Chapter 20

The inside of the Testing Center spread into a lobby with multiple archways leading to different floors.

Mr. Gleekle stood in the center of it all, greeting everyone with jovial waves and quick bounces on the balls of his feet. I hadn't seen him since the Branding, and the sight of his shiny pink cheeks stretched in a smile that Jagaros had warned me not to trust… it only made the tangled nerves in my stomach tighten. But as president, the man was bound to show up now and again, and besides—the lobby was in way too much disarray for him to make true eye contact with anyone, let alone me.

Everyone pushed and shoved each other toward their sector's archway, where spindly engravings marked the gold semi-circles above each of them—not, to my surprise, labeled with the type of magic, but rather the phrase each sector swore by:

BY THE ORCHID AND THE OWL

BY THE MOONBEAM AND THE MIST

BY THE LOCKPICK AND THE LYRE

BY THE FEATHER AND THE FANG

BY THE TEMPEST AND THE TIDE

I fought my way toward my sector's archway, already having lost Emelle, Rodhi, and Gileon, and came face-to-face with a narrow staircase shooting upward into darkness.

Dragging in a deep breath, I started up… and thankfully only had to suffer the ink-dense shadows for a minute of labored breathing, because cheery sunlight flooded over my shoes when I came to the top.

Here, a row of windows surrounding a vast waiting room and half our year's sector already sat in plush gray seats.

I found the others, sat beside them, and waited. The room bloomed with whispers until a door on the far end opened and Mr. Fenway said, "If you could follow me, class, you will be taking your History portion as one."

We jumped up and followed his hobbling figure through the door, where a testing room much cleaner than his usual classroom sat in perfect condition, each desk already sporting packets of paper and skinny fountain pens.

I chose a desk and plopped down. Around me, everyone else did the same. Mr. Fenway sat in a bloodred velvet armchair at the head and rasped, "No talking, please. No looking at your neighbor's answers. No distracting your neighbors by fidgeting." His aged blue eyes strayed toward Rodhi at that. "Begin."

The first question had my heart calming down immediately: In 329 AF, a hurricane ravaged the island and left Esholian crops in ruins before Element Wielders could temper it. How did Wild Whisperers of the time react?

Easy. Much too easy. We'd learned this in the first few days of class. The Wild Whisperers in each village had coaxed the seedlings out of hiding and prompted them to grow faster by singing them special lullabies day in and day out. They'd had to take shifts with each other, to continue that rapid rate of growth, but had managed to replace all the crops within a week.

Smiling down at the paper, I began to write.

An hour later, we were all back in the waiting room. A few people were asking each other about their answers on the test, but Emelle, Gileon, Rodhi, and I chose to pass the time by bouncing a rubber ball back and forth between each of us. Leave it to Rodhi to pull a random rubber ball out of his pocket when we most needed it.

As much as I felt confident about the History portion, I didn't want to push my nerve's luck by talking about it, and the others seemed to think the same.

It wasn't long, anyway, before Mr. Conine emerged from the same doorway and read a name off a scroll flowing from his grip.

"Pierson Kadder. You're first, bud."

The Predators Prey portion of the test would be a one-on-one examination, then. I tried to shake away the tremors in my arms.

"I wonder what he'll ask us to do."

Emelle tracked Pierson Kadder's trek to the door, where he followed Mr. Conine through and shut it behind him.

Rodhi bounced the ball to Gileon across from him, who just barely caught it.

"I'm kind of hoping for some more crocodiles so grease-face over there gets a nice fat fail." Rodhi nodded toward the other end of the waiting room, where Fergus had an arm draped around Jenia's shoulders while she said something to Dazmine that made the girl laugh. Only… I wasn't sure I believed that laugh was real, not after the warning she'd given me between staircases that one day.

I continued to study her bronze-tinted face as the minutes leaked by. Was she happy? What was going on behind that firm, rather tense guise of hilarity?

"Dazmine Temperton."

