. The Primordial instructors wanted her gone so badly that they’d let their own students finish her off themselves, even if it sentenced them to a life in Terminus for killing a human. Children, fucking children, being used as pawns, being thought of as collateral damage in their mission to exterminate her, because her erasure from their world mattered so much more than these children’s lives. Ella couldn’t understand how their hatred for her, someone they didn’t even know, outweighed the need to protect their students, how anyone could be so selfish.

“Oken,” she shouted, marching across the room. Oken and Ella were well acquainted at this point—this was the third time this week she’d been summoned to Herculea because Oken wielded his strength against another student. “Oken, let Skye go right now.” The seventeen-year-old boy was so lost within his rage spiral that he couldn’t even hear her. She’d been taught in grad school to never approach within hand-and-foot striking distance a student exhibiting aggression, but if she didn’t do something, the last of Skye’s oxygen was going to shrivel up.

So, she made a split-second decision to grab Oken’s wrist. It had been the wrong decision.

Oken released Skye, but only to grip Ella’s forearm in exchange, mincing her bone into crumbled shards beneath her skin. Ella sunk her teeth into her bottom lip, entombing a scream inside her throat. She watched from her peripheral vision Skye crumble to the ground, spluttering wheezes, her trembling fingers embracing her inflamed throat. Now the two instructors rushed over to console Skye, the female instructor using her healing abilities to nurse away the imprint of Oken’s fingers from Skye’s neck.

“Oken,” Ella gasped, his name sounding guttural through the tears she worked to subdue. She curled her fingers around his forearm with her free hand, then pulled him towards her so she could wrap her arms around him, gripping him with all her strength, which compared to the strength-wielder was next to nothing. She kept her head close to his body, enclosing them in a protective bubble of interwoven limbs. At first, he writhed in her hold, his grip on her arm fortifying to the point where she feared he would sever her hand from her wrist if he squeezed any harder.

“Let me go!” he screamed, swinging his knee forward. Ella dodged the strike before his knee made contact with her stomach.

She pleaded, “Oken, remember what we talked about yesterday? I want you to count to ten for me. Okay?”

She squeezed him harder, unsure if he could even feel it.

Oken dropped his forehead onto her shoulder, smearing perspire onto her turtleneck. Every frenzied breath he spewed bathed her whole body in flaming hot air, but no matter how strangulating the closeness was, no matter the excruciating pain in her arm that nearly clouted her to her knees, she wouldn’t separate herself until she knew he’d regulated himself into a calmer state.

Though he didn’t listen to her, he’d already begun tiring himself out. His breaths started to slow, less rapid and frantic, his body unwinding from the clenched shell she’d been hugging moments ago.

Finally, his fingers slipped off her.

“Good,” she whispered, taking her arm off him. “Good. That’s good, Oken.” A single tear escaped her restraint, trickling down her cheek. She quickly smudged it away before any of the instructors or students could see. She stole a peek down at her broken arm, verifying that it was still there, that he hadn’t succeeded in disuniting her hand from her wrist. He hadn’t, though the limb looked mangled in a way that made Ella’s stomach twist into a knot and the inside of her mouth taste like bile. Somehow, her voice stayed tender, none of her pain seeping through. “Now, can you tell me what happened?”

“We were forming a line to do boulder presses, and Skye cut me. My last name starts with B, so I’m always first in line. I told her to move, and she wouldn’t, so I grabbed her.” No emotion appeared to fuel his words. He spoke in a detached manner that Ella sensed was a farce, his anger prominent in the heat emanating off him in waves. The goal she’d set for herself with Oken was to help him make the connection between his actions and his thoughts, then to his emotions, so he could use that self-awareness to stop himself from attacking others and find healthier ways of managing his anger.

“What were you thinking at the time?” Oken grimaced.

“What was I thinking?” he repeated, his cheeks stained red from a violent flush. “That I needed her to move so I could be in the front! She wasn’t supposed to be there. We always go in alphabetical order. She should’ve been in the back of the line.”

“It bothered you that she was breaking the protocol,” Ella extrapolated. Oken’s lashes fluttered.