I jumped, as if the universe had caught me thinking about something I wasn't supposed to and was manifesting those thoughts now for everyone to hear.

But it was just Mr. Conine again, poking his head into the waiting room to call on the next person.

I sagged in my chair again, then noticed Pierson Kadder hadn't returned.

There had been another door in that classroom. Had Pierson been told to go through it to whatever lay on the other side? Maybe for another test?

"It's your turn, Dazmine," Mr. Conine repeated.

Dazmine hopped up and followed him into the classroom.

And didn't return.

Slowly, the room emptied.

Mr. Conine called name after name, until I was the only one left among my group of friends. Just like during the Branding, the name calling seemed completely random, so I had no idea when I'd be summoned.

No one returned, and my nerves began clenching extra hard when, suddenly, the only four left in the room were me, Norman Pollard, Fergus, and Jenia.

Norman, bless him, sat between me and the other two, blissfully ignorant of how his very presence acted as a blockade between two mutually hateful parties.

I hadn't found myself alone with either Jenia or Fergus since the incident, and I sure as hell didn't want to be caught alone with both of them in the Testing Center, so when Mr. Conine stuck his head out for the fourth-to-last name, I prayed—

"Norman Pollard," he called. "Come on, Norman, let's see what you've got."

Shit, shit, no.

I hunched into myself, crossing my legs and arms as if I could protect my core from the awkwardness that was surely about to dawn between us.

The door to the testing room slammed shut behind Norman and Mr. Conine.

Silence for a beat.

Fergus lifted his head with a savage half-grin, his arm still slung around Jenia's shoulder.

"Hey, Drey. It's been a while. How are you doing?"

The words—they were casual. So, so casual, I might have missed the ire squeezed between each syllable.

"Fine," I answered, and did not ask how he was. The shorter this conversation was, the better for all of us.

"Learned any upper-division magic lately?" Fergus asked. "I mean, like, beyond the ant thing?" He gestured at his own body to remind me of the damage I had inflicted. Jenia, still tucked beneath his arm, twisted her perpetual pout into a leer.

"No," I said.

"Cool, cool. I have. See, after that little incident, I decided I wanted to make sure that would never happen again, so I've been hanging out with some older guys in my house who're teaching me how to actually use this Whispering shit."

He withdrew his arm from around Jenia and leaned forward. Eager.

"Do you want to see, Drey?"

No, no I didn't, but I kept my limbs crossed and my teeth clamped. If only Mr. Conine would reappear and call my name, get me out of here…

"Show her, babe," Jenia said, sticking her nails into Fergus's arm.

At first, nothing happened, and I couldn't understand the way both their lips curled in obvious excitement.

But then—then—

I jerked my head down, where something black and fuzzy was blooming at my feet, as if rising from the carpeted floor.

Mold.

Mold that boiled up toward me, licking my ankles, spreading in every direction.

Yelping, I withdrew my legs from the floor, hugging them to my chest, but even that position wasn't going to save me. The mold was festering at such an alarming rate that I jumped up and scrambled over the arm of the chair to the next seat over. And the next seat, and the next, and still that mold bubbled into being everywhere I turned, save for where Fergus and Jenia sat.

Where they watched with nothing but hate and cold amusement.

I leaped over the arm of the last chair and shot for the stairwell. To hell with the Testing Center, if staying here would bury me alive in this toxic, black revenge.

Yet my mind raced at the idea that Fergus could wield this much power. Had he even said anything to the mold, or was he and the mold internally connected at such a deep level that he didn't need to? Mrs. Wildenberg hadn't even approached the topic of fungus yet, and I wasn't sure she ever would.

Just as I hurtled down the first step of the staircase, the testing door flew open.

And just as quickly, Fergus's mold shrunk back to nothing, like a worm retracting back into the soil.

"Fergus Bilderas." Mr. Conine rubbed his eyes with heavy fists, as if he thought he'd seen something a moment before. Then he turned to me, where I stood stock-still at the top of the staircase. "Rayna… what are you doing? You weren't going to bail on me, were you?" He chuckled.

My very bones rattled within me, but I shook my head, refusing to look at Fergus and Jenia in their little corner.

"No. No, I was just…"

I didn't know what kept me from telling him about Fergus's little prank, except for the thought that maybe this was it. Maybe now that he'd taken his revenge and scared the piss out of me, we were even, and this would be the end of it.

Slowly, I wafted back into the room and sat back down, trying not to stare at the ground where I swore a ghost of mold had stained the carpet.

"Fergus," Mr. Conine repeated. "Come with me, please."

Wary. He'd been wary of Fergus since Fergus's first temper-tantrum in that swamp. Even now I could see the stress lines digging into his forehead as Fergus kissed Jenia's brow and bounced onto his feet to follow.

A moment later, the door closed, and Jenia and I sat staring at each other.

Jenia dropped her gaze from mine to inspect her cuticles. My heart couldn't quit pounding against the inside of my skin like a drum straining to erupt.

"Kimber had a plan to get him back, you know," Jenia said.

My vow to stay silent melted through my teeth. "What?"

"Coen Steeler, of course." Jenia looked up. "My sister, Kimber—our house princess, in case you forgot—she was really torn up about their breakup last dry season and was trying to make him see reason. But then you came along and had to weasel your way between them before she could."

So many different responses rattled around in my brain, but the one that came out, soft as a whisper of leaves in the arboretum, was "Why do you hate me?"

Jenia tilted her head.

"I don't hate you, Rayna. You just tried to hoard your best friend from everyone else, set ants on me because you knew you couldn't compete with my looks, and slept your way to the top of the social chain in a matter of weeks." She paused to examine her cuticles again. "Why would I hate you for that?"

"I have not," I said through shaking lips, "slept my way to anything."

No, all that teasing with Coen had amounted to exactly nothing. Nothing besides a tormenting build of desire in me that I'd never experienced with anyone else. To think that I'd been using him for some stupid social ladder? It was absurd.

Jenia feigned a curious tone. "Why're you holed up in his room every weekend, then, if not to sleep your way to the top?"

Getting medicine to prevent my power from bursting through my skin and cutting you up into tiny, fleshy pieces right now.

"That's what I thought," Jenia said, her eyes blazing with triumph. "Listen."

She leaned forward, as if to tell me a secret even though we were a room apart.

"You might feel good about yourself right now, but once Coen and his friends pass—or fail—their Final Tests next year, who are you left with? All your friends are either fat, weird, or stupid, and you're nothing but a dirty little whore pretending to be an angel."

The testing door sprung open. Mr. Conine appeared once again.

I stared and stared at Jenia, who in turn stared at her cuticles.

"Rayna Drey," Mr. Conine said. "Thanks for your patience, Rayna."

"Good luck!" Jenia called brightly. "Lovely chatting with you, dear!"

Dear. Everything—from my blood to my bones to my brutally twisted heart—had frozen inside my skin. I had to force myself to uproot my ass from the chair. Had to force each step toward Mr. Conine, blinking and blinking as I tried to get rid of Jenia's words, to toss them away like they were nothing.

"Are you alright, Rayna?" Mr. Conine asked quietly when I'd neared him.

"Fine," I mumbled.

"You'll be okay." He clapped a comforting hand on my shoulder and motioned me to follow him. "It's nothing more than what we've done in class."

Right. The test. Perhaps Fergus and Jenia had meant to dismantle me piece by piece so that I'd fail it. And while this one didn't officially count, it would make or break my first impression to the Good Council, so I really, really needed to do well.

After all, I couldn't have Dyonisia Reeve picking my name out from a list of general passes and investigating me further all because I'd let a little mold and name-calling get into my head. I couldn't allow her to notice me.

"I'm fine," I said again, raking in a deep breath.

Letting my insides melt back into place.

And following Mr. Conine into the testing room without looking back.