“Yeah. I guess.” Oken’s eyes dropped down to his sneakers.

“Who do you think was affected by what just happened?” Oken raised his head to look at her.

“Um…Skye?”

“In what way do you think Skye was affected?” His brows pulled together.

“Um…because I hurt her.” His shoulders sank, the weight of that truth pressing down over him.

“Who else do you think was affected?” Oken cocked his head.

“Who else? I don’t know.”

“What about your classmates? How do you think they were affected by what just happened?”

“Um…I guess they could’ve been scared?” Good, Ella thought to herself. Good. He’s starting to get it.

“Who else was affected by what happened?”

“I have no fucking idea, Ms. Rose.” Ella pointed at her arm.

“What about me?” Oken’s eyes fell, absorbing the damage he’d done to her arm for the first time.

“Oh shit,” he stammered, scratching the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, cradling her broken arm against her chest. “Oh shit.” Oken’s brown eyes glazed over with tears. “What do you think you need to do to make things right with Skye and your classmates? Or with me?”

“Tell them…tell them I’m sorry.”

“Good. That’s good, Oken.” I’m going to pass out from the pain if I don’t get this treated. “Why don’t you go do that?”

Oken loitered there a moment, then said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Rose.”

“You’re forgiven, Oken.” Her vision grew more hazy by the second, bleared with black dots, like smears of ink spilled over her eyesight. “Now go apologize to your class. We’ll talk about this more later.”

As Oken scampered off to apologize to Skye, Ella gathered the pendant around her neck in her fist and squeezed her eyes shut, calling out to Headmistress Dyer with the last shred of strength she possessed.

Heal me, she begged the Headmistress.

It took a few seconds before filaments of silver shot out from the pendant, snaking down her shoulder to envelop her injured forearm, dousing the shattered bone in a chilled cloud that sent a shiver down her spine. When the smoke cleared and the silver strings retreated into the pendent, her bone had returned to its former glory, no discomfort echoing in her limbs. The amount of times a day she requested to be healed should have alerted the Headmistress that something needed to change here.

Now that her arm was mended, she marched over to the two Herculea instructors, snapping, “What the hell were you thinking, letting him strangle her like that! Why didn’t you do anything?”

“We did something,” the female hissed, narrowing her gold eyes in a scowl. “We called you.”

“And what if he’d killed her? What would you have done then?”

“We wouldn’t have let it get that far,” the male insisted, squaring his shoulders so his shadow loomed over her.

“Well, next time this happens, call me after you separate the students.” The male instructor’s hand came barreling towards Ella’s face before it crashed into her cheek, the blow pulsating down to her knees, which buckled from the force. She lost control of her balance and tumbled to the floor, landing roughly on her wrist, the one that had just been healed by Headmistress Dyer. She was fairly certain he’d fractured her cheekbone, from the agony that lanced through her jaw when she tried to move it.

“You have no grounds to bark orders at us, earthborn.” The female spat—actually spat— on Ella. “We don’t take commands from human scum.” And just like that, the two instructors left her to address their class.

Ella cupped the side of her face, still stinging from the assault. She angled her head down so no one could see her bottom lip quivering, so no one could see her eyes brim over with tears, deluging down her cheeks in unchecked stripes.

Get on your fucking feet, Ella, she snarled in her head, yanking herself up.

She somehow found the strength to lift one foot after the other, against all odds making it to the door. Safe inside the hallway, she sluiced the tears from her cheeks with her fingers, then squeezed the pendant to contact Headmistress Dyer. Once her cheek and wrist were healed, she began making her way back to the academic sector. As she passed through the lobby, she glanced up at the clock.

“How is it only noon?!” she groaned.

Just as she entered her office, Ella’s stomach hissed at her as a reminder that she’d forgotten to eat breakfast. She scanned her desk for any food she happened to have left there, coming up empty handed. It must have slipped her mind this morning to grab something from the teacher’s lounge for lunch, as she usually did before the school day officially started, when no one else occupied these halls, so she wouldn’t have to interact with a single soul. This meant she’d need to enter the teacher’s lounge.

During lunchtime.

When nearly the entire faculty—apart from the unlucky teachers scheduled to surveil the students in the cafeteria—would be gathered in the lounge. A scream threatened to rip Ella’s throat apart.

You’ve survived worse, she coached herself on her way there. Just run in there, grab a sandwich or something small, and run out. Don’t linger longer than necessary. Remember. You’ve survived worse.

Relief swamped her when she found only a small cluster of teachers congregated in the teacher’s lounge, huddled together in a jumble of whispers. The period ended at twelve-twenty, so she had three minutes to grab her lunch and escape before more teachers arrived. Someone within the group, the second her foot cleared over the threshold, began inhaling the air in an overdramatized manner, overstating the act of inhaling so the sound was unavoidable from all corners of the room.

“You smell that?” the male instructor, one Ella hadn’t yet been introduced to, asked his fellow coworkers. “It smells… nasty. Disgusting. Like a mutt. Like…an earthborn.” Three pairs of eyes found their way to Ella.

Fuck. Here we go again.

“I just want to get some lunch,” she tried to reason as the three instructors began advancing towards her, their progression intentionally slow and glaringly calculated. “I’ll grab something and go, I promise.”

“Not so fast,” Oliviana Bryan, a Meteoro instructor with earth-bending abilities, crooned. She twisted her fingers, inked in tattoos that resembled vines, mirroring the vines that came germinating from the floorboards now and wrapped themselves around Ella’s ankles, snaring her in a trap.

The male instructor, who Ella quickly learned was a Herculea speed-wielder when he blinked over to her in less than a second, seized her throat in his fist and forced her back against the wall.

Again? Really? What is it with Primordials and walls? “You’re not wanted here,” he growled in her face.

“Trust me, I know,” she answered, which prompted the instructor’s grip around her throat to tauten, his fingernails digging into her trachea. A month ago, she would have feared for her life, but now armed with the knowledge that none of them would dare kill her since they’d be sentenced to Terminus if they did, she no longer allowed fear to soil her decisions. They just wanted to scare her, and a bully trying to intimidate her with a venomous bark but no bite was something she could tolerate. “If you just let me down so I can grab some food, I won’t be in your hair anymore.”

“Except you will, because your presence will continue to stain my world.”

“An unfortunate circumstance that neither one of us can control.” The male instructor gasped, as if he hadn’t considered that Ella wouldn’t just lay here and take this treatment without any pushback.

“You hear that, Oliviana?” he laughed with malice. “The mutt thinks she’s tough.”

“The human thinks she’s got teeth? How cute,” Oliviana taunted. The earth-bender swung her wine-red hair over her shoulder, then leaned in to bring her lips right up to Ella’s ear. “Where you’ve got teeth, little earthborn, I’ve got fangs.”

She nipped at Ella’s earlobe. Ella’s head jerked back on instinct, but the Herculea instructor tunneled his fingers into her jaw, refusing to allow her an inch of space to separate herself from Oliviana.

“Please,” she heard herself implore, but didn’t even feel her lips form the word.

“You want food, princess?” Daniel Madix, head of the Cerebri department, sneered from behind them. He raised his hand, steering his index finger towards the fridge, and directed his abilities forward, using his psychokinesis to open the fridge door and pluck what looked like a smoothie from the shelf. “Eat this, mutt.”

He sent it hurdling towards Ella.

Her eyes squeezed shut so none of the frozen drink decided to make a home in her eye sockets. The pulverized ice and mashed fruit crashed into Ella’s face and exploded between her brows, drenching her cheeks in freezing liquid. The concoction, as it slipped down her chin, nestled between the locks of her hair, coloring the blonde strands purple. Finally, the Herculea instructor released her throat, letting her slide down the wall and disintegrate on the floor like a ragged sheet of paper.

The three instructors abandoned her there in her pond, their cruel laughter ricocheting behind them.

Ella’s tongue darted out to lick the smoothie on her cheek. Raspberry and blueberry. My favorite.

At least it wasn’t horse shit like last week, she thought to herself before scrambling to her feet. She sprinted across the lounge, grabbed the last smoothie from off the shelf in the fridge, and bolted back to her office.